3 Data Retention Best Practices for Digital Marketing
Data retention has become a key component for businesses, as it enhances their ability to perform more advanced analytics, which in turn helps with increasing marketing retention. Marketing retention helps to keep customers engaged in your products and services through more customer targeted analytics strategies. Strategic forward thinking marketers often use data analytics to acquire new and keep existing customers. Analytics can guide decisions and drive growth in sales and consequently revenue.
“I tell all CEO’s now to start investing in what you can do with AI and data management” says Kevin O’Leary, Shark Tank co-host, speaking at CNBC’s Small Business Playbook event on August 11, 2021. O’Leary goes on to say that sales shifted from being 10% to 50%-60% in online direct sales for direct-to-consumer companies during Covid, but it’s not the sales success alone that is the key to the future — it’s the data that comes with reaching the customer online directly.
With the rise of sales and consumer engagement from digital activity as result of Covid world wide lockdowns, data retention of marketing data is now center stage. Marketers should add the implementation of a data retention policy to their business goals this year as CEO’s are learning more of the importance of digital analytics to the bottom line.
Data retention policies should be strategic and compliant, as storing data longer than it is required can lead to unnecessary storage space and higher costs. But what’s important to remember here is that devising an effective data retention policy goes beyond just compliance. A useful data retention policy is also in line with business requirements. Keeping that in mind, it should then be decided what marketing data needs to be archived or retained beyond legal requirements.
1. Maintain Data Consistency
Data retention differs with the nature of the business. When we talk of a marketing campaign, there are many diverse areas to look out for, which often manifest in the form of confusing taxonomies and names, with no one specific reference point.
To succeed in today’s competitive landscape, marketers have a tough job on their hands, which is to break the silos across channels and departments to consolidate data for a unified view of the customer. By better data governance through consolidation of taxonomies, marketers are better equipped to understand and consequently cater to their customers’ needs.
A unified marketing data governance practice is able to achieve personalization for customers and also allow the organization to track progress and measure the marketing campaign’s ROI.
2. Retain Measure and Analysis Data
Given the rapid success rate of data driven marketing campaigns, it only makes sense that marketers jump on the rapid success of leveraging digital analytics to get deeper insights into what the ultimate driver wants: the customer!
Leveraging the power of tools and technology to make this possible is the bedrock of any business’s success in today’s fast-paced digital age. This is where use of digital analytics models like Adobe Analytics and new models like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to improve conversions for the organization’s marketing campaign is instrumental.
GA4 serves several benefits for organizations to help further the data retention model. It focuses on the user’s journey, providing a deeper insight into customer behaviors. Moreover, GA4 has 3 predictive metrics, allowing marketers to devise and develop an effective marketing campaign.
Since GA4 is the future of the business landscape for current analytics partners, it’s high time marketers take advantage of it to retain Universal Analytics data in a cloud platform, like Big Query, for when GA4 becomes the only source of analytics.
3. Sustain Dynamic Customer Experience
Once you have managed data retention, it is time to integrate these customer insights with your platform to provide better, more dynamic customer experiences. The important thing to understand here, when it comes to digital marketing, an opportunity I continue to see marketers overlook on how to leverage your retained first party data, is that many marketers prioritize acquisition over retention. Not focusing enough on retention efforts is a huge missed opportunity. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase your revenue up to a whopping 95%.
There are several ways to leverage your data retention insights to improve customer retention. For example, marketers can use data analytics to retarget their ads from customer pages. Use popular platforms like Google and Facebook to show ads to members who have previously visited your website.
Conclusion
Homogenized taxonomies, the power of tools and using these analytics to bring about change in digital advertising is a recipe for success in today’s digital age. With the ever evolving business landscape, it’s time marketers ditch the traditional tracking plan and make efforts to indulge in a more personalized, customer-centric data retention approach.