In our last newsletter, we provided a listing of the various types of enhancement data that are available in the marketplace. To review our last newsletter, click here.

For purposes of this newsletter, we define enhancement data as any third-party sourced data that is appended to your existing internal consumer or business data. This newsletter focuses on where you maintain and apply your enhancement data—your marketing database.

First and foremost, your marketing database should be used to integrate the data that resides internally within your organization, including individual contact data and its associated transactional data. The fact is, most organizations do not ever truly integrate and optimize the use of their internal data, much less enhancement data.

However, your marketing database should not be limited only to data that exists within your internal operational source systems. Once your internal data is integrated into your marketing database, a key advantage of your marketing database is using it as a repository to cohesively integrate the following categories of externally sourced enhancement data with your internal data ¹:

• Demographic, lifestyle, firmographic
• Segmentation
• Appends/Reverse appends
• Address change processing
• Suppressions
• Other

¹ Some of these categories can be obtained via self-reported means, which is preferable to external sourcing, but this newsletter assumes the need for externally sourcing enhancement data.

The above data can easily be identified and sourced in the marketplace, with larger providers including companies such as Experian, Equifax, and Dun & Bradstreet to name a few. There are many smaller providers that package and re-package data for specific verticals, applications, and convenient use.

The key is not that you obtain the enhancement data, but rather where you integrate and maintain your enhancement data. Often, if an organization lacks an integrated marketing database, they may be enamored by the potential of enhancement data, but once obtained, find they cannot fit the enhancement data into an easily usable or accessible framework. In other words, there is no readily identifiable single place to keep the data.

For instance, if a business has a POS data source, a web data source, and a loyalty club data source, but does not have a marketing database that integrates these three sources, where should the enhancement data be placed? And even if the enhancement data can be logically prioritized into just one of these existing sources, does the existing source database structure support the seamless inclusion of the enhancement data? Many companies have faced this scenario, investing heavily in enhancement data, only to realize there is no practical way to obtain the intended value from the enhancement data.

The solution is to use your marketing database to integrate enhancement data with all of your other internal direct marketing data. When this integration is done properly, your marketing database will robustly support list selects/counts, analysis, and ROI analysis—using your internal RFM data in conjunction with your enhancement data. And, if your business wants to take the next logical step of predictive modeling, all of the data you need to build the model is at your fingertips. The data can be used to develop a model using all integrated internal and enhancement data, and subsequently you can apply the model, scoring each record in the marketing database each time it is updated.

When properly applied, your marketing database makes it easy and effective to manage enhancement data within the same framework as your existing internal direct marketing data. By managing both your internal and external data in a cohesive, integrated marketing database, your organization will be equipped to optimize direct marketing during these challenging times.