Marketing Automation is the latest buzzword in the business world. With everything getting automated right from toothbrushes to automobiles, marketing automation was an expected advancement. Marketers face a number of challenges to achieve the desired results, one of them is to repeat the same marketing act or process every time they deal with their target audience. Marketing Automation is a software tool aimed at automating repetitive marketing actions such as emails, social media & other website actions.
In order to harness the true potential of marketing automation, cleansing data to obtain error-free data is one of the most fundamental requirements. With the immense volume of customer data available to marketers, there is a need to segregate this data into 3 main categories: Clean data that is a source of useful prospect insights, dirty data that needs to be cleaned before it can be used, and useless data that holds no relevance. Once this is done it’s fairly simple to leverage data and boost your marketing efforts. So let’s see how exactly clean data contributes to better marketing efficiency.
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Understanding Your Prospects
Having a clean database is an asset to every marketer. Inaccurate data affects the entire marketing process causing disruptions at each stage of lead generation and nurturing. Due to the flawed insights derived from incorrect data sets, targeting customers becomes a major hassle. To use marketing automation effectively, it’s important to have a 3600 view of your prospect’s interests and this is possible only by cleansing data in order to obtain valuable insights from accurate data sets.
Facilitates Optimal Segmentation
Equipped with a cleansed database, identifying and targeting specific prospect segments becomes an easier task to fulfill. Segmentation is a very important aspect of marketing as it helps in the designing of marketing strategies that are sure profit winners. Reliable Data obtained from sources such as landing page forms, manual data entry, list purchases, event lists etc helps to improve the deliverability of emails by better segmentation. Consequently, acquisition of new leads and sustaining their interest is fairly simplified. With well segmented data, marketing automation can help achieve a larger ROI.
Promotes Content Customization
Relevant and attractive content can play a major role in lead engagement and nurturing. Clean verified data provides insights that can aid in the personalization of every content form that reaches your prospects. This will not only increase their interest in your product or service but will also help you save on your marketing investment. Marketing Automation efficiency is measured by the overall traffic and leads it generates; this can be facilitated further by providing customized content that is specific to the interests of the target audience.
Aids Lead Scoring & Qualification
Accurate datasets help to raise the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) quality with explicit scoring. Explicit scoring mainly involves the assigning of a basic score to each lead on the basis of their relevance to ideal prospect characteristics, after which points are awarded if those leads belong to the right job or function and their ability to make or influence purchase decisions. This explicit scoring is dependent on the availability of a clean database and provides sure shot qualified sales leads. Thus with the cleansing of data and improved lead scoring, marketing automation efficiency is significantly enhanced. The qualified leads that are hence forwarded to the sales team exhibit higher conversion rates.
Enhance Customer Experience
Customer satisfaction is the ultimate aim of any sales organization. To provide a rich customer experience it is important to have a clean database that provides the necessary insights for effective lead nurturing and conversion. Striking interesting conversations and building long term relationships with customers on social media and other interactive platforms helps in establishing a positive brand image. Marketing Automation along with data enrichment provides the necessary tools for spreading your message to the target audience effectively.
Having said all this it is imperative to understand that accurate high quality data is a combined product of proficient data appending, verification, validation and cleansing processes. These processes are essential to ascertain cost effective efficient marketing automation. In short, maintaining data hygiene can amplify the efficiency of marketing automation as well as help you in achieving major business goals such as the expansion of contact network, driving sales and fetching ROI.
