I have heard mixed reviews on using personalization in email marketing.  And if you have dirty data with things like LEIGH ANNE or Leigh Anne (don’t call til Q1) in the first name field of your CRM, using personalization can be pretty scary and it might be time for some data cleansing.  MarketingSherpa is a proponent of personalization as they use it in their own emails.  But shame on them for an email my co-worker, Lauren, received.  Check this out:

Dear ,

There aren’t too many positives to come out of the recession.

However, new MarketingSherpa research reveals one overwhelming positive: more than ever, companies are relying upon email marketing to engage prospects and generate high ROI…

Leading with the recession (which I believe is grossly overused) aside, “Dear” is not a greeting that can stand alone.  If you are going to use personalization with a holey database, you have to be careful.  Use a greeting like “Hi”.  It can be followed with a name or just a comma and not look weird or let prospects know that you don’t really know who they are. After all, the point of personalization is to make a prospect feel as though it is one-to-one communication.

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.

The marketing database plays a vital role in maximizing marketing effectiveness.  A lack of a centralized and complete marketing database impacts the marketer’s ability to both create and execute highly effective marketing strategy.

The marketing database feeds the marketing mix, it helps determine which targets and segments a company should pursue, and it ultimately allows the organization to consistently develop better products and services and market these products and services efficiently and effectively.

Most importantly, the marketing database is the lifeblood of marketing campaign execution.  The ability to deliver relevant, timely marketing messages to prospects and customers across one or more marketing channels is directly correlated to the quality of your marketing database.  As a result, marketers need to trust in their marketing database; therefore ensure that the data is accurate, complete and reliable.

Market leading organizations heavily rely on their marketing database to build intimate, relevant, personalized relationships with prospects and customers.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve the quality of your marketing database and ultimately the ability to execute more effective marketing campaigns.

Read each question below and write down the appropriate number of points according to your answers.  Once you’re done, add up your score to determine if you are a database slacker, an average Joe database marketer, or a database jockey with the right customer and prospect data at your fingertips all day, every day.

Rate the quality of your marketing database?

• Complete- Award yourself 4 points if you are confident in the quality of the marketing database you rely on execute marketing campaigns
• Room for Improvement- Award yourself 2 points if you feel fairly confident in the quality of your marketing database but there’s still some room for improvement.
• It’s in bad shape- Award yourself 0 points if you are confident in the fact that your database marketing practices are less than desirable and leave room for significant improvement.

Do you currently have a centralized marketing database that provides one source of the truth for marketing, sales, and service?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you have a centralized database that delivers a 360 view of customers across marketing, sales and service
• No- 0 points if you are still operating multiple siloed databases or worse excel spreadsheets

Do you augment your marketing database with information to enhance, authenticate, or supplement your marketing database?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you enhance the quality of existing data through third party data sources or marketing database integration tools.
• No- 0 points if existing marketing database is rarely enhanced

Do you regularly scrub the database for erroneous or outdated information?

• Yes- Award yourself 4 points if you constantly monitor the quality of the data (regardless of whether it’s manual or automated)
• No- 0 points if you can’t remember the last time you acted on the quality of your marketing database.

Do you collect multi-channel information to build customer profiles?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you supplement individual leads data with information from two or more marketing channels: email campaigns received, click-through history, website visits, landing page form captures, survey questions, direct mail, etc.
• Sort of- Award yourself 1 point if you supplement individual leads data with information from one marketing channel
• No- 0 points if you have yet to integrate multi-channel activity at the customer account level.

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____+ e._____=  ______

How did you score?

• 0-5 Points: Database Slacker -  A final score between 0-5 indicates you need to spend more time focusing on your marketing database.  Your competitors and peers are utilizing marketing database techniques that will give them a competitive advantage.  Your marketing database can become outdated and erroneous rapidly; particularly with the rapid growth in digital marketing channels.  The most effective marketing creative is useless if the customer or prospect never sees it, and poor data quality in personalized campaigns can erode brand reputation.  Consider devoting organizational resources to (1) manually scrubbing the marketing database for duplicate data, erroneous data, or missing data and (2) refreshing the marketing database through a third-party marketing data provider.
• 6-12 Points: Average Joe – A final score between 6-12 indicates your marketing database is in reasonable shape, but you should consider initiatives to improve data quality.  This could include augmenting or validating the current marketing database with a third-party data purchase or assigning resources to manually scrub the database by hand.  Consider cross-checking bounced email addresses from outbound email campaigns and removing these email addresses from the database.  Likewise, make sure you are constantly offering customers an opportunity to opt-out of communications.
• 12-14 Points: Database Jockey- A final score between 12-14 points indicates your marketing database is in great shape.  The question is, what are you actually doing with this robust marketing database to improve marketing effectiveness?

