Marketers have to be smarter in acquiring and maintaining data to ensure that it stays relevant and up to date, which ultimately drives results.

In a recent report by Enterprise Innovation on business intelligence tools, IDC's Research Manager for Asia/Pacific Software Research, Sharon Tan said,

"More users are seeking better access to information, which is still one of the fundamental reasons behind BI adoption. The recent turbulent times and uncertainties have intensified the need for timely, accurate and relevant information to make sound business decisions. Following the economic crisis, many decision makers and information workers felt the pain of insufficient, inaccurate or contradictory information as they tried hard to grow their business." 

Budgets have been tightened and marketers are coming under immense pressure to justify marketing spend. Marketing spend, now more than ever, needs to be measureable and tied to quantifiable end results -- driving incremental sales. How? One area of focus is customer data and the means of acquiring or developing meaningful customer information. With a foundation of thorough and accurate data, data can be analysed more effectively to understand customer behaviours better and used to improve customer engagement through channels that they will most likely respond to. In doing so, marketing campaigns can be more effective, thus giving a better return on investment.

Here are some tips to kick off the process:

Organise and consolidate the data
Let's face it -- data is still kept in various places, even in very sophisticated companies and organizations. Customer touch points and channels are ever expanding -- stores, online, call centres, sales people, point of sales systems and so forth. Customer information and interaction at these different mediums are often stored by different teams, in different databases, different formats, even different mediums! As marketers, it is important to consolidate data from all touchpoints to get a single view of the customer to understand their interactions across all channels. As the data and channels of interactions grow, so does the task of making customer data meaningful. While rare in Asia, some companies and organizations even appoint a data chief to ensure that the data is managed well and conducting regular data audits also help ensure that data is clean. An experienced interactive marketing services provider should be able to assist you in consolidating and optimizing your data.

Track, measure and analyse data to understand your customers better
Traditional segmentation is driven by demographic profiles of customers, but they do not take into account customer behaviour (response behaviours, purchase behaviours and so forth). Effective segmentation and analytics enables you to obtain the desired action from targets -- what compels your prospects or customers to click on the website or pick up the phone to call you. Gone are the days of blasting the same message to everyone.  Your data could well tell you the mediums and content of communication that compel your customers to connect with you. Past customer behaviors are better at predicting future behaviors, for example, whether they will respond to eDM or SMS communications or whether they will walk into the store to purchase. Understanding your customers' preferences will enable you to start a meaningful dialogue with them. Start your analysis -- it could save you a ton of money and help you connect faster!

Tools and applications
As your data grows exponentially, a uniform set of tools and applications (business intelligence tools, CRM applications) within the company helps to ensure the integrity of the data that is captured as well as familiarity with the system. Using the same system within a company across different brands or different business units makes investment in such tools more economical and also provides a uniform view of customers from a company perspective.

Data is the foundation for all marketing programs and customer insights -- whether you are embarking on online, offline or a multi-channel marketing campaign, data has to be in good shape for you to get effective results. Best of all, having data you can rely on gets you a return on investment. When selecting an interactive marketing services partner to help you optimize your data, be sure to consider the breadth of their capabilities -- whilst being able to help you with the operational work such as consolidating your data and delivery of communications, they must be able to provide you with consultative assistance to help you interpret and make sense of the findings from the data and how it applies to your business while considering other factors such as how long have they been providing these services, and how have they assisted companies or organizations similar to yours.

Whatever the mechanics, marketers have to be smarter not only in acquiring data but also in maintaining it to ensure that it stays relevant and up to date, which ultimately drives results! 

SeowPing Tan is CRM practice leader at Acxiom.