Delivering successful marketing attribution projects

You might think that introducing accurate omni-channel marketing attribution is a sensible thing to do and that there would be a limited chance of failure. But think again, as these projects can and do fail.

The reasons are mainly to do with what they are replacing. Prior to the start of such a project there was probably no one person with overall responsibility for marketing attribution, or even someone with it in their job description. Instead, there are likely to have been many local attribution activities, each one designed to prove to the business that team X or Y, or channel Z, was doing a good job. The most typical team silos are digital and direct marketing, yet these teams have the most to benefit from working together on attribution.

Attribution projects

It is common to find attribution projects limited by media channel, such as including selected digital channels with no account for direct channels, or limited by sales channel, such as just including online sales with no account for call centre or store sales – or both. The attribution work may have been done internally, but more often externally by an advertising agency. And the external agency may be driven by a need to keep funds flowing through their channel, rather than necessarily being focussed on the end contribution of their activities.

Some marketing attribution looks at more superficial measures such as opens and clicks, rather than at the longer-term value generated by a campaign. Again, they often ignore the fact that orders are usually achieved through a combination of customer interactions in more than one channel.

So, a new omni-channel marketing attribution project, centrally and professionally managed, is definitely going to be disruptive for certain vested interests.

Avoiding disruption

To avoid internal alienation and disruption, it is essential that the entire company management team, from finance to marketing, buys into the project from the start and has confidence in the methodology that is being used. They also need agree that they will respect the results produced, even when they may upgrade or downgrade the value contributed by certain existing activities.

However, as one US commentator recently put it, ‘algos make a unified approach possible’. The ‘algos’ (or algorithms) are what make omni-channel marketing attribution possible, and if they are well designed, they will deliver trustworthy attribution results that can be used to guide marketing spend, and optimise budget allocation in the future.

If the business is aware from the start of the consequences – as well as the immense benefits – of introducing accurate omni-channel marketing attribution, then the project can succeed, and the business can optimise the marketing budget and reap the sales and growth rewards.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed. Our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Selecting a CDP — the questions mid-sized companies need to ask

As a mid-sized company, there will be many areas where a Customer Data Platform (CDP) may add value to your business.

Your company will most likely have an existing range of marketing technology solutions, such as an email service provider (ESP), an ecommerce platform linked to your website, Google Analytics, and an offline order processing system which maintains a history of all product sales through different fulfilment channels.

where does a CDP fit in diagram

Before deciding on whether a CDP can improve on what you already have, there are some key questions you need to ask.

What actual value will we gain by adding in a CDP to our normal configuration of tools?

A CDP will normally provide additional core functions including:

  • Ingesting data from your website, email service provider, ecommerce system and order processing
  • Identity resolution to pull together all known data about every customer or prospect sourced online or offline
  • Data integration, often via API, with other existing martech tools
  • Building a single customer view to include a mix of raw data received and derived data variables
  • Capability to automate trigger or batch marketing campaign selections
  • Provision of dashboards based on the data received
  • Campaign results reporting or even multichannel marketing attribution

What is the role of a CDP in supporting our marketing and business planning decisions?

A CDP will be able to answer a wide range of planning questions, including:

What longer term customer value (LTV) can we expect when we recruit customers from various sources, or through different offers?
Invariably different recruitment channels will provide customers with varying LTV and understanding these enables the business to set realistic CPA targets by channel.

What proportion of my existing customers reorder each year and how much is that worth?
This key question allows a marketer to plan forward knowing broadly how much demand is to be expected before new customer recruitment is added in. It also enables a company to measure how well their overall customer marketing is doing. If the percentage of existing customers reordering is growing, then customer marketing is doing a good job, but if it’s falling something needs fixing.

What value am I getting back from my marketing investments?
Because the CDP can track customer journeys, both online and offline, it can measure the contribution made by specific campaigns or channels to these, and hence their value provided. No longer should a marketer simply take a list of people contacted by a campaign and find out which of these have ordered in a specific time period, because this will ignore all the other components of the customer journeys that led up to a sale.

Are there areas of my marketing spend that should be cut back or removed?
Most companies hang on to some campaigns that should be modified, but often lack the analytical tools to identify them. A frequently found example is spend on PPC where GA is reporting a much-exaggerated contribution, but without the capability to look at all the other elements in the customer journey, the PPC spend is maintained. Another example is where data is purchased to run cold campaigns. A cold list needs to be integrated into the CDP to support the full evaluation of the campaign just as contacts made with existing customers do.