Having trouble seeing the good in your database?  Separating the diamonds from the dirt can be tough and time intensive, but if you map out a plan ahead of time it can save you time and sanity!

• Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
  • Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (i.e. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
  • Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM system to work – if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses for instance, outline what those rules are and what format data has to be in to fit within those rules.
  • Information that people have asked for to make marketing, sales, and customer support, etc. work better.
• Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields idenitifed above.  (I.E. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, make a designated location for name pronunciation guides (input by sales) so they don’t clutter the name field, etc.
• Next, do a quick data quality analysis on each data element in these three categories. Score the data quality by answering questions such as:
  • Does this data element have 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?
  • What percentage of the CRM records has this data element missing, clearly incorrect, or duplicate? Determine the best course of action for filling in the gaps, do you have the resources in house or do you need to find a vendor who can do this?

Based on the results of your scoring (step 3), you’ll have a better idea of who you can assign items to for fixing and where you need to focus your efforts in terms of filling in the gaps.  Assign them out to the people who can fill in the gaps and make sure to supply everyone with the same set of ‘rules’ or standards for what the end result should look like.

Once you’ve got your data cleaned up, make sure your data standards sheet is up-to-date with any changes in process you may have made during the clean up process and then circulate it.  Your teams will be much more likely to keep the data looking the way it needs to if they know what the standards are.

Do you constantly feel the pull for newer, better, more data?  Is there always that feeling that if you could just get a few new contacts a sale would be right around the corner?  Of course there is value to new leads data, but what about the data you already have?  Your internal database is likely an underutilized gold mine, but if it hasn’t been properly maintained it’s likely in need of a tune-up.

Did you know?

1. Up to 20% of all postal addresses change every year.¹
2. Up to 18% of all telephone numbers change every year.¹
3. Up to 21% of all CEO’s change every year.¹
4. 25-33% of email addresses on a “house” file will become outdated every year.²
5. In the next hour, 58 business addresses will change, 11 companies will change their names, and 41 new businesses will open¹ … not to mention how many companies will go out of business.
6. In addition, up to 66% of people change companies or job functions every year!³

Scared yet?  If you’re not, you should be, these statistics are enough to worry the most seasoned marketer.  What are you doing to keep your database from being impacted by these figures?   Here at ReachForce we run a series of data hygiene reports on our database regularly, they give us information on what data has been marked as bad, where it came from and how old it is.

Ok, so let’s say you already do something like this, you’ve got your dirty data bagged and tagged, what do you do now? Check out our Top 10 signs your database needs help, some of these top 10 can easily be identified in an error report, for those that you can’t identify, you really need to take a deeper dive into your data.  These things can’t be remedied overnight, but with some elbow grease and time you too can turn around the state of your database, after all, according to  Sirius Decisions, companies marketing to a database that is routed through a healthy data-cleansing routing can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an average organization, based purely on data quality.

For an idea of how dirty your data might be, check out the ReachForce Dirty Data Calculator, with a few simple numbers from you, it will give you some real-life idea as to how much of your data has ‘expired.’

SOURCES:
¹D&B
²Lyris Technologies: “Guru’s Guide to Email Marketing Success”
³Sales & Marketing Institute

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, Are Your Leads Lying to You?, I want to dive a little further into David Taber’s article CRM Tips: When Leads Lie.  There are some truly interesting statistics in this article, but the meat of the article is his call to focus on the creation of opportunities as a key indicator/metric rather than the creation of leads.  Sitting at the cross-roads between Marketing and Sales I can echo his commentary that is a key indicator but I feel that it’s also a bit hasty to claim that it is the only meaningful metric.

Taber argues that by focusing on ‘sales-cycle starts’ (i.e. creation of opportunities) you get a true view of the over all process and communication between Sales and Marketing.   His position is that by using opportunity creation as the key metric you will encourage better alignment between Marketing and Sales.  While I think that he is on the right path, I feel like using only creation of opportunity as a metric fails to take into account the activity on all sides of the table that goes into feeding the creation of opportunities.

