Seth Godin just wrote a post that I think should be required reading for anyone in marketing, particularly marketing ops. It boils down to three principles of data:
“First, don’t collect data unless it has a non-zero chance of changing your actions.”
It’s easy to think we should track a metric or action just because it’s easy to do so. Even if we may not use the data for anything meaningful. Most of the tools we use are set up to collect more than we need. But all this extraneous data is just noise in the system. And data shouldn’t be something we collect just to save for a rainy day. This of course has consequences with users, when they learn about your reckless data collection practices. Think of all the apps that inexplicably ask for access to your phone’s contacts, photos, location, and more, without any validation for why.
“Second, before you seek to collect data, consider the costs of processing that data.”
These costs are both in terms of hard financial and time costs in processing the data, but also in the risk you assume by having the data at all. Do you really need all that PII about your contacts? What’s the cost if that data were to leak out?
“Third, acknowledge that data collected isn’t always accurate, and consider the costs of acting on data that’s incorrect.”
This is perhaps the nearest to those in marketing ops dealing with messy CRM data, and unreliable data providers. Demands for better segmentation and personalization have never been higher, yet the quality of most CRM data is arguably no better than before.