On a much wider basis companies need dashboards to show them the direction of travel across a whole range of KPIs. These can look at anything from how different customer segments are performing, to the proportion of successful vs. unsuccessful website visits. The data in the single customer view, particularly because it combines both online and offline activities, can provide a very rich feed for dashboard reporting using tools like Power BI or Tableau.

The CDP can be seen as a rich historical data store that holds a persistent record of the activities of each customer. From an analytical perspective this is invaluable as the data can be mined by data-scientists to answer every conceivable question relating to sales, customers, marketing performance and even where profit ultimately comes from.

And finally, the CDP allows for the democratisation of data and information. CDPs are normally cloud based, and hence open to anyone with access rights. This means not only access to dashboards, and existing metrics reports, but also the ability to extract data and undertake further analysis as required.

How can we generate more value from existing customers or prospects?

There are many ways in which the CDP can improve cross-channel communications, and hence improve value received from customers.

  • The capability to respond to triggers is critical to delivering the right communication at the right time. There is some capability to do this embedded inside many of the ESP platforms, but because they lack the richness of data contained in the SCV, they can on the whole only respond to short-term signals like dropped baskets. A CDP will be able to take the wider view, for instance understanding the longer-term value of the individual customer, whether they are becoming more or less loyal to the brand, whether they have missed their usual anniversary of making a purchase, the kind of merchandise they are likely to buy based on their affluence, the behaviour of other customers in their household, and so on. The list of potential trigger activities based on a CDP is huge and a brainstorm to surface these can be invaluable.
  • In a related way the CDP can target batch campaigns in a very sophisticated manner. For instance, not only can overall response propensity models be built that are far more powerful than RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) selections, but also these can be used to determine which categories of product an individual customer is more likely to be more interested in.
  • We often find companies ignoring large swathes of customers who have not ordered for a while, which, when using RFM selection methodologies, they are not able to target economically. However, once a reactivation propensity model has been built, groups of these individuals can be identified that are very profitable to reactivate.
  • Introducing customer segmentations to determine the types of propositions to make to individuals. Take a very basic segmentation based on age and affluence and it becomes immediately clear how useful is a tool like this. It can be applied to the SCV and used to differentiate the content being used for different groups so that the affluent older generation can be treated differently to impoverished students.
  • The CDP can be used to manage customer contact density across all outbound channels and to coordinate the messaging. When they are operating in different silos the ESP can send message A and the direct mail campaign can contradict it with message B. The CDP can remove these kinds of contradictions and also manage the overall level of communications sent to individuals. Send out too much and you are not only wasting money, but also drowning the customer, whilst sending too little means that you will be missing potential demand and leaving the customer curious about what they have not been offered. Our testing has also found that different customer segments, particularly those based on different propensities to buy, will respond better to varying levels of contact density.
  • Lastly, there is the crucial question of using testing and setting up control groups. A CDP can be used to set up control groups who, for instance, are not exposed to any marketing communications from any channel and contrast these with those that are. Testing also provides the knowledge base from which every kind of improvement in customer communications can be derived. But tests need to be selected from, and recorded in, the SCV to avoid cross-channel confusion and provide the ability to measure the longer-term consequences of the tests, rather than just the short-term response from a particular offer.

 

How do we reduce the time spent on managing campaigns and pulling reports?

The CDP will create one version of the truth for the business, from which consistent compliant selections and reliable automated reports can be produced.

  • There is a huge amount of drudgery in managing marketing communications if you don’t have the right tools. With a well-designed CDP, and using drop down menus, setting up a new campaign should be a matter of minutes, compared with what many hours if different data sets need to be combined, manual selections made, seed lists added in, and source codes applied, etc.
  • If your CDP is linked to a suppression house you can also, with a click, send your selection to have the goneaways and deceased flagged in seconds.
  • At the same time as setting up the campaign you will be able to organise how its results are reported and choose the right metadata to describe it. After that reporting and test results comparisons should be automated.
  • Ad hoc reporting is normally the elephant in the room when it comes to workload and much of this can be eliminated by having in place the right set of dashboards, plus automated customer and campaign metrics.
  • Some CDPs will automate many aspects of GDPR requirements, including the coordination of consents and automating the production of Subject Access Requests. Consent coordination is vital for campaign management and again can avoid considerable manual effort.
  • When looking at the benefits from introducing a CDP, the financial value of marketers’ time saved may seem small compared with the other benefits, but the improvement in accuracy, creativity and job satisfaction released by the removal of boring manual tasks can be very important.

 

How do we make a decision about whether to introduce a CDP?

