Periodic tune-up for your Marketing database

I recently took my wife's car, a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible, for a tune-up. The service agent at Jiffy Lube inspected the car and came back with a list of recommended services:

1. Oil change (of course)
2. Oil filter change
3. Recycling of power steering fluid

and so on....

I bought a few additional service options along with the oil change based on the service reps suggestions.

This experience got me thinking about a tune-up for Marketing Processes & Databases. The first question that came to my mind was, "Do Marketing Databases really need a periodic tune-up if the right processes and policies are set in place to begin with?". My answer to self was - ABSOLUTELY. Going back to the car tune-up analogy I consider myself to be a conservative driver who stays within the recommended guidelines of the car company (including using 92 octane gas - ouch!!!). But my car needs regular service just like everybody else's for all the obvious reasons like wear & tear, recycling etc.

Here are a few areas where a Marketing database can use a quarterly tune-up:

1. De-duplication checks: We all know that automated checks can only de-dupe new Leads entering a database around 80% of the time. Data enters a Marketing system through different channels - online registrations, off-line file imports, synchronization from CRM (SFA) systems like Salesforce.com. It is always a good idea to verify the de-dupe counts once a quarter using checks like -

    a. Email
    b. First Name, Last Name, Company Name
    c. First Name, Last Name, Address 1, City, Zip

In my experience a company is doing a pretty good job if they keep the dupe counts to less than 5%. 

2. Data normalization checks: There are certain key fields like State, Country, Job Level, Industry, Company Size etc. that are used in key marketing functions like segmentation, scoring, automation etc. Again, since data comes into the system from multiple sources it is extremely difficult to systematize data normalization. The biggest culprit is file imports from third party sources like content syndication vendors, partners, tele-marketing vendors among others. How many times have we seen segmentation rules like -

        "Country contains united states, usa, u.s.a,"
        "Job level contains vice president, v.p"

The minute I see such rules I picture a Program Manager crossing his fingers and hoping that the system pulls all the records that should be included in the campaign.

3. Opt-in checks: It is extremely critical to ensure that permission fields like email opt-out are in sync between your Marketing database and sales database since emails are not always sent from the Marketing system. Sales people send emails directly from sales systems like salesforce.com.

4. Qualified Lead profile checks: I see almost every company having a spec of a qualified Lead. But, the real story we get from running database profiling queries is, more often than not, quite different. It is very rare that customer's have information beyond the basic Demographic fields filled in more than 50% of the time. The reasons for this problem could be process related and sometimes it could be due to  lack of appropriate technology to populate the contact profile.

5. Database trending: It is always a good idea to trend key metrics like:
    a. Database size - How rapidly is the marketing database growing?
    b. Unsubscribe rate - Checks to verify the overall unsubscribe percentage is a good indicator of issues      like content relevance, touch frequency among others
    c. Contact info availability - It's good to get a trending of availability of contact fields like email,             phone and postal address.
    d. Profile trending - How is the overall profile richness growing?

Market2Lead will be announcing a series of new services in the coming weeks to address some of the operational issues we typically see our customers run into. Stay tuned.

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