Three Benefits of Centralized Marketing Data
The digitalization of global business environment has completely transformed the traditional mode of marketing communication. The previously used platforms for reaching out to the prospects and customers are getting replaced by sophisticated digital channels equipped with innovative features. These platforms have shown a superior capability to quantify all aspects of marketing communication and their results, including leads.
Subsequently, this has led to the growing need for specialized tools to gauge the performance of all marketing initiatives, which can be achieved when distinctive silos consisting of customer data are integrated into a central marketing repository. The integrated system can track the varied channels with greater accuracy and provide an in-depth analysis of almost every customer’s activities.
The system can work efficiently as a super-centralized warehouse for all forms of customer and marketing data. When this system is integrated with a specialized platform such as a CRM, it can generate a coherent representation of the overall business.
1. Efficiency
A centralized database can maximize the efficiency of analytics and reporting by making the data much more accessible. The efficiency is the result of the integration of separate data spread across various domains such as Customer Service department, e-commerce portal, and POS. The centralized data system makes it easy to retrieve the answers even for tricky queries that need records to be fetched across the domains.
Collating the transactional data such as demographics, purchase history, and campaign responses together can reveal the useful insights about the consumer behavior. Subsequently, it also leads to better reporting, which helps figure out the critical insights about the performance of campaigns, transcending every consumer touch point.
2. Quality
The quality of data is crucial for data-driven systems such as CRMs and marketing automation tools. Eliminating the discrepancies from the data can be grueling if the process of capturing, storing and managing it is not streamlined adequately. As the constant changes in customer records have to be updated quickly, the centralization of data becomes all the more necessary to maintain the quality of the data.
The quality management can be complex and challenging as it involves matching and merging customer records based on several criteria. The consolidation process is aimed at eliminating the duplication of info the, which can go a long way in improving both the quality and efficiency.
Management routines to maintain the quality of the data is an ongoing process. Based on the type of business, target audience and the operational capability, the sequence of these can vary. However, with regular updates, businesses can unlock the full potential of the marketing data in the long run.
3. Reduced Cost
When customer data is integrated and consolidated, a company’s processes are made much more efficient. Firms that maintain a centralized data system have a better control on the marketing and customer data. They also have to spend much lesser time and effort to reconcile and manage it, which leads to better utilization of resources, which in turn play a vital role in managing the cost. The super congregation of marketing data can be ideal when it comes to extracting specific information needed by marketers, without spending much time on conjoining the dispersed fragments of data. The time and money saved on the data collation can be invested for better activities such as strategic initiatives, resulting in significant savings for the company.
Even if the improvements in ROI are not realized immediately, a continual commitment towards data centralization can bear fruitful results such as optimized operations and enhanced customer experience in the long run.