There are a large number of areas where a CDP may be able to add value to your business. However, there is no substitute for brainstorming, and then listing, all the potential use cases and working out the value you will expect to get back from each of them. The benefits usually take the form of increased customer value, reduced marketing costs and saving of staff time.

There is also the important question of what impact this will have on your internal IT resources. The answer to this is relatively simple. Assuming that all the data feeds can be automated, once these have been set up to run your internal IT team will have done their job, assuming you are buying a fully serviced CDP.

If you are buying a platform that you will need to configure yourselves, then there is an additional layer of work which may be substantial. It is critical to find out from the vendor exactly how much support you can expect to get.

Research has shown that most companies who introduce a CDP get considerable value from them, but that this augments over time. As the users learn how to get more and more value from the CDP, so the returns grow. So, it is worth lowering expectations for year one, and augmenting them for subsequent years.

UniFida can help with use cases for a CDP:

Request a no-cost Proof of Concept

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed. Our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

CDPs provide efficiencies as well as effectiveness

We have been looking at an interesting report called ‘The State of CDPs, Q3 2020’ by Treasure Data and Advertiser Perceptions. The research is based on 101 respondents working for larger US companies, and reveals that CDPs provide efficiencies as well as effectiveness, however, to realise both takes time.

The CDP use cases for marketing effectiveness are generally well known, and this slide does not provide any real surprises:

top benefit of using CDP to manage customer data

What was more striking though were the improved efficiencies experienced by companies using a CDP.

significant impact where CDPs provide efficiencies

These efficiencies improve as companies have more time to get used to having a CDP.

To get full value from a CDP a company needs to adapt its marketing processes around it, and this takes time. To take a common example, there may have been one team dealing with owned outbound channels such as emails and direct mail, and another with paid digital advertising such as display, programmatic, SEM etc. and, another team managing the website content, optimisation and of course the data. In order to deliver the optimal messaging, customer experience and drive business value, all of these channels need to be merged to deliver a unified customer experience.

One area that does not change with CDP tenure is the freeing up of IT resources. This is because once the feeds into a CDP have been organised, and the CDP configured, IT should be able to take a step back and let the marketers take over. This all happens in the early stages of introducing a CDP.

CDP technology is an enabler allowing marketers to do things differently, and this change process will inevitably take time. This delay factor needs to be built into the calendarisation of benefits when developing the business case for a CDP.

This is a major component which is often overlooked by businesses when considering marketing or advertising technology such as a customer data platform, the people who operate and optimise it. Do they have relevant skills and experience to maximise the investment? Have you allocated time and budget to ensure a consistent coaching and development programme is in place?

Hence the considerable increase in satisfaction with CDPs seen amongst companies with more than two years’ worth of experience of using them.

satisfaction with CDP

If you are at the early stage of considering whether they should introduce a CDP, and would like help establishing the use cases for one, and quantifying the benefits, we would be only too pleased to offer support, without any charge. We have worked on many CDP business casing exercises and can help fast-track you through the process. We also provide in-depth training and support and hold your hand at every step to help deliver your goals.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Are customer data platforms affordable?

To determine if customer data platforms are affordable, will depend on who you are and who you are talking to. But if you are a typical large US enterprise then a reasonable cost for a CDP could be around $1m per annum.

Not many UK companies would be happy to pay that much, even if it did only amount to a few pence per customer.

We are concerned that there is a perception that CDPs are like private jets, the preserve of the very rich. In reality, CDPs come in many shapes and forms and to some extent this affects what they cost.

How much does a customer data platform cost?

We would like to feel that our cloud-based customer data platform is both functionally very rich, and at the same time extremely affordable. For instance, if you have 100,000 customers, would paying 27p per customer per annum be too much?

But more importantly than the cost, CDPs, if deployed well are a great investment. For instance, if your average margin on goods you sold was £20, then you would only have to sell one extra item for one in every 75 of your 100,000 customers to pay for your CDP.

Our clients have given us feedback on their returns from investing in our CDP, and they are seeing an increased contribution of between x4 and x8 the cost.
customer reviews on customer data platform affordability

We offer a free business evaluation service where we help you identify the use cases for a CDP, and then quantify the results.

Would you like to arrange a chat with us about this? Just email us and we can arrange a Zoom meeting.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Will there be an avalanche of consumer demand after lockdown?

It’s most likely that there will be a massive surge in many areas of the economy after lockdown, including consumer demand. So now is the golden moment for companies to prepare for this.

