It’s Black Friday week, which means there’s lots of pressure on marketers to cut through the noise and attract the attention of customers to secure some of the Christmas online market. Inboxes will be filling up with email offers and discounts, and the potential email fatigue could mean a that right now, a marketing email could do more harm than good if it’s reaching the wrong audience.
Working with accurate data is always a fundamental part of outbound marketing campaigns. But during Black Friday, when customers are experiencing an increase in communications from a most lists that they’re subscribed to, it becomes critical. Not only with the goal of securing a sale, but also ensuring it doesn’t result in increased unsubscribes and unhappy customers.
What can marketers do to tip the odds in their favour and keep the positive relationship with their customers that they nurtured over many months, or even years? Working with a strong data foundation is the starting point we should all be working from to as ourselves two key questions:
1. Is our data accurate?
We all know how quickly customer data decays over time; for instance, people moving to a new house, changing email addresses, getting married, and passing away can all degrade the reliability of databases. Ensuring data is clean, accurate and up to date reduces the risk of email campaigns bouncing or not reaching the right person. Ensuring data is managed with data quality processes built in, removes the need for manual data quality cleansing before every campaign.
2. Do I have the right consent?
By now, we’re all (hopefully) aware of GDPR, and the need to have the right level of consent to contact customers and prospects. As well as being non-compliant, not adhering to customers’ consent can damage the customer relationship that companies have worked so hard to foster. The potential damage caused by non-compliant communications is increased at times like Black Friday, when customers are already receiving a higher volume of marketing emails across the board.
As permissions can be revoked or changed at any times, it is important that marketers are always working on the most current consent level that a customer has given. Having a central organisation-level view of consent that is updated in real time ensures that a campaign will be GDPR compliant, whenever it is sent out.
Having confidence in the accuracy of customer data, including consent data, allows marketers to use their data strategically and to support their marketing objectives. This confidence is the basis required to give the best chance of effectively communicating with customers and having a successful and profitable Black Friday campaign.
If you want to have an accurate, complete and up to date single view of your customer and consent data, find out more about our Data Quality, Master Data Management, and Data Governance solutions, or get in touch to speak to one of our team.