I have done a few marketing audits with a couple of leading organizations in India. Amongst some interesting discoveries, one thing that always fascinates me is one-third of nation’s population is genderless as per the databases of these organizations, this statistics has been more or less consistent at various audits. 

Without worrying about this, marketing departments or these organizations are constantly proposing some product or the other without being gender biased. I must admit, it’s a whole new segment for all the marketers out there. Imagine fairness cream and special charge cards designed for this brand new segment.

Folks, your customers’ gender is one of the key things you must be aware of. In absense of such information, instead of marketing team’s innovative ideas to handle this sad segment, it is better to embrace the process of data cleansing at a regular frequency thus vitalize the underlying customer data and ensure the monies spent on marketing programmes are effectively utilized.

Cleansing is one of the key facets of data management in Analytical CRM/Marketing initiatives, without it any fancy solution is bound to fail, rather miserably.

Today, there are few very good campaign management products available in the market. These products try to allure marketers on how campaign management function (alone) can be automated without worrying about the important peripheral attributes of campaign management function. 

For all of you guys planning to automate your campaign management or marketing functions, please be aware the aforesaid solutions would not lead your anywhere expect letting to march harder towards the alley of 55% CRM failure.  To get into the success book, as one of the key aspects, do ensure the shortlisted solution’s capability to handle various facets of marketing automation, it should ofcourse include data cleansing/management as part of it.

It is quite possible an unsophisticated marketing user gets allured by simple campaign automation tool, however, these unsophisticated users will turn sophisticated in a few months of operation and feel terribly handicapted with the confines of a la “Campaign Automation” tools.

So, instead of saying let-us-cross-the-bridge-when-we-need-to suggest you guys know the known pitfalls ahead and plan in advance. The solution that you are evaluating should encompass modules capable of handling the maximum width of marketing/campaign automation initiatives. This starts from ofcourse, data management and data cleansing.

It is also important to note, marketers need not have to wait till the day data is in pristine state, it will never happen. However, calling him Ms.Radha Krishnan can be avoided and sending him women’s special card can be stopped.

Also, cleansing the underlying customer data will strengthen your predictive modeling aspects as well, if you have one as part of your marketing management – Role of statistics and scoring will be published in a different post in a couple of days.