4 Ways to Drive Better Data for Your Marketing Automation

You know what’s better than a marketing automation strategy?

A data-driven marketing automation strategy.

You would be surprised how often we have to emphasize the importance of collecting and leveraging data to get the most out of your marketing automation efforts.

And there is a right way (and a wrong way) to collect data. So if you’re looking for the right way, here are four best practices to point you in the right direction.

1. Don’t Overlook the Data You Already Own

Once you’ve aligned on the data you need to drive your marketing automation campaigns, take stock of the data you’ve already collected. Start by thinking through your customer journey: What touchpoints and data collection points are already in place?

Data could come from the contact forms your customers have submitted, or the lead/customer information stored in your company’s CRM or ecommerce store. Once you know what you have (and, more importantly, what you don’t), you can focus your strategy on filling in the gaps.

2. More Data is Not Always Better

When it comes to collecting data, choose quality over quantity every time. The last thing you want to be doing is digging through a mountain of data, only to find out that a fraction of it is actually helpful to you. Your focus should be on getting clean and accurate data that is relevant to the marketing automation campaigns you need to execute.

If you foresee challenges in collecting the data you need, consider the minimum amount of data you can get to execute your campaigns. Start there and work through the next phase later.

3. Resist the Urge to Overcomplicate Your Data Fields

Keep your data fields as simple as possible. If you are collecting your data via form, have one form field store one piece of information at a time. If you are creating a dropdown list of options for a form field, don’t get too specific. Try to group similar options together, as long as doing so will still allow you to get the data you need for your campaigns.

The simpler your data fields, the easier it will be to mine the data.

4. Quality Control is Critical to Your Data Collection

If you are using an integration with your marketing automation platform, regularly check that the data is still flowing between platforms as it should. You should also take steps to ensure team members are entering clean data for fields that rely on manual entry (i.e. sales team actions).

As your data and integrations grow more complex, be sure there is documentation related to how the integrations work, what data fields are used for, etc. This helps maintain critical data and processes, and provides onboarding information for future team members.

What to Do With All That Data

Once you’ve collected your data, it would be a shame to let it go to waste.

So why not partner with experts who know what to do with it?

If you’re interested in learning more about how to leverage your data to optimize and enhance your marketing automation efforts, let’s chat.