Appending marketing identifiers is necessary for a company to successfully develop, increase sales and profits, and clearly understand in which direction to move.
Modern marketers understand that additional marketing data is the key to enhancing outreach program efficiency and return on investment and the key of perfect marketing strategy. They also understand that gathering data appended organically—asking interested customers to volunteer their information to your company. Such as through an email newsletter sign-up form—is a time-consuming and exhausting procedure. It also won’t give you information on possible clients you don’t know about and hence don’t know who to ask for information from!
So, what can you do if you want to drastically improve your team’s marketing plan but lack the necessary data assets? You make a financial investment in data append services.
What does it mean to append?
The term “append” refers to the process of attaching or supplementing something to something else. As a marketer, you may have come across the following examples of adding in your daily work:
- Sending out marketing materials by email and attaching a leaflet that expands on the themes discussed in the email.
- Making a meeting agenda with a client and attaching (linking) any deliverables to the document.
When you append material, you are adding to what is already there to provide the person or team who is using it a better grasp of the subject. This better understanding allows you to strengthen your marketing efforts. Whether it’s giving customers a more thorough view of your product or service, or giving your internal staff a better grasp of your target demographic so they can reach out to them more precisely.
We’ll concentrate on one sort of append in this tutorial: data append. Let’s look at how data appends can help your team’s data resources to better your marketing efforts in a variety of ways.
What is data, exactly?
The process of supplementing the information within a brand’s internal database with additional data from external sources is famous as “data append.”
There are several reasons why a company might want to add external data to its existing records:
- To fill in blanks, such as missing contact information such as email addresses or phone numbers. Let’s imagine! You offer customers to complete a survey and just require them to submit one method of contact—either a phone number or an email address. However, you’ll need both forms for future outreach. To guarantee that you have a complete record for each customer, you can attach the missing contact information.
- To learn more about a new audience segment with the objective of more accurately targeting that group. Consider the case of a restaurant that has historically focused on hyperlocal marketing for its single flagship location. The eatery is now expanding to three new locations across three states. You can include data about lookalike audiences in these new locations that are similar to the audience in the flagship location for targeted outreach prior to the new openings.
- By appending contact information you haven’t emphasized in the past, you can pursue new sorts of outreach. Let’s imagine you’ve previously focused on direct mail marketing but want to broaden your efforts to include digital media. To target your present audience. Use digital means. You can add information about them, such as email addresses and social network handles
Several reasons
- By narrowing down your target demographic, you can add more specificity to your present marketing activities. Consider how you might market a moving truck company. You’ve previously advertised to all homeowners with little to no return on investment. This could be due to your target audience being too broad—not all homeowners intend to relocate very soon. To boost your ROI, you should add data about prospects who are going to move or who have already moved.
- Data appending can be as simple as filling in gaps in your audience records or as complicated as creating a custom audience for more precise targeting. Working with a data supplier like AccuData Integrated Marketing, which can give your team access to leading external data sources, is part of the process. These massive databases are then used to strategically complement internal records at your organization (or your client’s).
What is the data appending procedure?
Before we get into the details of how to append data, it’s crucial to note that data appends are only one stage in the process of developing a holistic marketing strategy— and they’re rarely the first. Outside of the data append process, you can strategize about what data will need to be added and how that data will be used in your marketing efforts. The task of appending data is what you do to get the assets .You need to carry out your entire strategy.
With these in mind, the basic steps of a data append are as follows:
- The data append service you’re employing uploads your existing data assets.
- These records are comparable with entries in a separate database that the append service uses.
- You can choose which data attributes to append, such as contact information, demographic data, and so on.
- Your selected attributes are retrieved from an external database. Its are appended to your records, giving each record a more complete picture.
The data appending procedure varies slightly based on the information required to support your marketing efforts. The distinction between batch append and real-time append each of which shines in a different marketing scenario, is an excellent example of this.
Append in Real-Time.
Real-time append, unlike batch append, is a continuous procedure. Real-time append builds on a single name, phone number, or postal address by appending data (contact information and demographic features) to your records in real-time.
The following procedure is used for real-time appending:
- A customer comes to your or your client’s location or website. It gives you or your client personal information (such as their name or contact information).
- The database and the data provider’s system can exchange information almost instantly thanks to the use of an API.
- The preset data properties you’ve decided to append to that contact record in your database are added.
- You can provide customized recommendations to that customer in real time using this information.
