Top 10 Signs Your Data Aint Integrated
June 2nd, 2010 | 
Author: Top 10 Signs Your Data Aint Integrated
1. If you think your customers Millie Joan Smith Daisy Jane Smith and Billy Joe Jim Bob Smith are the same personhellip;your data aint integrated.
2. If contacting individuals households residences or unique businesses is done via the blanket approach; youre at the wrong picnic andhellip; your data aint integrated.
3. If youre more afraid of getting accused of SPAM than you are of eating ithellip;your data aint integrated.
4. If email snail mail and voicemail arent included with female male and opened emailhellip;your data aint integrated.
5. If you think firmographics is the latest new exercise trendhellip;your data aint integrated.
6. If you think integrating your website data is something only Mr. Spock can dohellip;your data aint integrated.
7. If you give 3 different people the same criteria for a record count and you get 5 different answershellip;your data aint integrated.
8. If you think churn only applies to the dairy industryhellip;your data aint integrated.
9. If you think modeling is used to find good looking customershellip;your data aint integrated.
10. When you take your car in for maintenance and think wow that reminds me I need to do some database maintenance too;hellip; your data aint integrated.
We hope youre laughing. Or at least smiling. But in the real world data integration is no laughing matter. For direct marketers and IT personnel alike trying to obtain and integrate all of the data needed for direct marketing campaigns is serious and often difficult business. And For instance lets say you wanted to send a direct mail campaign followed up by an email campaign to nonresponders. The basic criteria for list selection might consist of a few suppressions geographic area transactional data/behavior and number of marketing touches to manage fatigue with the mailing to occur at a household level and the emailing to occur at a unique email address level. On the surface this sounds like a straightforward normal and intuitive direct marketing campaign. But what about the underlying data to support the campaign? Is the necessary data available and integrated? If not what will it take to get the data ready? Is the data integration part of the marketing campaign or is the data ready prior to the campaign as should be the case? Data integration is indeed no laughing matter. For the selection criteria above it is likely that the data needed to execute the campaign exists in two or three disparate places within the typical organization and possibly in as many as five or six different places.
Proper integration of pertinent marketing data to effectively and efficiently conduct direct marketing campaigns is essential and foundational to the success of specific direct marketing campaigns and to the ongoing viability of an organizations entire direct marketing program. The following types of data while not all encompassing are typical of the integrated data that an organization needs for direct marketing:
bull; Customer and/or prospect data
bull; Multichannel contact data i.e. postal address email address phone number etc.
bull; Transactional data and dates RFM
bull; Multilevel managed data i.e. individual household residence unique business unique email address etc.
bull; Attributes of customers or prospects such as interests preferences or affinities can be selfreported or appended
bull; Demographic/lifestyle data
bull; Segmentation data
bull; Predictive model data
bull; Campaign history
bull; Marketing touch tracking
bull; Suppression data optout
bull; Derived data such as region or categorizations of other data elements
The above list is a good starting point but it does not address how the data is supposed to be combined when it is integrated. Routines and processes should be built to standardize validate and correct data and items such as address standardization and merge/purge need to be performed on the data. For instance what are the business rules for an active customer if they were active went to inactive and are now active again? Should this type of customer be considered the same as a customer who was always active? This is just one example of potentially dozens or even hundreds of business rules that need to be considered when integrating data.
It would take several articles to provide detail on how to integrate datamdash;in fact books are written on the subject and no two organizations are exactly alike. But the first step is recognizing the need for data integration and then having a discussion or series of discussions between marketing and IT to talk about the data that is needed is available and how to obtain and assemble it. In some organizations depending on scope this could be done on an adhoc project basis but the data will typically become outdated quickly. It is ideal if Marketing and IT can work together to build an ongoing process and database to capture and integrate the data; in some cases depending on an organizations needs outsourcing or partially outsourcing to a database marketing vendor may be the best option. The bottom line is that data integration is essentialmdash;scope complexity and cost are all important factors in determining what and how to integratemdash;each organization needs to determine what is best given all of these factors.
About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Jeff Barela
Jeff is the Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Business Development for DovetailThe Marketing Database Company.
As a cofounder of Dovetail a company that builds hosts and provides access to marketing databases Jeff has been in the database marketing industry for over 9 years and the database industry for over 15 years.
To learn more about database marketing or Dovetail visit our website at www.dovetaildatabase.com. Don’t forget to signup for our free eNewsletter to receive more information on database marketing. Or contact Jeff Barela at 303.904.4771 or jeffdovetaildatabase.com.
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