According to the Salesforce State of Marketing Report (7th Edition), marketers expect a 40% increase in the number of data sources they use between 2021 and 2022. This is a whopping increase that will bring new challenges to companies' data strategy. It will also naturally lead to companies holding inconsistent data problems with data governance and management that may well result in security breaches.

Pro tip: Count the data sources your company is collecting. We guess it's more than 20. Then take a moment to ask three fundamental questions: 

1. Do you utilize this data to its full potential?
2. What is your goal in collecting all of this data?
3. Are you satisfied with the state of your data collection at this point in time?

If you can quickly answer all these questions, you might not need this book, but if these questions resonate with your own doubts and concerns, we invite you to read further — we'll try to find a solution together.

Types of data you need to collect

Perhaps we should start by breaking down types of data into basics. In general terms, we can put data into two categories: quantitative and qualitative. 

Quantitative data

Under the classification of quantitative data, the following types of data can be found:

Demographic data – a collection of all the data points about a person, such as their name, email, title, income, location, marital status, and more.

Firmographic data – a collection of all the data points about a business (a 'firm'), such as company name, industry, number of employees, annual revenue, and stage in the sales cycle.

Behavioral data – data on the interaction between website users and app users. This reveals the data collected from your website or app visitors, such as pages visited, links clicked, average time on site, and a count of visits, retention rate, churn rate, daily & monthly active use, and more.

Contextual data – data related to a visitor's unique properties while providing context to their behavior on a website or an app, such as device type, browser type, location, and time of the day. 

Collecting demographic and firmographic data requires your visitors to fill out and submit a form. This may include a newsletter subscription, a demo registration, a live chat transaction, or a lead magnet download. This data typically ends up in your CRM, where you also obtain some automatic date and time stamping, lead source tracking, and lead activity insights.

Qualitative data

On the other hand, qualitative data can be collected through questionnaire-style methods to garner the customer's attitudes, motivations, and opinions. Some of the qualitative information that can be collected includes:

Opinion (e.g., their favorite journey destination for a holiday).

Motivations (why they requested a particular service).

Attitudinal (e.g., customer satisfaction reviews).

All the data you collect falls into one of these boxes. Later, and as you'll see, you need to design a process that allows you to create a single customer view. 

Data you need to improve personalization

It'll come as no newsflash to you to hear that personalization is the key to successful data marketing. And with so many incredible sales & marketing automation tools at our disposal, there are myriad ways for us to interact with customers (and potential customers) in creative and engaging ways. 

80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. 

— Epsilon