Direct marketing is about communicating a message to a specific prospect or customer. The success of that communication, measured in terms of a qualified lead that generates a sale, depends on accurately identifying the prospect. Once you've identified the prospect, you need to contact and convince them your message is worth their time. There is nothing like misspelling their name, using the wrong title, mailing to an old address, or mailing multiple copies to instantly lose credibility. But ensuring data quality can be a significant challenge if you have 500,000 or a million or 10 million prospect records in your customer relationship management (CRM) system and you are trying to target the right prospect. The challenge becomes matching the target audience of your upcoming marketing campaign to the records in your database. How do you select the correct prospects? Data quality, data integration, and other functions of enterprise information management (EIM) are crucial to this endeavor.

This white paper from Business Objects, an SAP company, focuses on these concepts as they pertain to marketing, and particularly as they are supported by data quality functions inside of the broader EIM framework.