Head of data services at Royal Mail, Keith Jones rounds off this series on data quality with key tips on how to build a marketing database out of an existing customer base.
He explains the value of data mining tools and segmentation in creating lists for specific campaigns and why getting the opt-ins and marketing permissions right is key to retaining customers.
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Building a marketing database
One of the best ways to use existing data, yeah, is really to build a marketing database that encapsulates all of the data you have on your existing customer base. So if I’ve already dealt with a customer, I want to know as much about them as I possibly can to ensure the messages I’m going to communicate to them are as relevant to them as possible.
Plus having a piece of technology, a database technology that allows me to segment, to analyse and to build lists for specific campaigns, really important. And there’s a lot of in-house data that most companies forget they have which can make a big difference in the way you market to existing customers. So what product do they buy? When did they last buy it? What is their overall value to you? These things, recency, frequency and value as they’re sometimes known really can make a big difference into the way you communicate with your existing customers.
So building all that data into a simple database, which can be run in Excel if you have just a few hundred or, of course, there are marketing database software technologies available that can run to several thousands. So you can scale this to suit your organisation, but it can make a big difference to the way that you will communicate with your existing customer base. And of course if you get it right it can provide some significant ROI on the campaigns you push out there.
So building a marketing database is challenge number one and then getting the opt-in, opt-outs correct, which principally apply to consumer data. It applies to business data when you have individual records held on the dataset. Now if you’re dealing in the B2C world, the consumer data, it really is important that you get the data fully permissioned.
What that means is if it’s not permissioned you’re only allowed to communicate with that individual in the way that they communicated with you. So if they bought something from you, you’re allowed to tell them about that product, but what you’re not able to do is tell them about your other products, only the one they bought.
It is very important to have the right opt-ins, opt-outs, the right permissions. It is a legal requirement under the Data Protection Act, and certainly of late the Information Commissioner is making very strong plays that this will be an area of focus over the coming years and I think anybody who gets it wrong really will be feeling the wrath of the law and it can be a quite expensive wrath if you get it wrong, there are significant fines to be had. So focusing on that is important and there are helpful sites at the Mail Media Centre as well as the DMA itself where they have experts who are more than happy to give advice, and I would advise anybody who’s getting into that world to really draw on that network.