Marketing has progressed significantly from the days of direct mail addressed to “occupant”.

Or has it?

• I recently received a snail-mail letter from a major corporation, addressed to Rondo Greg – not Randall Craig.
• My wife recently received an email addressed to her work address, asking whether her company – a major financial institution – would be interested in using the financial services… of their direct competitor.
• And of course most people have received emails that begin “Dear [Contact Name]”, where it actually says “[Contact Name]” instead of their own name.

For the first time ever there are low cost tools (Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, and ActiveCampaign, amongst others) that allow any organization to do sophisticated marketing automation/database marketing.

There is an eerie parallel between marketing automation today, and desktop publishing in the mid-late 1980’s.  Back then, the newfound ability to choose between so many fonts/sizes/styles gave the writer incredible power when it came to formatting and layout.  Some of what was produced was brilliant – but most was a disaster.  Today, marketers have been given similar superpowers: some superpowers are being used brilliantly, and some… not so much so.  (And some marketers don’t even know what these marketing automation superpowers actually are.)  

While organizations will eventually develop the knowledge and skills to incorporate marketing automation into their plans, they will never be successful unless they pay attention to the definitely unsexy foundation: their actual data.   Consider the following ten questions:

1. Who has executive responsibility for the quality of the organization’s data?
2. Which staff member is tasked with day-to-day responsibility for the quality of data? (They sometimes have a title, such as “data steward”, or “Director of Master Data”)
3. Do your databases have a well-structured architecture?
4. Do key fields have a well-thought-out taxonomy?
5. What processes currently exist to continuously improve data quality? (Review, testing, verification, etc)
6. Do you continuously collect data across the entire “journey” for a 360º, end-to-end view of your clients/members/stakeholders?  (Including from internal systems, real-life interactions, web, and social media.)
7. Are all email and outbound messages legally compliant? (eg CASL, CAN-SPAM, CCPA, GDPR, etc)
8. Is there a process to change implicit consent to express consent, and then track it?
9. Is there transparency of data to those in the organization who need to see it?  (Including dashboards, exception reporting, and ad-hoc reporting.)
10. Is the data adequately protected from external threats, but also with internal rights restrictions?

Does this topic resonate? Reach out to Randall: he can present it to your group.  (More presentation topics)
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