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Established 2009

Data Acquisition

In order to leverage your data to make better marketing decisions, we have to start by gaining access to it.

Your customer, order history, and prospect list data can reside in any number of places, including in:

  • e-commerce software
  • marketing management software
  • CRM systems
  • accounting software
  • MySQL databases
  • POS (point of sale) systems
  • proprietary order history databases
  • MS Excel spreadsheets
  • .csv files
  • .txt files
  • third-party prospect lists
  • OLAP cubes

Once your data has been compiled from various data resources, the various sets of data need to be integrated into one or more database tables. The integration step involves creating an initial report describing the data sets sourced and an initial assessment of how they can be integrated together.

In our experience, many marketing executives and company owners view data acquisition as a barrier to starting the data-driven marketing process. Fortunately, compiling your data does not have to be a challenge. At MindEcology, we make things easy by issuing very clear data requests at the beginning of a project. And if you get stuck, we can even advise you on how to extract your data or even join you via remote desktop to help you pull it. We can data residing in disparate locations and file types, combining the necessary data into a single ?flat file? table, when appropriate.

One data acquisition is complete, we move on to the data description step.