One assumes that in this upcoming training workshop (see screenshot below) from TechTarget, one of the “common mistakes to avoid” will be:
If you’re going to insert variable information (i.e. company name) into a subject line, make darn sure that a) your data is accurate, and that b) the fields actually contain the information you want.
BEA Systems was a long-time client prior to their acquisition by Oracle, and the firm in parentheses was their media agency.
It never ceases to amaze me how many times I see this from companies who clearly should know better.
I appreciate TechTarget’s attempt at personalization, but they appear to suffer from a common problem: poor standardization and normalization of data. Many customers of ours have contact databases that are a complete mess because they never defined how a sales or marketing person should input data into their CRM. We find contact records that say, “First Name: Jerk on the Phone” and “Company: Something to do with Manufacturing”. Some records are in all caps, some all lower case, etc. which makes for very poor email lists when exported. It’s not only a matter of checking your lists before sending them; it’s important to start earlier by making sure everyone with access to create/upload new records understands the consequences of bad data fields.
Good example – made me chuckle.
Data accuracy is a huge problem, and a constant one. The more you have, the harder it is to fix. In some cases, if the task of fixing so much data is too daunting, it’s probably best to leave out the variable fields.