Marketing campaigns have changed a lot over the few years. In today’s age, you need to own a solid contact database of your customers and potential leads to conduct a successful marketing campaign. The most successful marketers engage their target audiences with excellent content and rely on different kinds of data to determine which information to send, when to send it, and whom to send it to. The success rates of marketers depend heavily upon not only current data but also clean and complete data.
Inaccurate date or outdated information is one of the primary reasons why your hard work and efforts end up missing the mark. It can lead to wastage of valuable time and resources of your enterprise and can also reduce your customer’s confidence in your company or brand.
Identifying incorrect, outdated records and correcting any duplicated entries or typographical errors is the first step to make sure that you are working with the best information source. But undertaking just a data cleansing job is not adequate; you need data appending to sort you out.
What is Data Appending?
Simply put, data appending is a process that allows you to keep up with your contact data without compromising on the quality. Data appending leads to an enhancement of your business enterprise’s customer files.
Most business organizations collect basic information about their clients or potential customers such as phone numbers, emails, etc. The data appending process allows you to take out the incorrect data and add new, up-to-date elements to an existing database. For example, you can replace your contact’s email id from their old job with their new email id at their new company. Through this process, you can also take the current information and match it against a larger accurate database of business data, so that you can add the desired missing data fields in your database.
Data appending takes your existing data and improves it by adding updated newer information about your potential buyer. This helps in improving lead quality and subsequently in delivering more conversions and greater returns on your marketing investment, hence keeping your organization’s operations productive.
Even though data appending plays such a huge part, it still isn’t something that most marketers are adept at. To help you and your team in the better management of your database so that you can mobilize your data, here are some best practices for data appending –
1. Start With Existing Customers
Customer data is among the most accessible and valuable information that you can get your hands on. This is why it only makes sense that your business enterprise’s customer data should be the first data that you should append. Starting with your existing customers’ data also makes sense because it is less costly and requires fewer efforts to keep an existing customer than it does to acquire a new one. Your existing customer has already demonstrated that your products or services are something they like. This means that you already have an existing audience; now all you need to do is find out what else they might be interested in.
Data appending can update any incorrect information and can also add new information such as contact details, social media accounts, what skills they possess, what organizations they are a part of, etc. This information can give you an idea of what other products or services you can offer to them that they might be interested in. More additional data can also help you in determining what you need to focus on in your sales efforts to different customers.
2. Practice Data Appending in the Off-Season
No matter what industry or sector you may be in, there will be a time when your business is not so busy. This ‘low season’ is the perfect time to take care of essential data cleansing and appending. Use this time smartly and handle your data appending during this time when you are not being bombarded by work calls and questions.
If you don’t already have a data management strategy in place, you can take advantage of this downtime to keep your data ready for the next busy season.
3. Append Data Regularly
You might not be aware of this but data is dynamic and prone to constant change. This is why to maintain your data’s hygiene and to keep it up-to-date, data appending becomes vital. Your previous customers as well as prospects are continuously moving to another city, getting a new phone, changing jobs, and getting new email addresses.
Many existing businesses close their shutters, whereas new businesses open their doors and so on. With such rapid and continuous change, your business enterprise cannot afford to append data only once a year. To make the most of any situation and to ensure that your marketing efforts are hitting home, you need to keep up with the times and make these changes.
To help you in staying up-to-date, seek out technology partners that can help you to efficiently and consistently cleanse and append data at regular intervals. It is best recommended that you update your data preferably each month or least once every quarter. This will help you to know when, where, and how to reach your contacts.
4. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help
Outsourcing is a common solution for taking care of activities that you or your team doesn’t have the expertise in. There is no shame in accepting that you might need help with various skills to succeed in running a business enterprise, especially if they are not your core skillset. For example, when you need to create a website to compete online but you don’t know anything about creating one, you can hire a digital agency to get the job done. In the same way, if you need help with data appending, you can have an expert help you out.
As mentioned earlier, data appending plays a crucial aspect in the success of your business, which is why you need an expert who is aware of the techniques of data appending and can do it well for you. This is where Span Global Services comes into the picture.
We at Span Global Services know that a database with missing field or invalid information won’t help you in obtaining your desired ROI. On the contrary, it can severely hamper your enterprise’s name. At Span Global Services , we are equipped with a master database of millions of records from different industry segments. We take your current data and match each data with our database to fill in the missing fields. With our services, you can maintain the hygiene and quality of your business’ database. This will help you in reaching your potential customers, bring down marketing campaign costs, increase campaign response rates, and sail through your sales target with ease.