We know first-hand that many companies are putting infrastructure development projects on hold at present, when logic suggests that they should be doing the opposite. So when the bounce-back happens they are fully capable of taking advantage of it.

Often the reason for delay is cash flow, as this is also a time of unprecedented financial stress for many companies.

So if you are thinking about getting your technology for marketing upgraded to be ready for when consumer demand picks up after lockdown, we can make an offer that could help substantially.

If your interest is in getting hold of a fully serviced cloud-based customer data platform (CDP) at a moderate price, then we can offer you a substantial license holiday of at least three months if you can place an order in April or May. The free period will continue until the lockdown is over so it could be extended.

A CDP is capable of supporting B2C marketing in many different areas including:

– customer message personalisation that is based on a complete view of online and offline customer activity
– multi touch order attribution that tells you how in combination all your online and offline channels are performing
– customer value and customer retention dashboards so that you can confidently calculate how much you can afford to spend on recruitment
– dormant customer reactivation based on propensity models that tell you who is most likely to respond
– one click campaign results reporting to give you up to date news on how your different contact strategies are actually performing
– automated outbound campaigns responding to online and offline triggers

We can also help you with making a decision about whether or not to invest by helping you build the business case for a CDP at no charge, even if you do not proceed to purchase one from us when the work is done.

The last two business cases we developed for B to C companies showed a return on UniFida technology of between four and eight times the cost.

Please do take a look at how our clients have benefited by using UniFida, and also email us with a time that would work for you for an initial call to see how we could help.

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Why your own first party data is so important

There are many reasons why first-party data is so important, but your recognition of it may be at risk of being drowned out by the clamour of people selling recruitment media, particularly digital and programmatic media.

To us the case for first making best use of your own customer data trumps all other media purchase decisions. Here are just four reasons why first-party data is so important.

  1. It’s free and uncontrovertibly yours (as long as it’s properly permissioned)
  2. It allows you to develop very personalised relationships with each of your customers, and hence unlock as much value as is possible from them
  3. It can help you understand what is really driving your new customer recruitment, particularly when multiple online and offline channels play a part in your recruitment marketing
  4. It can support your overall business planning based on understanding the longer-term value provided by each customer segment

To allow you to obtain that customer value you need to ensure that your single customer view contains all your customers’ online and offline behaviours, linked by all the available personal identifiers.

You also need marketing technology that joins all this together, so that there is one complete version of the truth about each customer that can be used by all your marketing applications.

 

This is why we suggest you need to consider installing a customer data platform or CDP

To help develop an understanding of what a CDP can do for your marketing we offer three complimentary services.

  1. Data duplication testing: Identify how many duplicate customer records you have. Understand the impact of wasted spend on marketing.
  2. Suppressions run report: Identify and suppress individuals who have moved away or deceased.
  3. Business casing exercise: Identify and develop use cases and financial evaluation. See the opportunities and map out the ROI prior to any commitment.

Contact us to find out how UniFida’s Customer Data Platform could add value to your business.

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Do you prefer working in a kitchen, or sitting in a restaurant?

As a marketer, do you prefer working in a kitchen, or sitting in a restaurant?

We have noticed that the way marketers operate is changing, and the trend is firmly towards working in the kitchen!

Looking back a decade and more, agencies liked to own most marketing functions, and that went way beyond strategy, planning and creative; they liked to manage the production as well. This would mean that they would buy media, manufacture direct mail, and even take control of data. The full lavish restaurant experience.

Marketeers have gradually woken up to the fact that eating in restaurants is both very expensive, and puts control in the hands of someone else. If campaigns flop, they have to switch agencies, and this means listening to the whole nine yards of pitches and flummery.

Now that we are firmly in the data age, we find that marketeers like to get down among the weeds, and understand what is really going on. This way they can own that precious commodity, a true understanding of the customers on whom their fortunes rely.

That does not mean that there is no role for agencies, rather that, in addition to creative work, they are increasingly providing the technology environment in which the marketers can do their own cooking.

Nor does it mean that marketers have to start learning how to write their own code; instead they want a ready-made technology environment in which they can take control of understanding customer behaviour, and make sure that they are delivering, as far as possible, the right personalised experience to each individual customer.

At UniFida we are very aware of this trend, and have chosen to go down the route of delivering the technology (kitchens) in which marketers can operate.

In practical terms this means providing a cloud-based environment in which all online and offline sources of customer data are tied together, identities are resolved, marketing metrics are provided, and personalised campaigns can be planned and executed.

We don’t expect to tell marketers what they should do; rather we like to provide the most refined possible tools to help them do it themselves.

