Better leverage your data: Overcome common data quality challenges

Marketers need to work to improve their data management techniques and the way they work with other parts of the organization to improve the quality of data assets. Yesterday, Erin Haselkorn, Analyst and Public Relations Manager at Experian Data Quality presented a webinar, “Better leverage your data: Overcome common data quality challenges.”

The webinar focused on three major topics: the data landscape today, what data quality challenges we face and why they exist, and how we can overcome some of those common challenges.

Erin explained that marketing isn’t always collecting the data, but that they need to encourage better data stewardship across their team and organization in order to be successful. Here are the 5 key steps that marketers can take to improve their data:

1. Start with contact data – Did you know that 97 percent of companies suffer from common errors associated with contact data? The three most common errors are incomplete or missing data, outdated information and inaccurate data. Duplicate data is also a significant problem for a third of companies. Without accurate contact data, marketers will struggle to reach their audience. Some ways to improve contact data for marketing purposes include: validating data at the point of capture, getting software in place in highest volume areas for other departments, batch cleansing data, and monitoring data over time that is used frequently to make sure it is still accurate.
2. Prioritize data challenges – You can’t fix everything at once so it’s important to evaluate where your biggest data management pain points are and attack them accordingly. Some questions to ask:
• How do you identify data issues today?
• How do you resolve those issues?
• Where is the most data collected?
• How is data used in marketing?
• Where do you see the biggest pain points?
3. Understand silos - Addressing data silos is key to unlocking improved employee efficiency, enabling data-driven decision-making and realizing the potential of Big Data. On average, US companies use 3.6 channels to collect contact data, so understanding the flow of data in and across your organization is necessary.
4. Identify changes that can be made – Erin explained that every organization will be different in how they tackle data improvement, but there are some similarities. Once you know the value of data to your department, you can justify investments that would need to be made. Some of the decisions would include changes in staffing, investments in technology, automating manual processes and encouraging central ownership across the business.
5. Know your third party suppliers – When you are making decisions based on data from someone else, you have to assess how much can you trust it. Aim to use third-party vendors that perform well against data-validation services, and that can demonstrate successful past performance.

You can view the slides from the presentation below, or to learn how we can help improve your contact data, check out our data quality solutions.