I just received an email from SeniorPeopleMeet.com that looks like this:
What's wrong with that? Well it's because I look like this:
You see, I’m the one on the left. I’m a young-ish thirty-something and was recently married. And as a marketing professional, it forces me to wonder what data is being analyzed that would flag me as a likely candidate to be in the market for meeting up with senior singles. What type of segmentation strategy is being used that puts me in the category of targets that would receive this communication? And as a marketing professional, I can’t help but say, “how could this company better utilize to target this campaign to the right people?”
Customer data is one of our most valuable resources within the marketing department. The cleaner and more accurate it is, the more effectively we can communicate relative information to groups of people. When data is inaccurate or there are pieces missing, there are two options:
1) Revise messaging to be less specific and appeal to a larger target audience
2) Throw caution to the wind, send the very specific message without being sure that it will be relevant to the targets, and hope for the best.
Within my organization, when we lack details or accuracy, instead of maintaining a narrowly focused message that only applies to a very targeted group of people, we typically broaden the message so that we become relevant to more people, and in turn will hopefully learn more about these customers so that we can continue to grow our database. (Obviously not all companies take this route, and hence you will from time to time receive startlingly badly targeted emails.)
As a marketer who owns our CRM database, I am challenged daily with finding ways of growing our data and adding detail to it. Sometimes this is objective and means clarifying how many office locations this customer has while other times it is more complex and subjective, like figuring out which customers would be interested in a new product based on past purchasing patterns. Regardless of how the targets are selected, one of my priorities is to make sure that those pieces of data are captured within our CRM so that eventually, when we are ready to send out a very to a small precise group of targets, we can do so with the assurance that the message makes sense and is relevant to the recipients.
by AKA Enterprise Solutions