Our toolkit is a combination of UniFida Technology and UniFida Data Science. It’s reasonably priced, fully serviced, and the result of five years of continual development.

We hope that it’s what you will want to enable you to cook things up that your customers will really appreciate!

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Building a CDP business case

Most marketeers would like to have a customer data platform (CDP), but many struggle to build a business case for one.

Clearly the benefits that come from introducing a customer data platform, and an associated single customer view, derive from many stages in the customer relationship and from several different areas of the business. This helps to explain why assembling them together to justify the cost of ownership can be complicated.

As providers of cloud-based customer data platform technology we have decided to try to make things easier for you.

 

We offer a free service to help you develop a business case for a CDP.

The CDP business case exercise identifies and develops use cases and financial evaluation, allowing you to see the opportunities and map out the ROI prior to any commitment.

We won’t be inventing any numbers, but we will be helping to point you in the direction of where the benefits are coming from, and assisting you in quantifying them.

Simply contact us to get started with this free service.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Do customer data platforms suck?

Are CDP’s worth the investment or do customer data platforms suck?

Well, you can paint a very bad picture of them from a bean-counter’s perspective. The technology costs money, they add another item to the marketing technology stack, they have to be set up to receive data from many different sources, they then have to store all that data, and have to keep on being fed with it. Someone even has to hit a few keys for something to come out of them.

We think there is a bright side, which is not surprising to hear from people who are intrepid enough to actually build and sell CDPs.

Obviously, in themselves CDPs are worthless; the value only comes when you start to do something useful with that data. But as an enabler today’s CDPs can be something quite special.

The big picture view is that if you don’t have everything known about each customer structured and held in one place then you have no chance of meeting the customers’ expectations. And this holds true for every occasion when you are interacting with customers.

However below this Olympian vision there are a growing number of applications that are either made possible, or made to work better, when they can be powered by a customer data platform.

Here is a checklist we have made or current uses that our clients have been making of a CDP:

Outbound marketing

  • targeted and personalised direct mail
  • segmented email campaigns
  • triggered email campaigns
  • SMS push notifications

GDPR/Call center support

  • consent storage
  • privacy portal for SARs
  • customer recent activity search

Dashboards

  • customer and sales performance
  • linked to web browsing activity

Digital advertising

  • website personalisation (segmented and one-to-one)

Technical/ analytical

  • includes browsing history in the SCV
  • bespoke engineered data fields based on the SCV
  • SCV data exports for analysis

For those not entirely immersed in the jargon, what we now call a CDP we used to call a customer database, and after that a customer data warehouse, and then a single customer view. One of the differences between now and then is that in the now we expect data to come in from far more sources, and these include on-line browsing as much as off-line transactions.

Customer Data Platform timeline diagram
Customer Data Platform evolution timeline

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Do you know how much duplicate customer records are costing you?

Deduplication may not be the stuff of everyone’s dreams, but it could turn out to be more interesting than you expect. Especially if you are in the dark as to how much duplicate customer records are actually costing you?

 

How many duplicate customer records can you expect to find?

Our rule of thumb is that within any single customer system there will normally be between 5% and 25% duplicates.

However the more ways you have of identifying an individual, the higher the level of duplicates normally uncovered. For instance, if names and addresses can be combined with email or mobile number, many records can be brought together that otherwise would have been kept separate.

There are no rules of thumb however about the level of duplication between different customer systems held by the same organisation; but as an example, our recent work with a media company selling a range of direct to consumer services revealed that for every 100 customer records held across their systems, there were in fact a net 75 individual people.

 

So why does this matter?

Perhaps the most obvious reason is that deduplication will stop you sending two communications to a proportion of your customer base.

Just stop to think just how irritating it is to have to open or delete two emails from the same source with the same content.

And then, if you are using paper and post, there is a big cost implication of not getting the deduplication right.

The second reason is GDPR. How will you handle individuals’ requests to be forgotten when there are two versions of these peoples’ records? And how foolish would you feel when sending customers copies of the data you hold on them when clearly it came from two separate sources?

But probably the most interesting aspect of deduplication comes when you pull data together from across different systems and sources.

Mr Smith who buys holidays, and is on a dating site you run, has a distinct profile; so does Mrs Smith who buys wine and cooking equipment, and so probably likes entertaining at home.

So whether you have a single customer file, or customers spread across several systems, the case for deduplication is clear, but just how clear it is can only be quantified when you have matched all those duplicate customer records together.

To find out more about Unifida can help your business please contact us.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.