How Data Quality Makes or Breaks Your Email Marketing Strategy

Get the best ROI from your customer data. Find out how data quality can make or break your efforts to segment and personalise email marketing campaigns. Find out why quality data is an important part of your email marketing strategy and what errors you should look for in your customer database.

The value of email marketing probably isn’t news to you. 81% of B2B marketers use email newsletters as part of their digital marketing strategy. 31% rate email the highest performing content for lead nurturing.

But is your strategy built on the faulty foundations of unreliable data?

Digital transformation is enabling a reimagining of business, and increasing privacy regulation is prompting a shift away from third party data, making the data you own one of your organisation’s most valuable assets. 

Your customer data is critical to your B2B marketing strategy, and the key to unlocking value by enhancing both your company’s productivity and your customer’s experience.

In short, ensuring the validity, accuracy and richness of your data should be high on your company’s agenda.

The Power of Personalisation

Successful digital marketers know that segmentation and personalisation are critical elements in data-driven email marketing campaigns. As Penny Gillespie, VP Analyst at Gartner says, “customers expect to be recognized and want their experiences personalized. If they don’t get it, they may go elsewhere.”

Of course, you should also pay attention to your customers’ privacy needs and protect their data. However, according to Gillespie, some organisations are too risk-averse and this is holding them back in a market where customer experience is the key differentiator.

Instead, she advises digital marketers to balance personalisation with data privacy and suggests combining identity and behavioural data, provided it’s relevant. 

In short, “The key is to bring value to customers and keep data use in context.”

It seems that current wisdom provides digital marketers with only two choices: 

Personalise or perish.

To facilitate personalisation, your organisation needs data. There are many touch points throughout the customer journey that can provide it. Accounting systems, purchase information, email marketing, social media, website tracking… they can all feed into your CRM and enable sophisticated marketing automation. 

However, your email campaigns are only as successful as the data they rely on. And your data sets are only as valuable as the accuracy and completeness of the entries. 

The Foundations of Email Marketing

Customer data integrity is the foundation of your email marketing strategy. The full power of your email list relies on data quality. 

Digital marketers must plan for data management. You not only have to comply with privacy regulations, such as GDPR, but also focus on the power of your data to improve your ROI. 

Unclean data can have devastating results so organisations need to allocate resources to the process of: 

• Data collection and refreshment

• Data cleansing and standardisation

• Data enrichment

More on these later, but first let’s look at what can go wrong when data integrity is lacking.

Reduced Deliverability

Attrition plagues many customer databases, with incorrect or stale email addresses damaging deliverability and campaign effectiveness. Industry experts report that about 22% to 30% of emails become invalid in just one year. 

Allowing errors to mushroom out of control could start a downward spiral that sees your emails being flagged as spam. Your audience may never see future emails, and response rates will decline. If over 20% of your emails bounce, your domain could be blacklisted.

Inaccurate Segmentation

Without reliable customer profile data, you cannot target your campaigns accurately. You also won’t be able to create customer personas, or segment your audiences so you can tailor your messaging based on their interests and needs. 

Say, for example, an accounting firm has 1000 customers on their contact list. They want to promote a webinar that provides tax tips specific to company directors. If 80% of their contacts have no data regarding their position in the company, that leaves only 200 customers from which to create the segment.

If only 5% of those 200 customers are listed as company directors, the software can only select 10 contacts. The accounting firm knows there must be more customers on their list who could benefit from this content, but their email system can’t find them because of poor quality data.

Damaged or Lost Customer Relationships

All relationships need a personal touch to grow. Customer relationships are no different. However, personalised emails can fracture your customers’ trust if it reveals missing or inaccurate information that implies that the relationship is fragile.

A great customer experience relies on accurate, relevant, personalised messages that resonate with the recipient. Ensuring the quality of your data shows you value your relationship with each customer and want the bond to flourish. When unreliable data is used, it comes across as sloppy and can be perceived as a clumsy attempt to communicate.

Decision makers may think your email has no value. Your open rate may stagnate. Many will unsubscribe. Unclean, inaccurate, and incomplete data translates to a loss of relationships, lost opportunities, and wilting profits.

How to Improve Data Quality

Cleaning up your customer data may seem like a costly and time-consuming task. However, the return on investment will enhance profitability. If you are concerned with marketing metrics, like engagement, conversion, or Customer Lifetime Value, you’ll want to start by validating, updating, standardising, and cleaning your database.

Validate and Clean Existing Data

Since people change jobs frequently, check in with contacts periodically to confirm they are still there in the same department or set up LinkedIn to flag when they change roles automatically. Remove or update old email addresses. Ensure that titles, names, roles, business and department names are complete and accurate. 

Also, be sure to parse the components into separate fields to give your data more flexibility. For example, Mr John or Jane Samples’ contact details below should be validated and recorded as separate components to facilitate personalisation and segmentation:

Title	First Name	Last Name	Email	Job Role	Business	Dept
Mr.	John	Sample	jsample@example.com	CFO	ABC Consulting	Finance
Ms.	Jane	Customer	jcustomer@example.co.uk	Purchaser	XYZ Company	Purchasing

Use filters to check for obvious syntax errors or use an automated service to correct them. For example, common syntax errors in email addresses are:

• Missing or extra @ symbols

• Spaces between characters

• Double dots before @ symbols

• Obvious domain name typos (.co.ul vs .co.uk)

You should also clean your data by removing duplicates, so contacts won’t receive repeat messages. The same person can be listed twice with unique email addresses – both business and personal. Decide which contact is most relevant and delete the other. If you keep the business address, you might choose to keep the personal address in a different field.

