Real-Time Data Services Drive Multichannel Marketing

Marketing success increasingly relies on acquiring data and intelligence to better understand and engage prospects and customers. The most successful marketing campaigns also are multichannel, and eliminating and correcting bad data increases their success rates. Real-time data services are an effective means of acquiring and validating the data needed to market across multiple channels.

That better results are achieved through multichannel marketing has been shown in a number of studies, including those by Banta, Aberdeen Group, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

As Banta reports, personalized communications yield a five- to 10-fold increase in response and conversion rates, explaining further that, “When print, e-mail, Web and telemarketing are combined in integrated, multi-channel campaigns, the results are even greater.”

This is why, as Infinity Direct relates, “Savvy marketers know a smart multichannel marketing strategy is no longer optional, it’s a necessity.”

To reach prospects and customers across channels requires all the necessary contact information-email addresses, postal addresses, and phone numbers. If you have some portions of these contact elements but not the others, real-time data appending services can provide the missing pieces.

As the key trends show, email marketing is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, with profiling and segmenting yielding higher conversion rates. Profiling, segmentation, and personalization are the machinery driving Personalization 2.0, in which the aim is to deliver more engaging content based on gaining a more detailed understanding of prospects-their age, location, occupation, education, habits, interests, tastes, and more.

As Nick Heys relates, the most successful marketers today are those who are using customer intelligence to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, enabling them to use targeted offers to achieve better results.

The rich set of data needed for profiling, segmenting, targeting, and personalization can be acquired via demographic appending. This will allow you to acquire the needed data as prospects sign up and opt in.

The quality of the data in your database also makes a difference. As LeadJen‘s and other studies show, bad data is costly, resulting in a significant amount of wasted time on the part of a sales force. For example, bad email addresses will bounce or may be spam traps, which can affect your email reputation and lead to blacklisting, all of which undermines the effectiveness of your marketing. Take advantage of email validation services to clean out the bad data.

Putting it all together, we see that the key success factors that make a difference today-including providing engaging and relevant emails-rely on understanding your prospects, which in turn relies on attaining quality data that enables personalized and persuasive communication.