Data Appending Expands Marketing Reach and Results

Missing and incorrect data affects your ability to reach more customers, market more effectively, and win more business. As Aberdeen Group reports, solving problems associated with “inconsistent or inadequate” customer data is crucial to online marketing success.

The consensus of analysts and marketing experts alike is that data appending is the best way to solve the problems associated with poor and missing data, and that appending data has become imperative for achieving the best marketing results.

Heather Fletcher on targetmarketingmag.com informs us that, “Bad prospect data may be costing companies millions. At the same time, consumers are concerned about maintaining their privacy. The solution, according to representatives of Epsilon Targeting and Marketfish is respectful, effective data appending.”

The experts agree that retaining and selling to customers you already have is key to growing your business. Missing customer email addresses limits your ability to achieve the optimal results via email marketing, the method that yields the highest returns.

Studies also show that marketing across multiple channels-email, phone, and postal mail-can achieve higher success rates. Missing and incorrect data impedes the ability to do business across these channels.

Data appending can supply missing email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses, add important demographic data, as well as verify and correct information taken at the point of entry on your website, all of which can expand the reach and effectiveness of your marketing.

In today’s highly competitive online marketplace, the winners will be those marketers who focus, refine, and optimize their campaigns through targeting and segmentation. Performing a demographic append to the information you collect on your website gives you a richer set of details about your prospects that enables you to segment and target more effectively, and to achieve higher conversion rates.

As Bernice Grossman and Ruth P. Stevens in “Enhancing Your B-To-B Data With Data Append” report, “Database append provides a convenient and cost-effective way to enrich the customer information in your marketing database,” explaining further that, “Compared to collecting the data directly from customers and prospects, data append is a fast and convenient way to enrich your database for purposes of research, analysis, modeling, and campaign selection.”

One more point the experts emphasize is that data hygiene should be performed in concert with data appending. As Grossman and Stevens advise, “Clean up your file. Your append efforts will be much improved if you begin with clean data. Inaccurate data is harder to match, and will result in lower append rates.”