3 small-but-mighty marketing data mistakes to avoid

As a marketer, I’ve become increasingly adept at catching mistakes in marketing emails or ads that come my way, like getting an email that says “You left this behind..” when, in fact, I left it in my shopping cart for an hour, and then returned to and completed the purchase. Or when I receive an email with recommendations for college textbooks, even though I haven’t needed one in over eight years.

But, as a marketer, I also know that those mistakes often stem from issues with customer data or limitations with marketing and data tools. So, before I dive into this blog post, I just want to say: It’s not you, it’s probably your data. 

Regardless, the following marketing data mistakes should not be overlooked. Let’s get into it.

1. Not putting extra focus on advanced suppression and exclusion tactics

Crafting an audience segment with precise criteria is essential. Naturally, you want to aim to reach the cohort of customers that will drive the outcomes you want to see from your marketing campaigns. However, identifying the customers who should absolutely not receive a specific marketing ad, email, promo, or text is just as important.

Suppression and exclusion lists should be equally important when building a campaign, especially because marketers everywhere are pressured to do more with less budget. 

Not only that, customers have exceedingly high expectations and get easily annoyed by irrelevant communications. This can negatively affect your customer relationships, and over time, lead to customer attrition. We don’t want that.

Here are just a few advanced suppression and exclusion tactics to help you target and spend smarter on advertising platforms while protecting your customer relationships.

Suppress customers from marketing campaigns that have recently complained to customer support or have left a bad review.

Not doing this is probably the fastest way to lose a customer, especially if their customer support issue hasn’t been resolved yet or they’re waiting for a refund or exchange.

A customer data platform (CDP), like Simon Data, can help by unifying data from all sources, including your customer support platform, so you can create segments using this data and sync them in real time to the marketing and advertising platforms you need.

Suppression on advertising platforms will only work if you can find and reach your customers online. This is challenging when customers use different email addresses for their online profiles (e.g., one email for shopping and another email for social media) or have multiple devices (e.g.,  mobile phone, tablet, laptop, work laptop).

Enriching your first-party data with additional hashed email addresses (HEMs) and (mobile ad IDs) can significantly increase your ability to match them on advertising platforms and target or suppress them as needed.

For limited-time deals and offers, exclude customers with a high lifetime value (LTV). 

Why? Because your most valuable customers don’t need the extra push. Instead, focus on the audience segments that will drive a higher return on investment (ROI). Conversely, for campaigns where you want to engage only your high-value customers, you can suppress customers who have a low purchase propensity, calculated by machine learning.

Break down your suppression lists further, just as you would with your targeting. 

If you have one large suppression list made up of customers who recently purchased athletic wear, well, that’s a missed opportunity to promote complementary products. For example, if someone recently purchased an athletic top, they can still receive ads for athletic bottoms. 

2. Not using real-time data when real-time data is key to the campaign

Some campaigns just don’t work with batch data processing, which occurs when changes in a dataset are updated as a batch at a set interval. Batch data processing, even if the set interval is one day or one hour, is not optimal for certain types of campaigns. Here are some examples.

Your suppression lists, which we just talked about, will be inaccurate if your audiences aren’t syncing to your marketing and ad platforms in real time. It’s  worse if you’re manually uploading CSVs. 

How often have you seen an ad or email promoting the same or very similar product you just purchased? This is because you haven’t made it to the suppression list yet. So, even if you spent all this time carefully crafting your suppression lists, your campaign won’t perform as well if the data isn’t there when it needs to be. This leads to spending more by serving ads to the customers who shouldn’t be getting them.

Real-time data is also critical when sending marketing communications with dynamic content, such as inventory, pricing, deals, etc. For example, a travel services business may want to send a price drop alert via email to customers who were browsing flights but haven’t booked yet. 

For this type of email, you’ll want to display the exact new price in the email at the time the email is sent, not two hours ago, or even 10 minutes before, which can result in inaccurate information and a bad customer experience.

For abandoned cart campaigns, you want the event data in real time to see exactly when and what a customer abandoned. Then, you can follow up with them at the right time to complete their purchase.

Want a real example? Vimeo recently optimized its abandonment campaigns with real-time data. Simon Data’s direct connection to their Snowflake Data Cloud allowed Vimeo to capture real-time user behaviors (in Snowflake), including the precise time that a user abandoned their video upload. With this data passing from Snowflake to Simon in real time, Vimeo could send communications to those users and test multiple send times with pinpoint accuracy (in Simon).

3. Not capturing the full customer picture, including small or unseen behaviors

You may think you have a solid understanding of your customer base, but there’s always more to be discovered — more behaviors to unlock and more context to be surfaced. 

Good marketing is always about the details. For instance, every action a user takes on your website — what they’re looking at, where they’ve clicked, and what they’ve added and removed from their carts — gives you invaluable metadata that should be funneled back into the customer’s unified profile. These pieces of information can be unlocked by resolving customer identities.

Identity resolution is matching anonymous website activity to known customer profiles. This is important because customers often shop without logging into a specific retailer’s account or when using a different device. 

In either case, you can build more complete customer profiles by matching that rich customer data to an existing profile — and without relying on third-party cookies. If you’re unable to match the unauthenticated users to known customer profiles in real time, you’ve missed the opportunity to engage with them in the moments that matter most.

Conclusion

While seemingly minor, these three data mistakes can significantly impact your marketing campaign's effectiveness and customer satisfaction. By prioritizing advanced suppression and exclusion tactics, leveraging real-time data, and capturing the full customer picture, you’ll drive better marketing and business outcomes. 

But the best way to avoid these mistakes is to partner with Simon Data. Not only does Simon offer advanced segmentation, real-time content personalization, and identity resolution, but you also get a full team of technical, strategic, and customer success specialists that help you with all of it every step of the way. To learn more about Simon Data, book a demo.

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