5 Ways Marketing Data Management Improves Business Operations and CX

Marketers need data — and lots of it — to create successful campaigns and bring in that all-important revenue. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of data that can provide incredibly detailed insight into customer behavior.

Still, data on its own can be another challenge. All this data needs to be collected, stored, and analyzed correctly. Without the right data management process, you could end up wasting time and money on campaigns that miss the mark.

So, how can you manage all this data effectively?

That’s where strong marketing data management comes in.

While it can be challenging, managing marketing data well will help you make the most out of the constant stream of data and reap the benefits, such as improving the customer experience, reducing marketing costs, and supporting collaboration in your marketing team.

But first things first, let’s cover the role of data management in marketing. 

The Role of Data Management in Marketing

Within many organizations, data storage and collection is fragmented across multiple platforms and departments. 

Say you have data extracted from contact center solutions that require the context of data from a CRM system. Without both, the full customer journey cannot be understood. This principle applies to countless other data uses across departments.

For example, understanding customer satisfaction may involve survey data from your customer support team and heatmaps from your website development team. 

To really understand your audience and customers, you need to bring all that data into one place through marketing data management.

5 Benefits of Marketing Data Management For Your Operations and CX

Good marketing data management practices can have a ripple effect throughout your entire organization. Here are just some of the benefits:

1. Refining customer profiles and segmentation

Unified and comprehensive customer data offers invaluable insights into consumer behavior. Suppose you’re marketing for a fashion business that has consolidated data such as purchase history, browsing patterns, and demographic details.

Upon analyzing all this data, it’s clear that many customers who frequently buy formal wear often browse the luxury accessories section afterward. From this, your marketing teams craft an email sequence that these customers receive following a formal wear purchase, helping build a loyal customer base.

2. Revealing cross-sell opportunities

Highly targeted and successful marketing campaigns require accurate data. Take, for instance, a company that sells electronic goods. After implementing centralized data management, an interesting trend is revealed.

Customers who purchased top-of-the-range TVs within the last year tended to browse for home surround sound systems within a short timeframe. Using the information, the marketing teams send targeted offers for sound systems to this specific customer segment. Such timely and personalized marketing brings higher conversion rates and increases sales.

3. Elevating customer experience and satisfaction

It’s not just internal elements that are improved by marketing data management; customer experience (CX) also gets a glow-up. Effectively using data is an integral part of crafting a unified customer experience and building customer loyalty.

Marketing data management allows you to collect and analyze customer data, including preferences, behaviors, and purchase history. This can be used to craft tailored campaigns and communications, creating a more personal experience where customers feel valued and understood.

Through good data management, you can consolidate and analyze data from various touchpoints to gain a comprehensive view of your customers. This understanding can be used to anticipate customer needs, preferences, and pain points, leading to the creation of more relevant and appealing marketing strategies.

Finally, customer feedback and sentiment analysis, when integrated into marketing data, provide valuable insights for continuous improvement. All this together results in a happier customer, and what’s not to like about that?

4. Improving marketing team collaboration and efficiency

An essential part of building a solid data strategy is pulling all your data sets together. Centralized data can significantly improve collaboration and efficiency within marketing teams. A unified system eliminates the need to juggle multiple platforms or trawl through fragmented data sources to find information. 

Instead, your team can easily access a centralized dashboard offering a holistic view of customer behavior, preferences, and past campaign performances – this is called customer intelligence. This expedites decision-making and cultivates a collaborative environment where you can collectively analyze trends, interpret insights, and develop effective campaigns.

5. Reducing marketing costs and increasing ROI

The key to reducing costs in marketing is good data and good implementation of the knowledge gained from analyzing it. With accurate and well-maintained data, marketers can create targeted campaigns directed at specific audience segments. This reduces the risk of marketing messages reaching irrelevant audiences, minimizing ad spend wastage.

Good data management practices eliminate silos and redundant processes across the whole organization. This reduces time spent on data collection and allows your marketing team to focus on creating campaigns that produce results, increasing revenue.

It also reduces the need for extensive market research, as you can extract valuable insights from their existing data. This streamlines the research process, saving both time and resources.

5 Challenges of Marketing Data Management

As we’ve seen, good data marketing data has huge benefits, but it’s not without its challenges: 

1. Managing large volumes of diverse data

One of the biggest data management challenges in marketing is data overload. When there’s an overwhelming volume and diversity of data that just keeps streaming in, organizing and interpreting it can be a daunting prospect.

Conventional data management systems may struggle to cope. This results in slow processing and poor analysis. You need the right marketing analytics tools to extract, process, and analyze this deluge of data.

2. Maintaining and integrating accurate data

Another of the main roadblocks to good marketing data management is that you need to handle data from several sources and in different formats. Data is collected in varying ways and managed by separate teams, all of which can be useful to marketers. Some examples of the data types you might encounter are :

• Customer data within your CRM system
• Engagement data from your social media platform
• Heat maps from your website
• Click-through rates from your email marketing platform

When data sets are scattered across departments or systems in this way, putting all this together into a useful format can be challenging. Human error, unsupported file types, multiple systems, and poorly gathered data — trying to corral all this into a coherent structure can feel like an uphill battle.

3. Safeguarding sensitive information

When data is siloed over different systems and departments, it is difficult to make security protocols uniform. This creates cybersecurity vulnerabilities, heightening the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches. 

Protecting customer data isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s the legal responsibility of any organization. You need to protect sensitive data from attacks and establish strong data governance measures to counteract cybercriminals. As such, carefully assess what business data you should protect with encryption and other security measures.

4. Adhering to data privacy regulations

Regulations around data privacy, such as GDPR in the EU or CCPA in California, often carry significant repercussions for non-compliance. The legal and financial penalties for risking sensitive data are heavy, and the reputational damage to your brand can be catastrophic.

Of course, as marketers, you need to obtain, share, and use data. However, this should always be done with local data protection laws as a priority. Strict compliance is an absolute necessity to protect customer trust and avoid expensive mistakes.

5. Extracting meaningful insights from data

Among all this data, identifying the most valuable information can be tough. Which of the countless data points will drive good marketing decisions? It can be a struggle to reel in this information from the ocean of data available. 

You need a refined and systematic approach that allows important trends and patterns to be uncovered. Once again, the right technology can help sift through the masses of information to gain actionable insights.

Level Up Your Marketing Operations and CX With Strong Marketing Data Management 

Good marketing data management transforms raw, chaotic data into ordered, actionable insights. Huge volumes of data can be better analyzed and interpreted. No longer scattered over departments and systems, data is centralized for easier access and use. Marketers can then create personalized, relevant campaigns, improving the customer experience and boosting revenue.

So, take a look at your data management processes and see what you can improve today. You’ll thank yourself tomorrow.