It sounds like the turning point in a dramatic movie or book: With no time, money, or resources, you’re being asked to be the hero.
If you’re a marketer, this may describe you.
There’s one obvious way that marketers can reduce this stress and get back some of their valuable time, budget, and resources: Marketing technology. It’s a hot topic and there’s tons and tons of services out there now. But there’s one big scary word that most marketers dread: Implementation. The time it takes to go from selecting a tool to actually gaining benefits from it can be painfully long. People have written entire books on this subject.
At the Salesforce Connections event this past month in NYC, I surveyed marketers at the event on a number of important topics. One of the questions I asked them was, “How often do you clean and re-validate your existing customer data?” About 60% said they cleaned it with some frequency, but that meant 40% said they had never cleaned or validated their contact data. This definitely leads to problems with ROI, campaign efficiency, failed business initiatives, and other consequences stemming from bad data.
There must be some reason all marketers aren’t saying they ensure their contact data is clean and reliable. Part of the problem, I am sure, is time. Putting a solution in place to clean and verify data that you retain or acquire takes some time away from other activities, and marketers have less and less time to think about overall strategy.
However, marketers know they need technology tools to get insights from their data. This year, 65% of marketers increased their technology spending, according to news site Marketing Land. The marketer who can figure out their technology landscape without draining more of his or her resources wins.
Do your providers constantly require updates that you have to ask someone to do? Either you spend the time managing these updates, or out of concern something will break, you ignore them. Neither is a good scenario.
If you could avoid these issues, get started fast (perhaps in about five minutes), and put a solution in place that worked with your existing workflows, how beneficial would that be to you and your organization? There is an answer. One of the best ways to avoid this loss of your valuable time and efficiency is implementing technology with APIs. These are like little bridges between technology and actually getting the benefits of it, without having to spend very much time managing updates, training your staff, or maintaining it.
APIs are incredibly fast to install, so you can get started quickly – a very valuable prospect for marketers who need to validate their data in the easiest way possible. Another benefit: APIs are cloud-based, so they can be integrated into any system or application, including your Informatica solutions.
APIs let two or more remote “things” talk to each via a series of “calls.” For example, if you wanted to update your marketing contacts in a database, it would be a manual process, unless you had an API that you could run the data through, updating it automatically. This is a huge time saver for marketers, especially those who deal with marketing databases that have too many manual processes.
If it’s still not clear what “API” means, let’s break it down some more. If an API were a person, who would it be? APIs are chatty, social, techy, modern, greatly involved with the internet, up-to-date at all times, concerned with the use of the right language rules, and ask a lot of questions. They always need more and more information from their data sources so they can work. Their reason for being is to share this data widely. Think of them as having the personality of reporters like Helen Thomas, Christiane Amanpour, or Lois Lane. They know what is going on in real-time.
Marketers can use APIs to clean, enrich, and use their data, including customer contact data, which marketers know is extremely valuable. See an API in action in this quick video, which shows how you can apply a verification check to email address, mailing address, and phone number collection in a shopping cart app or online webform via a simple-to-install API from Informatica Data as a Service.
See how it works in your system – contact us to learn about a free trial of the Contact Record Verification Suite, which validates your global customer email addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses.
The post The Easy Way to Marketing Technology Magic – and Better Data Quality appeared first on The Informatica Blog - Perspectives for the Data Ready Enterprise.