Many marketing-savy organizations have large data warehouses that are used to capture information about customers, including: magazine subscriptions, event registration, product registration, membership renewal, etc…
The problem is that most of these databases are creating a new customer record every time someone fills in a registration form. This makes is difficult to report a single customer across different databases.
For the last few years, our team over at CrossTech has been developing a solution called Master Data Management (MDM). This solution integrates into our overall platform, and is used to integrate your disparate data sources into a centralized repository for reporting and analysis. This article will discuss some of the benefits of organizing, analyzing, and reporting on your data using the MDM.
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Building a Central Repository
 The first step when implementing the MDM tool is to create a centralized database that contains a snapshot of all the data sources in your infrastructure. This process involves examining the relationships between your various databases, creating a list of business rules that dictates how the data should flow, and cleaning up your existing data. Once this step is complete, you will have a centralized database that provides a single, complete view of each customer, prospect, or audience member.
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Single View of the Customer
 Let’s say you send out an email to registrants for a certain event asking them to subscribe to your publication. Wouldn’t it be helpful to exclude people who are already subscribers? Sending these people marketing materials for something they are already subscribed to shows them you aren’t really considering their needs, just marketing to a list. Providing targeted interest-based marketing materials will give you a higher click-through rate, and increase ROI.
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Advanced Reporting Capability
 So now you have a single view of your audience. What are they doing? How are they using your website? What events have they attended? What marketing materials have they responded to? Once your MDM solution is implemented, you can take advantage of several layers of analytics and business intelligence tools that allow you to accurately measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
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Struggling with your audience data? Looking to grow your internal infrastructure? To learn more about our Master Data Management tool, contact Brett Wohl at bwohl@crosstechpartners.com.