Aberdeen recently released a great report on leveraging customer data to better serve your marketing efforts. Here are some of the take-away points we thought were worth sharing:

If your database is in the slow lane:

• Start by using data for activities that will have a positive impact on revenue. Demonstrate the value of your data to justify investment in its ongoing health.
• Develop timelines and processes for cleaning your data. The importance of good data hygiene can’t be understated. If you clean it once and walk away it will get dirty again. Only constant attention will yield golden results.
• Invest in tools to help analyze customer data. Data analysis and marketing automation technologies will help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

If your database is already on the right path but needs a boost to hit the fast lane:

• Implement a formal data hygiene strategy. Create repeatable processes for de-duping, cleaning, and appending data as well as documenting best practices for users of your data.
• Engage multiple departments for data analysis. Encourage collaboration between your sales, marketing, customer service, IT, and finance organizations.

• Democratize all customer data. Centralize your database to measure and optimize the performance of your multichannel campaigns.

Circuit City, Bank One, Enron, Lehman Brothers…these are folks you might be shocked to find still sitting in your sales and marketing databases.  What’s the common theme among all of these companies? They aren’t doing business anymore. Some of them have made very splashy exits from the scene (ehhem Enron??) and some have quietly been forgotten as acquisitions from a few years back (Bank One). Search around and you may just find them in your target lists.

As a rule, no salesperson or marketing team wants to waste time trying to talk to companies that are out of business.  It only makes good sense to weed those companies (and affected contacts) out. But how do you know who they are? Aggregating data from all the M& A activity, bankruptcies and shut-downs these days can be time-consuming. In face, it can become a full-time job.  Why not seek out some proactive solutions to keep these types of situations out of your database? Besides some shameless self-promotion here (yes, ReachForce has a solution for this), one of our best suggestions is to empower your teams to mark this kind of information in your database. That way you can weed them out as they come up. For a salesforce.com-specific tip on how to set up this weed-out process, check out a few of our past posts, Updating Lead Status in SFDC for Better Marketing Data and Cleaning Up Your  Marketing Database

Like it or not, data fuels the engine of your business. Your sales teams need it to prospect, cross-sell and upsell. And your marketing teams need it to create viable campaigns so your sales team has a message to sell. With that in mind, what exactly are you doing with that ever growing pile of information?  Do you have someone to keep it fresh, or does it sit untouched, unmaintained and just plain unloved?

No matter what, you need a plan for organizing the monolith that is your database. SiriusDecisions estimates that in a typical B2B company error rates are as high as 25%. That means that if you have a team of sales reps working with that data, 25% of their efforts are wasted.  At the same time, it means that 25% of your marketing departments’ messages cannot get through and likely are falling on deaf ears.  That’s pretty wasteful.  In an economic climate like ours you have to be lean and mean. Wasting 25% of your sales efforts and marketing messages just isn’t in-line.

Ok, so the baby (your database) is ugly, but how do you fix it? Set up error reporting so that you empower your users to point out the problems (see Cleaning Up Your  Marketing Database). Then assign some ownership, giving someone the responsibility to oversee, fix and police your database to ensure positive change.  You have to have a continual focus on data quality, because constant improvement will lead to gains across the board.  If you need proof, SiriusDecisions estimates that B2B companies that address the root cause of data errors can realize a 25% increase in converting inquiries to marketing-qualified leads.

You have an HR handbook, departmental training materials, and documented procedures. But do you have standards and rules for your marketing and sales database?  You should.  Without some law and order, your database will start looking like the wild West of marketing and sales data.  Here are some of our suggestions for putting these rules to paper:
1.    Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
a.    Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (e.g. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
b.    Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM/Marketing Automation system to work. For instance, if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses, outline what those rules are and how data has to be fomatted to fit within those rules.
c.    Requested information to make marketing, sales, customer support, or anyone else working in your database work better.

2.    Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields identified above.  (E.G. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, etc.)

3.    Do a gap analysis. Understand who is in the target Decision Making Unit and make sure all relevant contacts are present that for your target accounts and prospects.

4.    Make sure this data has an undisputed owner. Is it updated by a team member as a natural step in a key business process? Or can nearly anyone update it at any time? Depending on how you answer these questions, you may want to chat with the team or person that ‘owns’ the data. That way you can make sure that the way you choose to fill in the gaps suits their needs as well.

Are your email lists growing?  If so, you’re among the majority of marketers, according to Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark survey.   Despite the doom and gloom in the economy lately the majority of respondents appear to have not lost considerable portions of their email lists over the last year.

Here’s the better question, do you know which portion of your list is good? Do you keep accurate record of what has bounced, who has unsubscribed or what companies have shut down? You should, those numbers impact your email campaigns in so many ways that it is key to keep tabs on the changes.  One easy way to do that is with a ‘Lead/Contact Status’ field on your records.  If you’re working in Salesforce.com they make it very easy as this field already exists as a standard field on Lead Records, now you just need to go in and customize the picklist!

