The two big challenges for marketing in the last few years have been the rise of multi-channel marketing and the increasing use of near real-time information
from email, web and social media triggered events. Put simply, when and wherever your customer clicks - you need to know and react.
To bring together the information stored in your
finance, production and marketing systems and make this immediateley available needs a new approach to building marketing data marts: an approach that blends the technologies of data warehouseing with
the processing capabilities of a transactional database system.
The resulting system is capable of processing in excess of a million customer records per hour with information update frequencies set by the customers requirements.
To outline a few of the warehouse's attributes:
- A configurable Single Customer View (Data Warehouse)
- This is built on Microsoft's technologies: so commoditised and inexpensive
- A custom written data cleansing system that cleans data as it is fed into the data warehouse. For example:
- Address,email and telephone formats
- Correct casing of names
- Correction of titles
- Custom validation of any other fields as required
- De-duplication against multiple configurable rules
- A set of user-defined reports that track everything that happens to your data;
- An audit of Permission histories for Data Privacy Compliance
Campaign Management
Getting data into a marketing warehouse is just one half of the equation - using the resultant information effectively is the other half.
The Data Warehouse has a modular construction that allows Connectors to be created that link to third-party systems to drive email, SMS or offline activity.
Then, to close the loop, the response data (opens, clicks, page landings etc) can be acquired and processed to drive further activity.
From a marketers perspective you know who your customers are, what you have communicated and what they have done in response. From this managing campaign
effectiveness and ensuring a continuing positive return on marketing activity is relatively simple to measure and track.
There's more to say, so, if you would like to explore these ideas further.... just call.