Marketing data quality lessons come from politics

The recent U.S. presidential election held several lessons that had nothing to do with political ideology. They came down to the progress of technology, an area with consequences for all sorts of professionals. According to Dealer Marketing Magazine contributor James Green, the proper value of analytics and data quality shone through.

Green explained that the Democratic voter turnout system was highly effective. The party mined its data reserves to make sure it reached out to all of its individual members. This, naturally, has applications in marketing. For example, firms with good mailing lists can use them to spur consumer loyalty and action.

According to Green, companies may think they are operating at a high level when they are actually falling behind on management and oversight of their information resources. He noted that businesses may be plagued by duplicate records and bad data. Deduplication software could be the answer, allowing sales teams to weed out doubled names.

TechTarget gave a concrete example of a company in need of deduplication. The source reported that Data Locator Group, a third-party marketer, was beset with doubled information. A serious cleanup of records improved conditions considerably, reducing the duplicate rate to less than 1 percent.