You’re only as good as your data when it comes to direct marketing. So how do you ensure data integrity in your systems?

You are sitting around a conference table discussing new ways to communicate with customers and prospects. Everyone gets excited over an idea.

We are going to directly communicate with our customers and prospects. We need a personal approach to marketing. We want to direct our message to the specific decision maker.

Hmm…How can we deliver our message directly? We can do it by postal mail, email, and phone. Great! Who has this contact information?

………… dead silence….

I have experienced this scenario while sitting around the conference table of Fortune 1000 companies as well as 10-person companies. What do you do next?

Launching a Direct Marketing Program with No Data

I call it the “draw the line in the sand” program. Here is how you begin:

1. Many people get hung up trying to go back through months and even years worth of data to gather the necessary information. If you do this, this project will sit in the procrastination pile for forever. Don’t look back, just look forward. “Draw a line in the sand” and go to step 2.

2. You decide today that you want to do a direct marketing program.  

3. You decide that it is an important long term initiative and you want to change your processes to support this effort.

4. You establish a launch date for your program; let’s say three months from today.

5. You begin to collect name, phone number, mailing address, and email address at every reasonable opportunity.

6. After three months, you may have 50 contacts or you may have 500 contacts. Regardless of the number of contacts, you launch your direct marketing program with the contacts that you have.

7. From your first program you learn what works and what doesn’t. Did you forget to collect a piece of information which is critical to your marketing efforts? Did you duplicate efforts by sending the same message to different contacts within a company? This could be good or not. Do you need to maintain your contact information differently?

8. From your first direct marketing program, you refine your process, continue collecting contact information, and do it again.

9. Once you start direct marketing, don’t stop. The rules with the Do Not Call List and CAN-SPAM all contain time elements attached to the definition of “if it is OK to communicate with the person.” If too much time lapses between communications and business interactions, you no longer have the right to contact the person.

Maintaining Data Integrity for Direct Marketing

Maintaining data integrity requires a process where all people within the organization consistently and regularly enter updated information on customers. This can be an automated process or a manual process. The important point is that it needs to be well communicated that data integrity is important and that everyone is working towards the goal of maintaining accurate customer information.

Here are some ideas for checking and verifying your customer data:

• At the point of purchase, verify the person’s contact information and enter it into the computer as a part of the transaction.

• If the customer makes an appointment, verify the contact information during the appointment setting process.

• Invest in a card scanner, maybe even one for each person with a customer facing role. Everyone has stacks of business cards. Get that information into a common electronic format. It makes it easier for the individual salesperson, but it also enables you as a company to collect that information and aggregate it into a centralized contact source for the company.

• Train customer service people to be your data integrity checkpoint. If they are working with someone to place an order, to ship a product, or to make an appointment have them verify the contact information every time.

• Use your customer database to generate mailing lists for both email marketing and for direct mail regularly. Monitor these campaigns for which addresses bounce or generate a return from the post office. Then work to update and correct the addresses which generate bounces.

• If you have a sales team, develop a process where you synchronize the customer information in their personal contact list back with the company database. Often times the best contact information is sitting within individual salespeople’s computers instead of in a centralized repository.

• Create a map of all the places within your organization which touch a customer or which generate information specific to a customer. Evaluate how you can connect these information sources so that you have a complete view. Most large companies have complex data warehouses. However, there are inexpensive tools and software which can enable the centralization of data with the same outcome on a smaller scale.