As experienced integrated marketers will attest, marketing success today hinges on targeting—your ability to reach the right person at the right time with the right offer via the right communication channel. That means your customer data is everything and, no matter what business you’re in, you’re also in the database marketing business.
But not all data are created equal, and data quantity and complexity don’t ensure success. What ultimately counts according to Deepak Agarwal, LinkedIn’s Director of Relevance Science, is your data relevance.
Relevant Data is Customer-Centric
Relevance is the extent to which your data accurately signals your customers’ current or future needs and interests. Such data dimensions as demographics, psychographics, and quality might be important, but they don’t necessarily constitute relevance.
In the relevance game, timing and behavior are everything. Think for example of that time you received an offer for a new car you bought two months ago, or for a credit card you already possessed. That marketing stemmed from irrelevant data—data that doesn’t seem to know you. People subjected to such marketing feel they’re being treated like numbers, and customer loyalty and retention naturally take a dive.
Relevant Data is Well-Designed
Whether you manage your own customer database with a spreadsheet program, use an off-the-shelf contact management system, or rely on third-party database service providers, relevance must lead the way. Everything depends upon determining which criteria will foreshadow customer needs and interests in a timely, appropriate fashion. WebTrends’ Database Marketing expert Steve Earl suggests four relevance factors for consideration:
1. Recency—How current should data be to ensure well-timed, pertinent offers?
2. Retention—How much history should it provide to indicate usage patterns?
3. Richness—How much information must customer profiles contain to statistically predict their potential interest in your offerings?
4. Realization—How must data categories and collection processes conform to the marketing tools and technologies that will use the data?
This final factor is especially important for ensuring your integrated marketing program can collect, update, and sort data efficiently and cost-effectively.
Ultimately, data relevance reflects the capacity of your business to meet customer needs before someone else does. In that perpetual race against time, it’s not the company with the most data that wins, but the one with the most relevant data.
