Data Quality

Why Email Data Quality Matters: Excellence from Expedia

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Our February 16 webinar on “Why Email Data Quality Matters” featured special guests Dan Goran from Expedia Group, plus Tim Bond from the Data & Marketing Association and Kate Barrett from eFocus Marketing. We reviewed key findings from our brand-new report, and discussed the critical importance of good data for building strong relationships and effective tactics for achieving this.

Key talking points included:

  • Business Critical: Data needs to be compliant, correct, and complete for businesses to fully understand their customers. It’s the foundation of everything for businesses, and underpinned by how accurate the data you collect is, and whether you can rely on it.
  • Which Platform1: The platform used by businesses to house their customer data provides clear pointers to their philosophy on data quality. Email service provider (ESP) users are highly focused on bounce log analysis, CRM users rely on legal compliance as their top data quality tactic, while customer data platform (CDPs) users evaluate engagement as their preferred data quality KPI.
  • 1. See my blogs where we review these trends in more detail: CReaM of the Crop and Rise of the CDP.
  • Opportunity Costs: Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is ± £30 ($42), which brings the importance of data quality into sharper focus. Tactics like point of collection validation pay for themselves almost immediately when considered against a context of wasted CPA.
  • When to Say Goodbye: Just over half of businesses report having rules in place for identifying inactive/dormant customers, yet being able to do so—and taking the correct actions when this happens— has a major impact on customer lifetime value (CLV).

Dan summed it up beautifully with an analogy likening data quality to Warren Buffet’s investment strategy. Success can take 20 years to build, and five minutes to destroy. Silent, slow, and steadily decreasing performance is one of the biggest challenges for marketers. You can easily ruin the reputation you’ve worked hard to build with one moment of bad personalisation or irrelevant messaging. This is why building a “single source of truth” of your customers is key, and communicating this to senior leadership is vital to securing more budget.

This only scratches the surface, and our expert guests covered a broad range of insightful talking points. Which data challenges are most prevalent and how can they be fixed? Why does good data underpin great personalisation? How has data helped the travel industry survive the pandemic by focusing on loyalty and relationships? How do consumers think about the personal data they provide to marketers, and if you could ask them for one more piece of data, what would it be?

It’s all here in the video, plus plenty more. Grab a coffee, put on your headphones, and get ready to receive some high-quality data of your own!