Knowing who your customers are and what makes them tick is essential for personalised marketing, and most organisations believe they understand them well enough to launch one-to-one marketing campaigns. But do they really have the whole picture? In many cases, their image of a customer has not been fully formed, leading to misleading conclusions and the likelihood that targeted communications will hit wide of the mark.  

What is needed is a single source of truth to achieve a historical memory of your customers' behaviours, purchases and preferences over time.

Poor data quality takes most of the blame for distorting the customer view. With marketing data sitting in multiple locations, even interconnected enterprise silos can contain duplicate entries and plenty of potential for error. Names, dates, addresses, contact details – all are prone to decay, mistakes, user error and more if an organisation doesn’t observe good data hygiene.

More problems arise when organisations fail to make the best use of the data they already have. Often it contains much more information than initially thought, but an organisation doesn’t have the right expertise to extract the right data and connect it together. Sometimes the issue can be down to overly simplistic methods of analytics.

Still, even with the right talent extracting and analysing the correct data, it still remains that the information needs to be up-to-date and trustworthy in the first place.

For example, can you tell if the dozen or so ‘James Kelly’ entries you have in your database are the same person? Are your customers still receiving emails addressed to ‘FirstName’? Have you segmented your customers accurately enough to send recommendations for products best suited to their taste?

No customer wants to see adverts for products they have already bought. Nor do they want to receive the same promotion to all of the emails they may have registered with you.

Such mistakes will see your communications failing to connect, damage your brand and undermine your attempts to speak to a customer as an individual. It can cost your organisation money, too – and Mr Kelly isn’t going to have much use for the 12 expensive catalogues you posted them.

A Single Customer View (SCV) – a process that will cleanse and enhance your customer database – can achieve several things. Removing inaccuracies that skew facts about your customers will help make campaigns more effective, improve segmentation and generally allow marketing departments to make more informed decisions.

It will also you far greater levels of access to their data, improving the time it takes to get campaigns out. Without having to worry about retrieving information from disparate silos, SCV data can be used to turn every mass campaign into lots of micro campaigns with greater success.

Put simply, better governed data means better targeted messages with more relevant and personalised content. As long as this information is used sensitively, your one-to-one marketing will leave customers feeling like you truly understand their needs.