Hard to believe, but it’s that time of year – the time to make all of your holiday marketing preparations. While you and your team strategize about what you should offer and how it should look, don’t forget to consider your audience. Will you be able to reach them this year? Through data hygiene, modeling, and an omnichannel marketing approach, give your marketing campaign the best chance of success this season.
Cleaning Your Data
Whether customer records are entered incorrectly, multiple times, or simply not updated, your data can get messy. If these records are not cleaned up, you can waste thousands of marketing dollars targeting bad addresses.
Before you ramp up end of the year marketing efforts, carve out time to clean up your data list. Running data hygiene steps ensures you have the most up to date contact information for your customer base. You can also remove duplicate records, so you don’t end up mailing the same person 5 identical Christmas catalogs.
Some common data hygiene steps include:
NCOA & CASS
Avoid undeliverable mail pieces by running NCOA and CASS processing. These hygiene steps update your customer data to align with what the United States Postal Services has on file. The process involves updating the addresses of customers who have moved as well as formatting addresses to the USPS standards.
Deceased Suppressions
Remove deceased customers from your direct mail list by running deceased suppressions.
Deduplication
It’s not unusual for a customer’s address or contact information to be entered incorrectly into your system. When this happens, you not only have bad data, but you also have multiple entries for the same individual. This process identifies duplicate records or records that may be the same with different information. Deduplication will either merge the records with different information or remove duplicates.
Appending Missing Information
Holiday promotions are a great opportunity to get in front of your customer base and encourage them to purchase from you. However, if you are missing information such as names, addresses, or email addresses, it may be difficult to reach your audience, especially across multiple platforms. Data appends allow you to fill in the missing data elements, so you can complete your records and target your selected audience.
Suppressions
Before you deploy your holiday marketing campaign, don’t forget to run suppressions. Suppressions can include removing current customers from a prospect only mailer or unsubscribers from an email campaign. Depending on what the offer is, you may also want to suppress nursing home, prison, and military addresses from your marketing list.
Choosing the Best
While we would all love to have an unlimited marketing budget, it’s simply not a reality. You have to choose which records you want to go after and which ones are not a good fit. Many companies will take a random selection from the available universe, but did you know you can actually score your prospect records?
We created a custom model called MicroModeling® that analyzes your current customers and identifies prospects who look just like them. Your prospect universe is run through the model and each record is ranked from highest to lowest. Instead of taking a chance, you can intentionally choose the top records for your business and advertise to the people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
Surrounding Your Audience
For many businesses, the holidays are their busiest season. Everyone is in holiday marketing preparation mode. The challenge becomes how do you stand out when your audience is flooded with all kinds of advertisements? It’s easy to get lost in the noise, so you need to create a strong strategy for reaching your audience across multiple channels.
By using an omni-channel approach, you are sending your prospects the same message through channels like direct mail, email, display, social media, connected TV, streaming radio, etc. This increases your visibility, creates recognition, and builds momentum for the overall campaign. Each channel serves as a reminder and helps move prospects further down your sales funnel.
As you work on your holiday marketing preparations, reduce your marketing waste by cleaning up your data. Increase your return on investment by choosing the best records for your business with MicroModeling® and use an omnichannel marketing approach to get in front of your audience.
If you want to take your holiday marketing preparations to the next level, let’s connect.