Following is an excerpt from the Darwill white paper, “5 Ways Not to Fail at Big Data Marketing.” For a complete copy of the free white paper, click here to sign up and download. How Not to Fail at Big Data Marketing Increasingly, big data is driving marketing programs to even more effective levels. But while data is all around us, big data marketing is easy to mess up. Marketers often think that they can apply filters and set parameters, purchase a list, and be ready to go. In reality, there is more to it. Let’s look at some tips to success and real-life campaigns, then draw some important lessons to help you avoid making the same mistakes.

Tips to Success

Here are three tips to producing great data-driven campaigns:

Tip #1: Identify your target audience and their unique identifiers.

Before you can do great data marketing, you need a firm handle on who your target audience is and the identifiers needed to reach them. For example, you may want to sell boats to retirees, but in order to target and personalize your marketing messages, you need to select the identifiers — age range, household income, geographic radius, and gender — necessary to make it happen.

Tip #2: De-dupe, cleanse, and update your list. 

The next tip? Practice basic data hygiene. Company A wanted to do an A/B test of prospects. They provided us with their own data files — complete and ready to mail — and asked us to send out different variations of the piece to see how different target groups responded. The results were disappointing. After some research, we discovered that the list the client provided had not been cleansed or updated in years! In some cases, the prospect had moved from House A to House B. In other cases, two people were living at the same house under different last names. The entire A/B test was invalidated. The next time, the client supplied us with its list much earlier in the process and asked us to cleanse the data before sending out the mailing. There were no problems that time. <Box> As standard practice, you should run your list through CASS and NCOA on a regular basis. NCOA is only about 80% effective, however, so you have the option to use Enhanced NCOA services. Enhanced NCOA uses third-party data to yield 20-40% more matches than NCOA alone. </Box> What about new lists? Do you need to de-dupe and cleanse them, too? Yes! In a list purchase, you are given a list of names that meet specific criteria, but there may be multiple people meeting those criteria within the same household. People may also have moved. Any list purchase needs to be de-duped to reflect a single home and verified to ensure that names and addresses are current within the last few weeks.

Tip #3: Check the quality, legitimacy, and original source of your data. 

Make sure your data comes from legitimate sources. This includes ensuring that your list company has the rights to gather the data to begin with. Take the experience of a major consumer products company (CPG). It purchased a list of customer data that had been captured from a variety of websites. Unfortunately, the companies from which the data had been captured did not give rights for their customer data to be sold. The CPG used that data to email, mail, and promote using social media. In a six-week period, 55% of recipients either called the Do Not Call list or flagged the messages as spam. The fallout? $150,000 down the drain, plus the incalculable costs associated with PR and damage control. This happens more often than you might think. In another instance, an insurance company purchased a prospect list from a big data house that claimed to have licensed permission to send out email. The list company didn’t have the permissions it claimed, and the client didn’t double opt-in because it thought permission had been granted. In the end, it mass spammed 1.4 million names over a period of six months. The fallout for this company was catastrophic. It was blacklisted by one-third of the ISPs hosting recipients’ email accounts (included major ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Yahoo!), which meant all of its emails were blocked by those ISPs regardless of whether the marketer had permission from the recipient or not. Imagine the impact on response rates on its multi-channel campaigns. The company even ended up with a lawsuit against them for violating the federal CAN-SPAM regulations. The moral of the story? Verify the source of the data and secure the proper permissions. Ready for more? For a complete copy of the free white paper, click here to sign up and download.