If staff are manually entering data, you will probably see many simple errors. Look for typos and spelling variations and ensure all blank cells are filled. 

Stay on top of hard bounces (permanent errors) and unsubscribes by removing them or updating the data as they occur.

Refresh Your Data

Create regular opportunities to re-engage with customers, refresh their permission to stay in contact with them, and check your understanding of their needs.

You can use automated emails to trigger messages that reactivate unresponsive contacts. 

Your content marketing strategy could help refresh your data using periodical content. Invite contacts to download a valuable annual report investigating industry trends or a ‘Top Ten’ list each year. By emailing contacts with a link and asking them for additional details or to update existing fields, you can gain new information and update your contacts’ interests.

Yes, some may unsubscribe. However, contacts who unsubscribe are not fully engaged. Think of it not so much as losing subscribers but honing your list so you can focus your attention on the best potential leads.

Standardise Data

When left to their own devices, users have a knack for creating twenty different ways to say the same thing. 

Take, for example, the country field. Some people might enter 'United Kingdom', others 'UK', 'GB', ‘Great Britain’, ‘Britain’, ‘England’.

Look out for and minimise these inconsistencies, as they make it more difficult for your marketing team to filter the data and create segments. These simple differences can lead to smaller audiences and less effective campaigns. 

Clean up non-standard entries and put entry parameters in place to reduce the possibility for deviation in the future. Software provides a lot of built-in solutions, like pre-populated drop downs to restrict data options and entry validation to reduce incorrect entries. For other fields, staff training and standard operating procedures might be required to standardise descriptors.

Data Enrichment

Now that you’ve validated, cleaned, refreshed, and standardised your data, improve it even further with data enrichment. Broadening your data points will allow further opportunities for segmentation and personalisation.

Find Opportunities to Ask Smart Questions

Imagine you’re buying a car and the salesperson makes the pitch in boilerplate terms. They make assumptions about your interests and needs. It seems like they don’t really care about you. You feel misunderstood, so you disengage.

A smart salesperson asks the right questions:

• What are you looking for in a car?

• Do you have a family?

• Do you travel for work or vacations?

• Do you drive long distances or is the vehicle for short hops?

By doing this, they’re enriching their data so they can tailor their message to a target audience of one. 

You can achieve the same goal in B2B marketing, except your questions involve firmographics - such as job title, industry, company size, annual revenue, or sales cycle stage - and behavioural data. This information allows you to create segmented data sets with granularity, allowing for more relevant messaging and the ability to predict your customer’s needs.

Audit Your Data Collection Processes

Of course, you may never come face to face with customers like our car salesperson. However, when looking for ways to enrich your data, think about digital marketing as that two-way conversation to get to know your customers better.

Audit all your data collection processes and ensure that data flows into a single integrated platform. Think about data you can collect at every customer touch point: subscriptions, webinars, demos, event registrations, surveys, and every purchase transaction. 

Brainstorm Data Enrichment Ideas

Tap into the knowledge of your organisation’s teams. Finance, customer service, data processing, web development, and IT staff may offer simple-to-execute suggestions based on their experience. 

Use the following questions to get the creative juices flowing:

• Which customer touch points already gather data in other systems?

• Can we integrate other systems and sync them with a marketing automation platform?

• What processes should we develop at each customer touch point to collect data?

• How can we use content to create new opportunities for data collection?

• What additional questions would be useful to add to our lead generation form?

• Can we use dynamic form fields to prompt leads to enter a wider range of information without overwhelming them?

• Can our call to action include a survey link?

• Should our links contain UTM codes?

Learn how marketing automation allows for reviews and translates behavioural and transactional data into further data points. Use this new data to improve customer retention and loyalty. 

Data Enrichment Services

After you’ve sourced ideas from your team and built your data wishlist, you can supplement your existing data further using data enrichment tools.

These tools collect publicly available data and merge them with your existing data to fill out company profiles. Some scan hundreds of sources, including social media platforms and websites, giving preference to those with higher trust levels.

Most of these data enhancement tools integrate with your CRM platform to seamlessly add identity and marketing attributes, like job function, phone numbers, mailing addresses, industry type, and other firmographic data. So, before employing them, it’s important to have enough accurate information about your contacts so that matches can be made.

If ‘Content is King’, Quality Data is Queen

Email marketing and content marketing are some of the most effective strategies currently being used by successful digital marketers today. But your content driven email marketing strategy is only as good as the data at its core.

Your approach to data quality has to work on multiple levels if you are to succeed in finding and nurturing leads for your business:

1. Essential data such as name, email address, company and perhaps job title. This needs to be clean, up-to-date and standardised

2. Enriched data, which might include job function or interests or may include firmographic data such as industry sector, business size and principle location

3. Relationship data, which will tell you which of your products and services someone has already bought, and who in your company has the best relationship with them. This opens the way to an account-based marketing approach.

4. Behavioural data, which will tell you what pages they are visiting on your site, what content they are most responding to, and which emails they are most interested in. This sort of content, most easily provided using a marketing automation system, will tell you most about people’s propensity to buy, and it will guide you in planning future content and events.

The first two of these are the basics. They’re important, but they are more or less available to any competent organisation. The latter two are vital, since this information is both unique to your organisation and most revealing about people’s future needs.

Confidence in your customer data is key. Schedule routine (and, in most cases, automated) validation, cleansing, refreshment, and enrichment processes to ensure you have quality data to create truly valuable customer experiences. 

Need support to improve the quality of your data? Our marketing automation solutions work with your marketing machine to create a superior customer experience and drive stellar marketing results. Contact us today to book a demo.