Today’s guest post is by Brett Olszewski. Brett is the Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at the K/P Corporation, a comprehensive marketing solutions and consulting services company that empowers marketers to drive revenue, lower costs and continuously improve marketing ROI.

It’s obvious that that customer centric, personalized direct marketing communication works to improve the loyalty and profitability of customer relationships. One InfoTrends study indicated that 63% of consumers prefer messages that are unique and highly personalized, underscoring the need for richness of data.

Recognizing this, marketers can choose how they leverage automation to “operationalize” data and databases—that is to have data and its corresponding assets flow automatically between systems—in order to reach customers in more personalized, relevant ways.

The success of personalized programs relies squarely on the marketer’s ability to leverage customer relationship and sales data to understand preferences and deliver messages about relevant products and services. With CRM systems in place, marketers already have the ability to gather and analyze customer data to determine both their worth to company and how to most effectively communicate with them.

The challenge becomes how to make the data “operational”—that is to integrate it directly and automatically into marketing efforts across channels, with consistent execution and management. Integration must also consider processes that are measurable, repeatable, improvable, and consider open technologies that enable marketers to bridge the divide between data sources and marketing applications.

According to a June 2009 study by Eyeblaster / Taylor Nelson Sofres, “Sixty seven percent of marketers are running cross-channel campaigns today, yet only 12% are integrating performance or response data across channels.”

So how can marketers leverage data to extract information about their customers and use it build profitable relationships? Follow these six steps to find out:

1. Locate your content. Understand how your customers’ digital information is captured, stored, and archived. Data can be located in multiple systems such as CRM, Point of Sale (POS), and list augmentation databases.
2. Define your business rules. Translate client data requirements into templates and workflow for automated campaign messaging. Understand how creating “event triggers” can leverage activity in a primary data source (i.e., POS) with information from a secondary source (i.e., CRM) for cross-selling opportunities.
3. Integrate databases. Using open technology, like services oriented architecture or web services, to connect multiple, disparate data systems to push/pull information in real-time into “on demand” workflows. By integrating databases, you can secure a full view of the customer to deliver relevant, personalized customer communication.
4. Understand procurement. Utilize data for a holistic view to manage partners and suppliers and understand pricing impact. Methods include price matrixes for predictable budgeting, detailed reporting by individual campaign, and comprehensive roll-up calculations for total cost of ownership.
5. Manage customer response. All marketing is undertaken to solicit a response. As communications become more relevant and personalized, so do the responses. These can be captured via micro sites, personalized URLs or social media, and integrated into the data sources for additional and even more relevant conversations between companies and their customers/prospects.
6. Assess the results and apply the findings. Leverage all the data from multiple sources, pilot and campaign results, and the on-going conversation with consumers to establish buying patterns, media channel preference, cluster and predictive modeling and ‘ideal’ customer profiles. Collect the intelligence and apply the insights to the business rules that fuel the campaigns designed to communicate with customers.

By leveraging open technologies, like web services, and partner providers, marketers can more easily integrate data for improved execution, measurement, and analysis of their campaigns, obtain a holistic view of their customers and deliver relevant, personalized customer communications. At a high level, these six steps to “operationalize data” should give marketers a sense of what and how to prioritize their efforts to integrate marketing data across campaigns, customers and channels.

Write Brett at bolszewski@kpcorp.com or follow him on Twitter: @originalBrett.