Some of the types of things we have as possible Lead Status’ at ReachForce are:

Open
Bounce Back
Additional Followup needed
Mtg – continue marketing
Mtg – additional follow up needed
Mtg – no interest, no fit
Wrong Contact: NLT
Company No Fit: Closed/Acquired
Company No Fit: No interest/need
Company No Fit: See desc. Notes
Wrong Contact: See Comp. No Fit Notes
Unsubscribed

As you can see, our status field covers a range of things that are important to our sales team and some that are important to only our marketing team.  We use these fields to determine who to continue to pull into marketing campaigns and who to put into a file to Refresh (aka send through our process that phone verifies whether the person is still there, whether they fill the role we need and whether we have the right contact info for them).

We have also employed this type of dispositioning on our Contact records by creating a custom field.  For us, if something has made it to the Contact stage it has been qualified, we know that they are a fit for us, etc. so there’s no need to have some of the same status types and we narrowed down the list of statuses to the following:

Good
Email Bounce
Company Closed/Acquired/Bankrupt
No Longer There
Unsubscribed

Keeping these statuses updated is a two-fold responsibility….our sales team updates them as they call or have meetings/appointments with different people and our marketing team updates them as we have bounce backs or unsubscribes that we can track from Eloqua.   Overall, we have found this status field on our records to be an indispensible piece to keeping our email lists up to date.

In a recent post on Al Iverson’s Spam Resource Blog Al answered a question that I think is extremely interesting (more so is the answer) so I wanted to push some of his post back for The B2B Lead Readers.

“What, exactly, are spam [content] filters picking up from a generic template that could reduce delivery? Thanks in advance for your reply.”

The thing that these filters catch is commonality. If your content has different variables in common with other messages tagged as bad (for whatever reason), then your messages get tagged as bad, too. What does commonality mean? It can mean a whole bunch of things, and nobody publishes a list of the exact variables that are checked. It probably is all of the following things, and more:

• Your from domain.
• What domains you link to.
• The domain where images are hosted.
• What images you use.
• What HTML template you use.
• What unsubscribe footer you use

Take home message – spam evolves and thus do spam filters, they do not look for some stagnant list of triggers that you can avoid.  Take a look at the things being caught in your own spam filters, it might be a good reference point on things to avoid in terms of keeping your emails out of the junk mail folder.

Somehow amongst my responsibilities at ReachForce I’ve gotten involved in helping figure out email deliverability issues for some of our customers.  As a result, I have spent a good chunk of my time lately researching, reading and generally informing myself on some of the less than obvious things that can cause email deliverability issues.   I thought I might compile some of the info I’ve found lately, mostly my information is more technically focused than content focused, but if you want to check out some great posts on how your content might be affecting your deliverability, take a look at these posts.

The root of the problem, email marketing messages get blocked because they are bulk messages, therefore they look like spam.  In Return Path’s Deliverability Benchmark Report it was found that 28% of B2B marketing email never reaches the inbox!   Are you in that 28%?  Unfortunately for marketers, there are tons of filters that get set up between you hitting the send button and things hitting the recipients inbox. The way to avoid being blocked is to improve the reputation of your domain as well as the engagement of your subscribers.

Some food for thought when considering how deliverable your emails are:

1. Track your sender reputation. Use a service like Return Path. You can get an overview of your sender reputation free at senderscore.org or dnsstuff.com.
2. Know what domain your emails come from if you use an email marketing solution (or automation tool), your reputation is linked directly to that domain.  The good news about that is that email and marketing automation vendors wake up a night thinking about things like this so they should be keeping a close eye on the reputation of the sending domain.
3. Map your domain footprint, what email domains are you regularly sending to? Look at the results and see which domains are most important to you.  Cross reference the list of domains you regularly send to with the list of folks you believe you cannot reach and those that routinely have trouble receiving your emails. Then reach out to each of those companies and find out what sort of filtering is happening and try to become white listed. This is a manual but very effective strategy.
4. Watch rendering. Know how your message renders, with and without images, in the various versions of Outlook and on mobile devices.  Be sure to create versions specific to the email clients that are most important to you. A publisher may want to optimize for the lower capabilities of mobile, while a technology company might want to optimize for Outlook.
5. Keep it simple – break your message up into shorter messages and guide subscribers back to a website or landing page for further information.
6. Avoid all image-HTML messages, lots of links and lots of images.  These things typically trigger red-flags with email filters.
7. Are you blacklisted?  You can use any number of different services to find this out (just pop ‘Am I blacklisted’ into Google and you’ll see a number of resources for that).

