The B2B Lead » Mailing Lists

How to Get More From Your In-house Database

Bob Riazzi — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:20:24 +0000

To get more from your in-house data for lead generation, you need to keep it clean ― but that’s like hitting a moving target. With companies merging or going out of business and a workforce that is constantly changing, marketing databases get dirtier at an alarming rate.

In fact, 2.1% of data goes bad every month, according to MarketingSherpa. This means over 25% of contact data goes bad per year.

The only problem is knowing which 25%.

The good news is that marketers can dramatically improve their campaign results by using the right strategies to consistently update, clean and refresh their lead-generation database. 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.”

Lately, we’ve been talking about the best ways to start with data cleanup, what to consider when marketing to your in-house database, important signs that your database might need help, and more.

Armed with this information, you should be in a better position to optimize your in-house database, reduce wasted efforts, improve conversions and get more revenue from your marketing dollar.

Do you have some great tips for starting the clean up process?

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Move your Sales and Marketing Database Out of the Slow Lane

Lauren Kincke — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:46:53 +0000

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.

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Don’t talk to the ghosts of businesses past…

Lauren Kincke — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:46:06 +0000

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

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Your Database: No Longer Your Enemy

Lauren Kincke — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:24:17 +0000

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.

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Is your database in a complete state of lawlessness?

Lauren Kincke — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:24:04 +0000

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.

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Dirty Data — Think Relevance Before Repair – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #186

Suaad Sait — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:17:39 +0000

As we kick off the New Year, we’re typically in an “out with the old, in with the new” mindset. While that may be true for a lot of things, it doesn’t have to be the case for your marketing database. As we ponder in 2009 how to do more with less, think about what you can do with what you have.

Most Marketers are overwhelmed by a customer or prospect database with hundreds of thousands of duplicate entries, old data, inaccurate contact details and countless records in myriad states of completeness. This existing data has likely been gathered by many different individuals over multiple years.

Did you know?

More than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months – Gartner Group

In that same 12 months, some 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

“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.” – Sirius Decisions

Dirty data, whether purchased or collected from download offers hampers your lead generation results and drives up costs. So sticking with the same theme from my last couple of posts, doing more with what you already have, consider this.

Before throwing out your dirty data and buying new or taking on a massive database clean up initiative, think relevance.

What lead data do you have in your database that is relevant to your target markets and buying roles today? From there you can put together a repair program. Here’s a starting point for determining what relevant data you already have at your fingertips.

What businesses you need to target? Industries? Vertical markets?
Who in those businesses are involved in the buying decision for your product or services?
What are you going to do with the data? (Email campaign, direct mail, telemarketing)

Now it is time to repair that relevant data. Start with what’s missing. Here’s a list of things to consider:
If you are doing segmented email programs, do you have the right buying roles within your target markets?

Do you have all of the email addresses you need for each role in the decision making unit?
If you are doing a direct mail program, do you have accurate mailing addresses for everyone you are targeting?
Are there more companies out there that are in your target market that you currently don’t have in your marketing database? If so, find these and add them.
Is there data older than 6 months in your database that needs refreshing? Remember how many people are moving around and how many companies are merging or going out of business on a monthly basis. Consider refreshing this data. **This does not have to be a manual solution.

Thousands, tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of records in your database, there’s bound to be gold there, you just have to uncover it and dust it off.

Here are a few resources for you to consider as you ponder your marketing initiatives in 2009 and the value of your current data.

Is Dirty Data Sabotaging your Marketing Results?
Dirty Data: Even More Expensive Than you Thought
Understanding the Role of Role

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The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing: Role vs. Title – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #184

Suaad Sait — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:00:37 +0000

This is the third post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first post on Intention vs. Attention and the second post on Qualified Buyers vs. Leads.

Deliberate Marketing programs do not rely simply on prospect titles for targeting potential buyers.

For example, a B2B Marketer purchases a list or accesses a contact database and pulls a list of 1,000 Communications Analysts. How can that marketer be certain that the contacts who match those titles are involved with Network Communications instead of Corporate Communications?

