You Know Your Database Needs Refreshing When ...

You Know Your Database Needs Refreshing When …

July 5, 2005

By Michael Mathias

The great promise of database marketing is the ability to connect the right offer to the right person at the right time to stimulate a desired behavior. In practice, however, the best strategic thoughts are often completely diluted by the time they arrive at the point of execution. This dilution can be caused by many factors, but a leading culprit is not having the proper database infrastructure to leverage. Worse, the infrastructure itself, combined with the processes around it, could actually be an enormous constraint.

Databases are dynamic, but also entropic by nature. Left unmaintained, even the best customer or prospect database will degrade and become less useful over time. Often short-term objectives, such as hitting a fast-approaching deadline or testing pilot strategies, are in conflict with longer-term objectives that ensure relevant data is created, stored and made available for easy access and future analysis. It's the quick "work-arounds" that might actually do the most to render your database useless over time. Some of the most common marketing initiatives that can cause a database to need anything from a refresh to an overhaul include the addition of new data, new promotional ideas, new channel execution or response, and new users.

And, so, you know your database needs refreshing when …

New Data Is Introduced

There is always new data available to the database marketer and, assuming that there is some process in place to determine which data is actually valuable to the enterprise, the introduction of a new set of data might necessitate the review of business rules, calculations and access rights. Oftentimes data is either not actually loaded into a database and is treated as something "offline," or it is loaded into temporary space where information is not defined and standardized, and subsequently lost over time. This undermines the very reason to have a database.