Duplicate Data a Major Pitfall When 3rd-Party Cookies Disappear

As global businesses go digital, more and more pressure is being placed on marketing professionals, and especially digital marketing leaders, to drive new growth. This has become all the harder in the wake of the announcement from Google that they will be ditching the third-party cookie from their Chrome browser (which currently enjoys a two-thirds market share). This has been exacerbated by Apple’s big privacy push including ditching device identifiers on iOS.  

As part of their strategy to deal with these new challenges, organizations are placing a heavy emphasis on building out their first-party data to help them reach and engage with current and new customers. However, while this sounds like a simple solution, for most businesses managing the mountains of data, both internal and external, is far more complex than many had thought.  

In fact, the Gartner Marketing Data & Analytics 2020 survey showed that analytics currently influences only 54% of global marketing decisions. The research and consulting company says the reasons for this are poor data quality, results that are not actionable, and unclear recommendations.  

When it comes to poor data quality, duplication is a major challenge.  

Why Duplicate Data is Far More Serious Than You Think

Bad data is often thought of as simply an irritation that can be worked around. However, the implications for your business and your teams are far more serious.  

One of the dangers of duplicate data is the creation of unresolved entities within data sources.

When entities such as customer names, email addresses, and phone numbers are unresolved (including exact duplicates or variations and spelling errors, etc.), recording a single or unique record for the customer becomes almost impossible.  

There are a few ways unresolved entities can happen:  

• Input errors - these can occur when employees or even the customer themselves enter incorrect details on sign-up forms  
• Changing contact information - people move and change jobs, and keeping track of these changes is an ongoing challenge
• Importing and exporting errors - duplicates can happen when importing or exporting lists
• Inconsistent validation - different data sources have different validation checks creating different formats for the same field

Unresolved entities can lead to serious misalignments between your sales and marketing efforts and can result in friction between the teams. Eventually, this misalignment will not only cost you in terms of lost sales opportunities but will also erode operational efficiencies.  

Most importantly, they will always result in an inaccurate picture of your customer, and this can have devastating effects on your marketing efforts.  

Bad Data Can Destroy Even the Best Marketing Execution

As companies prepare to say goodbye to third-party cookies, global marketers will lean more on email for campaigns to communicate with and keep track of their customers. Email marketing allows marketers several opportunities to collect information about a customer’s interests and preferences for email segmentation, personalization, and automation, and even for ad targeting, provided they have users’ explicit consent.  

However, unverified and duplicate email addresses can end up doing more harm than good. This includes sending multiple emails to customers, causing frustration and leading to high unsubscribe rates. Incorrect contact details will also lead to high bounce rates which put your domain at risk.  

Duplicates can also blur the position of a lead within the sales funnel. This will cause confusion amongst your sales and marketing teams, triggering inappropriate actions and follow-ups.  

While bad data’s effects are most keenly felt in the marketing department, the real damage will be seen in the bottom line. Lost productivity when dealing with duplicate data can amount to substantial losses. Forrester research has found that marketers spend around 32% of their time managing data, adding that this is still not enough. What’s more, the company says 26% of marketing campaigns have been hurt by bad data - with a direct impact on results and a whopping 21 cents of every media dollar spent being wasted due to bad data.  

Synatic Has Marketers Covered

Spare a thought for your company’s marketing leaders. This year they will be scrambling to build up their contact databases as they prepare for the end of third-party cookies and other privacy requirements. In addition to this, duplicate data will make their job almost impossible and could have very real cost implications for your performance in 2022 and beyond.

Over the next few years, especially as marketing professionals adapt to life in a privacy-first world, marketing leaders will move away from the traditional campaign-based strategies and find ways to identify and reach individuals.  

This personalized approach will rely entirely on accessing every scrap of data on a potential customer from any and all legitimate and available sources.  

In this environment, data integration takes on a new and vital role in your marketing department.  

By integrating all your data from your various sources, the outcome is a richer and more detailed customer profile. Without integration, companies run the risk of not connecting vital data points and missing out on important common factors, leaving marketing leaders with an incomplete and fractured view of their customers. With data integration, your marketing team will have a perfect 360-degree view of the customer profile, allowing you to create hyper-individualized content.  

Syantic allows businesses to consolidate data from multiple disparate platforms. By having more data about a customer in a central integrated database environment, businesses can go from a generic platform with messages meant to work for everyone, to targeted and personalized messages that deliver the Right Data, to the Right Person, at the Right Time.  

What’s more, Synatic’s error management capabilities allow businesses to catch duplicates and ensure that when businesses are running marketing or sales campaigns, the business is reaching out to each customer without creating duplicates.

Key to many companies, Synatic's Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) performs data and application integration to Salesforce, the de facto CRM choice for most global enterprises. In addition, pre-built Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, and Pardot connectors also allow you to rapidly create solutions to your complex data integration issues.  

Synatic is perfectly placed to help your marketing team face the coming challenges of cookie deprecation and other privacy requirements. Improved data integration means transparent data sharing between marketing and sales teams, opening the door for increased collaboration, and reducing pitfalls of duplicate data. Most importantly, it will radically reduce wasted time and money and allow you to build that vital single view of your customer.  

If you’re searching for a way to improve data quality and evade the drawbacks of duplicate data, contact Synatic today.

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