Making Your Data Work for You

“Would you like to add your email address to our distribution list?” This question came right as I was swiping my credit card to pay for my five-year-old’s new Frozen sneakers. I shop here occasionally so I figured, why not? Maybe they’ll send me coupons. “Sure,” I said. The cashier then instructed me to enter my email address on the keypad. I quickly entered my secondary email address (the one I use for email marketing) and privately smiled knowing that my main email address continued to be “safe.”

As I walked away with bag in hand, I realized just how difficult it is to gain the attention of our customers. After all, I myself had once again given out a secondary email address — the one I use to keep my main inbox clutter-free. Only a select few email marketers know my main email address. These marketers have earned the “privilege” by proving that they know me as a customer. They send me relevant communications that I want, not generic emails that have no bearing on my interests. And that’s when the notion of “data is king” really hit me. To truly make an impact, we as marketers need to ensure that our data is up-to-date, clean, and helping to drive targeted messages. Marketing truly is built on a foundation of data, and before you can be a champion marketer, you need to be a champion data analyst, and more importantly, data hygienist.

So, as a marketing champion, how can you go about making your data as complete and clean as possible?

Conduct an Audit
Data quality is one of the most critical components of your marketing efforts, if not the most. Why? Because it impacts every facet of your game: segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, re-targeting, and most importantly, return. And, as proven by my own actions, it can severely impact the way customers see and experience your brand.

To start, you want to make sure that you are collecting and cleansing the right data. Take a step back and start analyzing which pieces of information are most important to you. How are you currently segmenting your customers? How do you envision personalizing your digital marketing assets? Which pieces of information are most important for your scoring model? What values are imperative to share with sales?

You likely have information within Oracle Eloqua that needs to match the information you have in your CRM platform. Maybe you also want to create consistency among your contact field values, or simply want your contacts’ names in proper case before using them as field merges in your emails.

After this audit, you will have the knowledge to identify key fields that are imperative in your data cleansing efforts.

Get Proactive
Now that you are armed with information, formulate a plan to standardize and cleanse data before it even hits your database. Taking a step further, look for ways to enhance your data to strengthen personalization, segmentation, and lead scoring.

Acquisition
Think about how you acquire data in the first place. For example, when you ask for data on your forms, are you using standardized picklists or open text fields? (The best answer is picklists). Review your most commonly used forms to confirm that you are acquiring the right information in the best fashion. If your audit uncovered a large number of important fields to collect, consider implementing progressive profiling on your forms or utilizing 3rd-party services that can append data information upon form submit.

Standardization
Standardization is becoming increasingly important, especially in relation to CRM integration, lead scoring, and reporting. You can accomplish standardization in a number of ways, the easiest of which is picklist enforcement. Best practice is to always match your picklist values with your CRM values, even if integration is still on your wish list. Some fields, like Lead Source Most Recent, may not have associated picklists, but it can be helpful to establish “acceptable values” for these fields.

Augmentation
Amplify your data collection by adding valuable information to contact records or CDOs. For example, are you capturing relevant campaign data on your contact? If not, would it be beneficial to start capturing data on the lead source, offer, response type, etc.? What about communications preferences or interests? Anything that may help reporting, segmentation, lead scoring, or personalization is worthwhile to capture.

Get Defensive
Now that you’ve planned a proactive approach, you have to prepare for the worst-case scenario: bad data. It’s bound to happen no matter how much we try to prevent it. Dirty data comes from a variety of sources: integrations, list uploads, form submits, manual entry, and the list goes on. However, if you are prepared, you can cleanse the data prior to it causing any issues.

Validation
Validation services range in complexity and cost, but they’re a worthwhile investment. Whether it’s adding a valid email check to your email address fields, or partnering with a 3rd-party vendor to do a real-time authentication of the address itself, there are plenty of options available to validate your data. Some services will even cleanse the data before populating the contact record. With that said, you’ll want to do your homework and make sure that these service providers have the data you need in the time you’ll need it. In addition to 3rd-party services, there are quite a few Oracle Eloqua cloud connectors available that will check and validate any commonly required fields such as phone, zip code, name, and address.

Cleansing
Gather your list of key fields that are in need of standardization and/or cleansing and formulate a list of acceptable values for each field. Then, pull field value reports from Oracle Eloqua to see the current values in each of these fields. From there, create a spreadsheet that maps each of the current values to one of your acceptable values. Once complete, create your data washing machine programs to replace the dirty values with the new ones.

Make it Happen
This is where all of your dreams are realized, so to speak. The actual execution is on the playing field in your marketing automation platform. It’s the ability to make all of the above happen within Oracle Eloqua. It’s creating and using picklists to your advantage. It’s using a combination of lookup tables and update rules with a side of program builder to create your data washing machines. It’s setting up your validation rules using data tools, form field validation, and/or 3rd-party connectors and components. It’s finding creative ways to use form-processing steps to augment your data collection. It’s being a marketing champion.

What are some things you have done to ensure complete and accurate data? What types of processes have you put in place for data cleansing?