If one side fails to fulfill their end of the bargain, then you’ll end up with a lopsided equation and little to no opportunity creation.  For example, if Marketing is not held to the standard of feeding ‘X’ amount of leads and then drumming up activity via an email campaign, webinar, etc. then there is nothing for Sales to use to stir up the opportunities.  On the other side of the coin, if Marketing regularly adds leads, keeps the activity going and continues to feed the fires but Sales isn’t following up then opportunities won’t be created either.   Both pieces of the puzzle are necessary to create opportunities and by looking away from the metrics that measure each of these activities, spotting upcoming problems (or finding the root to existing ones) is difficult at best.

Taber argues that an opportunity centric focus will create the collaboration necessary to convert leads to opportunities, while I agree that if all the pieces are in place it can happen I guess I’m just a bit of a cynic (or a big metrics nerd).  I feel like it’s important to see the whole picture to ensure the process works all the way around.  Keeping everyone accountable to key metrics (lead input, campaign activity, meeting setting and execution) that are relevant to their role in the cycle will allow better visibility across the process and will ensure that if something breaks you can easily identify where the problem was and fix it.

Sitting down with my coffee this morning I stumbled across David Taber’s article CRM Tips: When Leads Lie,.  In it, Taber makes the case for really focusing on the right metrics in measuring performance, interesting stuff, but I got stuck on a particular statement he makes: “In many B2B and B2C businesses, the unqualified leads that are in the nurturing cycle may be numbered in the millions. Industry statistics show that up to 40 percent of leads may make their first purchase after having been in the “remarketing database” for 18 months or longer.”   As someone who works with our database and manages the cleansing of our customers database (via our Relevance & Repair Process), I was really struck by this.

On a day to day basis I look at lots of data (ok that’s an understatement, in the past two months I’ve looked at tons of contacts/prospects), most people who engage in our data appending and cleansing services do so to clean up old data – to find the diamond in the ruff. They are looking for that 40%, but what if they’ve had the right name and the wrong email for the last eighteen months?? And assuming they have been emailing this person for that time and they’ve had the wrong email, wow – that’s someone that they have lost some serious time with.

So how do you avoid falling into the abyss of not knowing if you’re marketing but no one’s listening?  Know who you’ve got good information for and who you need to get the right information for.  One more pitch for data cleanliness here but the idea is very simple, how will you ever reach that 40% if you don’t have their contact information right?

Is your database a clunker?  Is it sputtering to a stop just short of the finish line?   Taking a look at the contents of your clunker can have some huge benefits for you, it not only helps you save some green, it also can stimulate the revenue engine for your sales team.   Drag your clunker out of the garage and see how it measures up:

1. Do you know how many of your contacts are duplicated? Saying you have 45,000 contacts is one thing, but if that is three copies of 15,000 people it’s not really a 45,000 contact database.  You aren’t reaching the number of people you want to be with duplicates in your database and you’re probably missing out on other contacts and companies who are ripe to hear your message.
2. Are you marketing to the entire DMU (decision making unit)? Marketing Sherpa says that for purchases of $25k or more:
   • Companies with 100-500 employees, the DMU consists of 6.8 people who make buying decisions
   • Companies with 501-1000 employees, the DMU consists of 13.5 people
   • Companies over 1000 employees, the DMU consists of 21 people

   So the question is which, if any, of the 6.8/13.5/21 people are in your database?  Which ones are you missing, which ones are over a year old?

3. How many email addresses are you missing? I’ll bet that’s an easy number for you to find, now can you tell me how many of the existing addresses are right or wrong?  Of those that are wrong, is it because there is something structurally (i.e. they are missing the ‘@’ sign or a ‘.com’) wrong or are they hard bouncing?  If you’re relying heavily on email marketing these are important things to know.  Having thousands of contacts is great, but thousands of contacts with only a few hundred accurate email addresses, not so great.
4. According to Gartner, more than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months.  Do you know which of your contacts have been sitting in your database for 12 months or more? Do you know which of those are still employed with the same company, doing the same job?
5. Do you know which companies in your database are in your target market? Is it easy to segment your database by company level information? If you’re missing industry information on your records you’re probably missing opportunities to include the right people (or companies) in your messages.

If you’ve been left with a few too many questions after reading this, that’s ok.  The good news is that a good data cleansing/appending service can fill in the gaps and help you turn your clunker into cash, or some serious elbow grease from an in-house team can really get the wheels turning.  SiriusDecisions reports that companies marketing to a database that is routed through a healthy data-cleansing routing can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an average organization, based purely on data quality.  Next step for you – get that clunker rolled out of the garage and get cleaning!