If you read our post about metrics Marketing should care about and you use Salesforce here are some easy to follow instructions for putting lead source tracking into place.

Lead Source (the field with the big red arrow next to it), is a standard field in Salesforce, so it’s easy enough to locate and use, the important thing is to put your own custom sources into the pick-list and to use them.

1. To add custom values to the pick-list, you’ll need administrative privileges.
2. Click on ‘Setup,’ then under ‘App Setup’ you’ll want to click on Leads.
3. Next select ‘Fields’ and you’ll get a listing of all of the fields in your CRM.  Click next to ‘Lead Source’ on the ‘Edit’ link.
   
4. Once you are in the edit interface, you’ll be able to add items to the pick-list by selecting ‘New.’
   
5. From there you’ll be given an easy, step-by-step way to insert a new value into the list.

As you can see, we have a variety of different lead sources, you’ll want to make sure your list matches the places that you gather leads from.   Now when you import leads you can select to attribute them to one of these values, thus helping you better track where things come from.

Now you’ll be able to run  reports on these fields, luckily, lead source is a standard field on the Contact record in Salesforce as well and it’s mapped so that the lead source transfers over to the Contact record when you convert Leads.

This was and actual email I received last week:

Hello,

Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.

Given COMPANY X success with multiple SaaS providers, I wanted to ensure that you were aware of our company and service offerings. We have been winning many key deals from a highly competitive landscape and COMPANY X is able to leverage key pricing advantages from Vmware licenses on a rental basis, a true cloud utility computing model with rapid provisioning of servers, support for Windows 2008, IBM platform standard for managed servers, citrix administration and support services which are handled by some of the best engineers with the most experience in the industry and still coming out with much better pricing than is provided by your other hosting partners.

COMPANY X is a consolidation of multiple, US-based, high-density data centers by Managed Data Holdings (MDH). With facilities in Chicago, Denver and Irvine, CA along with the ongoing acquisition activities for others nationally, COMPANY X is focused on providing both standard colocation services (cabinets, cages and power) as well as managed services comprised of IBM Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage in a virtualized, outsourced infrastructure. COMPANY X is a SAS 70, Type II certified facilities company.

Our data centers are 24/7/365 managed facilities with on-site NOCs, security and network staff available to support your needs on demand. Our customer portal enables our customers to remotely manage their collocated infrastructure, network bandwidth utilization, hosted server & storage infrastructure plus enables Compute-on-Demand and Storage-on-Demand flexibility for our hosted customers. Our Managed Services products range from managed IBM iDataPlex or Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage, security services (firewall, etc.), managed VPN, monitoring of your network infrastructures down to Load balancing, Network management and Infrastructure services (including “hands & eyes”). We have seen significant interest from major companies who have found that turning the infrastructure over to COMPANY X with the Virtual instances of VMware and the dynamic storage provisioning (on the fly) has significantly reduced their OpX as well as scope of responsibility for systems and software updates.

Please let me know if you have any projects with which I may assist you.

Thank you and best regards,

JOE

JOE SALESPERSON

Senior Sales Account Manager

Why is this is a ‘what not to do’ – a few really obvious reasons:

1. “Hello,” is that really my name?  No, don’t think so – if you’ve got the prospect’s name, you know you’ve got it spelled right, use it….don’t just write ‘Hello’ and ignore a person’s name.
2. My personal favorite – “Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.” What does this say about your knowledge of the prospect when your opening sentence assumes you are not sending your email to the right person??
3. How long is this email?  Yes this is a real email, it was sent to a group of folks here at ReachForce (yes really personal, isn’t it?), it’s so long though who is going to read it?

This email cracked me up, how many people really respond to something like this?  It’s amazing it didn’t get captured in my junk email.  Take some time when you are crafting an email to a prospect.  If it’s follow up to a call, make note of the call.  If it’s a cold email and you’ve never had contact with the prospect before, really put some thought into what is going to stand out to the reader.  Or better yet, don’t send cold emails!

As we run across cool companies that are trying to add value to today’s B2B sales and marketing teams  we want to be sure and share them with our B2B Lead readers.  Here’s another great idea…

Have you heard of Gist?  If not, you should check it out.  It might just be the tool your sales and telesales teams have been waiting on!

Gist is an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people (prospects) and companies.

Gist enables your sales team to build their ‘network’ from lists of contacts across a variety of sources from LinkedIn, salesforce.com, Outlook, Gmail (or any email service that supports IMAP), Facebook, Twitter  to any CSV file. Then, it sets up a Dashboard view of all the “news” going on within your network.  Once this is all set up your sales team can prioritize their contacts and outreach (or Gist can do it) based on companies/prospects/people you want to watch.

Something new is going up on the web every second of the day.  Can you imagine the efficiencies with just one dashboard of all of these relevant updates?