Presented by Treasure Data

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This article is part of a VB special issue. Read the full series here: Building the foundation for customer data quality.

Customer data has become the lifeblood of delivering connected customer experiences. But without the right customer data, it’s practically impossible to deliver personalized experiences at scale.  

In the rush to deliver these personalized digital experiences, it’s easy to overlook one simple fact: your customer data must first be accurate. If it’s not, the results can be worse than you think. Without the right data, your customers could end up with a personalized experience — but one that belongs to someone else. 

With so much data to manage, it can be hard, or even impossible, to cleanse your data manually. A customer data platform (CDP) can help automate the process, and create a system that continuously improves your data quality over time. It can also help marketing and IT teams make better decisions though consistent insights, which improves efficiency and delivers higher ROI. 

The true cost of bad data

In order to ensure the data you’re activating is useful, actionable and accurate, it has to be clean. Otherwise, you risk making bad decisions based on bad data — and that can be costly.

According to global research from Treasure Data, while a majority of marketers say they have access to customer data, around one-fifth say that data isn’t accurate or high-quality. This poor-quality data resulted in inaccurate targeting (30%), lost customers (29%), lost leads (28%), reduced productivity (27%) and wasted marketing spend (28%).

Wasted marketing spend adds up over time. According to our research, marketers in the U.S. predicted budget wastage of up to 38% — or nearly $6 million on average over a period of six months. 

The principles of data hygiene

Improving data quality starts with good data hygiene. Data cleansing, also known as data scrubbing or data cleaning, is the process of fixing or removing incorrect, incomplete, duplicate or corrupted data to ensure your data is accurate, trustworthy and consistent across your organization. 

There are several core elements that make up quality data. During your data cleansing process, organizations should consider these factors:

• Accuracy: Does your data accurately reflect the correct information? 
• Completeness: Are all needed attributes included in the dataset? 
• Consistency: How consistent is data across the organization? 
• Timeliness: Is the data relevant, and up-to-date? 
• Uniqueness: Does data only appear once in the ecosystem, without duplicates? 
• Validity: Is your data usable, or presented in a usable format? 

Here’s how data cleansing works, how a customer data platform can help, and what it ultimately means for the customer experience:

1. Inspect and audit your data

A data hygiene audit consists of assessing all of the entry points your organization uses for customer data collection, along with how that data is collected, and when. Understanding how data is collected can help you tailor your first-party data strategy to create a fair value exchange of data at the right touchpoints along the customer journey. 

A CDP unifies data from across sources and systems, eliminates data silos and gives you a clear view of all your data within a centralized system. With this visibility, you can pinpoint different areas of the customer journey, and tailor your data collection strategy to make the experience more transparent for customers.

Asking for the right data at the right moments can prevent dirty data from being collected at all, because you’re only asking consumers to give you data that’s relevant and contextual to the interaction they’re having with your brand.

Nearly one-fourth of U.S. consumers admit to providing false data about themselves to organizations.

Treasure Data

2. Merge duplicate customer profiles 

Consolidating duplicate data into one unified customer profile is a critical step for maintaining accurate records. A CDP with AI-powered identity resolution can automatically rectify duplicative data and tie it back to an individual profile. A CDP can also continuously update customer profiles in near-real time, ensuring data remains accurate and up-to-date. 

Rectifying duplicate profiles makes the customer experience seamless. For example, say a shopper has two email addresses that they’ve registered with across two different brands in your brand portfolio. In a siloed system, this may seem like two different people, which means one customer would receive duplicates with each marketing effort. With a CDP, this data is combined to one customer record that can be used across brands for more effective marketing outreach, and less wasted spend. 

3. Manage old or outdated leads

As you cleanse your data, be sure to remove leads that are inaccurate, and set up thresholds within your marketing solutions that can help you identify leads that have the highest propensity to convert. 

With a CDP, analytics and AI-powered next-best action allow you to set up triggers to re-engage customers who have gone quiet, or have performed an action that signals new intent. You can also suppress customers from marketing activity if they’re not interested in a certain product or service at any given time. This ensures that customers only receive marketing that is relevant to them — and not inundated with messaging. Tailoring outreach also improves marketing spend, since you’re only engaging with consumers who have a high likelihood of conversion. 

4. Use your data for actionable insights

Once your data is cleansed and stored in your CDP, marketing and data teams can use it to inform strategy, optimize campaigns and use machine learning to segment and analyze highly targeted audiences. With a CDP, marketers can activate campaigns for specific segments automatically, making processes more efficient. Continuous insights allows for swift optimization, which improves return on investment and reduces wasted spend.  

The power of clean data with a CDP

Data is a powerful tool. But if it isn’t accurate, it won’t help you get to where you need to go. A CDP helps marketing and data teams make sense of customer profiles at scale, and serves as a foundation for data cleansing, enrichment and activation.

It’s time to ditch the dirty data and make better business decisions. Investing in the right data solutions is the first step.

Learn more about how to optimize your data strategy with our guide here. 

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Jim Skeffington is Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at Treasure Data.

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