Need help updating your clunker of a database? ReachForce has a special Cash for Clunkers offer for Q3 to help you get in gear for Q4.

Written by Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua and the author of the recent book Digital Body Language.

Amy was kind enough to ask me to write a post to the B2B Lead audience to answer a question that frequently comes up.  What is the relationship between Demand Generation/Marketing Automation, such as what we provide at Eloqua, and Targeted Contact Discovery, such as ReachForce’s service.

It’s a great question, and the answer touches on a number of areas.

The key relationship is the critical importance of understanding your target audience.  The cost of raw, untargeted data continues to drop.  With various social or data scraping services in the market today, the cost of a raw name, even a name with title information attached, has been reduced to pennies.

However, this has led to a market dynamic where untargeted marketing messages are prevalent, and the ability to precisely target the right buyer with the right message at the right time is the most important differentiator.

Role-based contact discovery is a crucial step in understanding who is a potential buyer of your product or services.  Going beyond title to discover actual functional role allows you to precisely identify the individual who would, when the time is right, progress through a buying cycle and purchase your product or services.

And this is where demand generation, such as the platform we provide at Eloqua, comes in.

The key synergy is that by using a demand generation platform to understand the digital body language of our buyers, we can identify the critical second piece of the equation – where each buyer is in their buying cycle.  By understanding the stages of a buying process for your product or service, and then using scoring to map each potential buyer to the stage of the buying process he or she is at, you can see whether they are at the education and awareness stage, are discovering potential vendors, or are validating a vendor as their final choice.

With a clear understanding of the “who” (based on role-based discovery) and the “how interested” (based on reading their digital body language), targeting the right message to the right person at the right time becomes possible.

However, there is another crucial link.  Even though the differentiated value of understanding role, vs just title, is clear to most marketers, the difference may be lost on the CFO.  Demand generation processes allow you to paint a much clearer picture of the value of one name over another.

With Eloqua, you can rethink your marketing analysis around the full buying funnel.  By taking a top-down view of your marketing analysis, you can begin to get a clear picture of where each buyer is in their buying process.  As you do this, you can begin to push your analysis of the value of a name further down the buying funnel.  Determining, through using lead scoring, which source of names actually turns into Marketing Qualified Leads and revenue opportunities allows you to view the value of the incoming names more clearly.  If a targeted name costs more by a factor of 5, but converts into revenue opportunities at 10X the rate of untargeted names, it is clearly more valuable.  Demand generation allows you to prove that value further down the buying funnel.

A third critical link is in sales understanding.  Sales needs to engage with individual buyers in individual conversations.  The only way to do this is for them to understand the interests of each buyer.  Targeted discovery allows you to provide your sales team with insights into what the potential buyer’s role and major focus areas are, while Eloqua allows you to provide your sales team with insight into their area and level of interest through giving them insights into the buyer’s digital body language.

With these approaches in place, it is even possible to reverse the standard approach of seeking, through targeted lead discovery, folks in the right roles, followed by using lead nurturing to cultivate and generate interest.  Interest may already exist, and can be identified through seeing individuals from ideal target companies anonymously visiting your website. In this case, these companies, where interest has already been seen, can be passed automatically to Reachforce for targeted lead discovery.  This provides you with an immediate win, as you have a person in the right role, at a company that is already showing interest in your product or solution.

Together, targeted lead discovery through Reachforce and demand generation through Eloqua form a powerful combination that allows you to find the right person, at the right company, showing the right level of buying interest.  For your sales team, there can be no better lead than that.

According to SiriusDecisions, “The Company that markets with a healthy data-cleansing routine can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an ‘average’ organization, based purely on data quality.”  Whether you love it or hate it, we all have a marketing database filled with web leads, customers and trade show lists.

If kept up to date, this database is invaluable to the success of our marketing campaigns.  If it is used as a general repository of contacts and never cleaned up, your email bouncebacks/mail returns will be through the roof and your response rates will be abysmal.  According to MarketingSherpa, 2.1% of contact data goes bad every month. This means each year almost 25% of your contact data gets dirty.  Do you know which 25%?

Based on these stats, ReachForce has created a dirty data calculator to show you just how much of your data is dirty.  See how dirty your data is now.