Data plays a center role in developing Marketing strategy and creating relevant customer experiences. So, accuracy and relevancy of data is immensely critical for success to create lightening successful customer experience and hence relationships. But what will happen if those attributes change with time and are more dynamic in today’s world than we expect.  

Most of the data has a relatively short shelf life, particularly in marketing. Consider a case where a renowned brand is targeting me with say mobile phone ad and offers across social media during the week, when I am searching for a new mobile phone. But just a week later, that data that identified me as in the market for a mobile phone is just a fossil of the past as I made the purchase for my phone over the weekend from some retail shop or brand outlet. There may be some value in knowing that I was on the market, for a mobile phone in this case, but believing I still am, is worthless. Worse than worthless, because it may lead you to make bad decisions about me and target me with different offers on mobile phones which are now irrelevant for me. So, accuracy and relevancy of the segment that put me in potential market for mobile phone customers is no more relevant within a week. This was just an example, however, in real world there are lot more variables like offers from competitors, product reviews from family & friends, inputs from social channels, customer using multiple devices to interact with brands and so on. The result of all such factors makes the time for accuracy and relevancy even shorter and hence more challenging.

Questions to be considered

As a marketing technologist, updating the customer attributes and their relevancy close to real time is a task and should be part of marketing strategy. So, answers to below queries should be pondered: 

1. How frequently are we updating the customer attributes?
2. Are we updating the source of truth i.e., CRM (Customer Relationship Management) (Customer Relationship Management) in real time or close to real time? 
3. How frequently are the updates to customer attributes or segments synchronized to marketing channels so we always create relevant experiences? 
4. Are we differentiating updating to customer segment based on channels properly? For example, Push notification and SMS based on proximity to brick-mortar store or event of purchase should be real time. However, the email for XSell and UpSell offers is not expected to be real time but obviously should not be delayed much. 

Way out

Some of key ways that can help address the issue of keeping customer data accurate and relevant can be: 

• Bringing transactional data with Marketing data is one of key drivers here as it opens a lot of opportunities to create relevant experience and so its frequency. 
• Updating the segment and preferences based on customers online activities on brand channels or even responding to their inactivity in order to remove them from segments. 
• Using DMP platform effectively can help manage all data from various sources (first party & third party) and find insights about customers by creation 360 degree view of customer information. 
• Fine tuning your technology stack to make updates to customer data more real time rather than merely relying on daily or weekly batch data transfers.  

To summarize, strategize to always keep customer data relevant if you want to create great customer experiences. 

Thank you all for spending time in reading this blog post, feel free to provide your valuable comments and help enhance this post with more information.

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