Survey Cites Obstacles to Data-Driven Marketing Success

Despite technology advances and the bounty of "big data," data quality remains the biggest challenge for data-driven direct marketing. Consider MarketingProfs' report on a new Ascend2 global survey of marketing, sales and business professionals. In terms of the most important goals of data-driven marketing strategy, personalizing the customer experience led the field (60%), followed by measuring data-driven ROI (51%) and targeting individual market segments (50%). Then when it came to the biggest obstacles to success, companies put front-end data issues ahead of back-end analytics by a wide margin. Improving data quality was ranked as the No. 1 challenge to data-driven success (59%), followed by integrating data across platforms (51%), raising the level of data analytical skills (38%) and measuring data-driven marketing ROI (37%). In fact, only 16% of respondents rated the quality of their marketing data as "very good," compared with the 27% who rated data quality as "somewhat poor" to "very poor." The majority (57%) called their data "somewhat good," which is just not good enough for the most cost-effective marketing results! For more from the survey, read http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2015/28904/data-driven-marketing-top-objectives-and-challenges