Beyond Data Investment: How Marketers Can Achieve the Greatest ROI

Data’s role in marketing is ever-evolving. Companies are maintaining their pace of investment in data studies and strengthening the sophistication of personalized multi-channel campaigns. While marketers were once “data rich and insights poor,” their big-data investments are now paying off in a big way. In fact, almost half of all the marketers surveyed during our annual DMA2014 study found that respondents expect to see ROI from their data-related investments this year.

Despite advancements in data-driven marketing, many challenges remain. According to our study, challenges including data analysis, data application, data personalization and data collection hinder a marketer’s ability to increase their return on investment.

As data-driven marketing reaches its peak, marketers must focus on mastering analytics and other basic activities like data collection and cleansing. Here are four ways marketers can make the most of their data-related investments.

1. Go beyond the basics. Marketers now understand the value of data-driven marketing and as a result, can focus on sophistication. Simple segmentation efforts and personalization based on a consumer’s name is no longer enough for reaching an audience, however. By using deeper insights based on consumer interests and actions, marketers can send more relevant messages to engage their audience and boost ROI.
2. Protect your consumers. With great data comes great responsibility. Data-driven marketing allows companies to personalize messaging, but also challenges marketers to protect their customers. Without protecting your customer data and privacy, consumer trust and ROI can quickly disappear.
3. Be a data omnivore. A positive return on investment starts with collecting data, yet often, marketers feel overwhelmed by the scale of Big Data. However, our report found that the most successful data-driven marketers collect, analyze and implement data from a variety of sources. In order to achieve the most ROI, marketers must collect data from as many sources as possible and create a solution that provides a single view of customers. Doing so will help you understand your customers and their preferences, so you can personalize messages that are relevant and drive purchases.
4. Clean your data. Our study found that marketers who experience the most ROI clean their files weekly or monthly, while others only do so quarterly or annually. But the best marketers recognize that data hygiene helps control the quality of data collected. Cleaning data helps guarantee that records are accurate and up-to-date, and therefor allows marketers to successful execute data-driven marketing campaigns.

More than three out of five marketers have started investing in data solutions, and another 26 percent plans on investing in the next two years. As data-driven marketing becomes the status-quo, marketers must focus on privacy, data cleanliness and data sophistication to recognize the greatest amount of ROI.

To download the full report, click here.

By Gretchen Littlefield, President, List Services and Non Profit Solutions, Infogroup Targeting Solutions

BIO: Gretchen Littlefield is responsible for the overall management, strategic planning and growth of List Services and Infogroup Nonprofit Solutions. This includes leading the Business to Business and Business to Consumer List Services teams as well as services for Nonprofit, Political and Federal Government verticals.

About Infogroup

We are a marketing services and analytics provider that delivers best in class data-driven customer-centric technology solutions. Our data and software-as-a-service (DaaS & SaaS) offerings help clients of all sizes, from small companies to FORTUNE 100^TMenterprises, increase their sales and customer loyalty. Infogroup provides both digital and traditional marketing channel expertise that is enhanced by access to our proprietary data on 235 million individuals and 24 million businesses, which is distributed real-time to our clients.