Titles are simply a label of rank, not an indication of the actual role the prospect plays in the organization or in the buying decision. Instead, Deliberate Marketing programs are focused on “roles,” defined by Webster’s as: a function or part performed. They target communications based on organizational role and level in the DMU as well as stage of the buying cycle.

The average B2B marketing response rate is less than 3%, and it’s getting lower every year. It’s easy to see why title-based lists perform so poorly.

Consider a Fortune 500 company with 90,000 employees.
All told, this company has 500 IT staff.
Of those 500, 150 have a title of Manager, Director, and higher.
Only a handful of those 150 is in the right role to buy your product.

But what’s a marketer to do? Using current list technology, you can only get as specific as target title. So you have to market to all 150 people with ‘hot titles’, jamming the inboxes of the majority with an unwanted, off-topic solicitation. It’s simply not a cost-effective model.

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Direct Mail on a Comeback? – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #92

Amy Hawthorne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:10:58 +0000

As a long time B2B Marketer I know I typically have to “touch” a lead 5 to 6 times before they become a prospect in my sales funnel. With that in mind, I am using multiple tactics to get suspects to raise their hand. I have a feeling direct mail is on the comeback so we are about to give it a try again. Yes, it’s still expensive and postage rates are still going up but with email boxes being filled up with spam, suspects may be more likely to act if we can figure out how to stand out in the crowd.

As Marketers, when we start to build out a campaign we spend time on the WHAT we are going to deliver, the HOW we are going to deliver our message and the WHEN the program is going to go out but when it comes to the WHO, we haven’t had many options. Our choices were either an in-house database (how old and accurate is this data really?) or to rent data from a title-based list broker. And do we know who these people are or how these names were really acquired?

So as we get ready to build out a direct mail program I’m reminded of a tragic story one of our customers told us. They had a total budget of $100,000 for a direct mail campaign. This was going to be the program of the quarter and they were very anxious to get it out the door so the responders would start rolling in. Of their total budget, they spent $5,000 on the WHO they were trying to reach. The rest of the money went to creating an elaborate piece with “exactly the right messaging”, an attractive call to action and web components for tracking. They felt good about the program and believed the number of responses would justify the cost. They dropped the piece, then waited and waited and waited. Not only did they not get the overwhelming number of responses, they only got one. Now that’s one expensive lead if you ask me.

Obviously when creating a direct mail campaign we need to create a compelling piece with a strong call to action. But the WHO is where a lot of B2B Marketers go wrong. The most successful campaigns, direct mail or otherwise, are those that are targeted at the right people in the right companies. So how do you decide what the right WHO looks like? Here’s what I’m doing –

To find the right businesses, I go straight to my sales pipeline and recent customer wins. I’m looking for where we are winning and what kinds of companies are moving through the funnel the fastest. Then I build out an initial database of other companies that match this profile. Now that I’ve identified the right companies to go after, I’m just left with finding the right contacts for my message. Lucky me, we’re in the business of building custom role based contact databases for lead generation initiatives. So I use our own role-based contact discovery service to find the right decision makers within those target companies. By paying a little more attention to WHO I’m targeting, I feel confident my upcoming direct mail campaign is going to deliver.

Just in case you’re wondering, the person who was responsible for the $100K campaign lost their job. And the person that took their place now uses ReachForce to help keep their job.

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The L-word in B2B Marketing – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #71

Suaad Sait — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:56:09 +0000

As some of you may have noticed, we at ReachForce were founded on the principals that B2B direct marketing was failing due to the poor quality of lists – it was and is egregious that we get less than 1% response rate from e-mail campaigns and that the list industry had not changed in 100 years and I quote are like “dinosaurs in a marketing 2.0 world”. Then, this week I see a picture of a dinosaur on the cover of the BtoB magazine and it alludes to the “L-word”.

The article titled “The List World – List managers unable to adapt and create new products and services that dig deeper into data are in danger of extinction” is a very interesting piece. Carol Krol, great job on this article, you absolutely GET IT!

Here are some of the points covered in the article:

The “List industry” is undergoing dramatic change and consolidation is underway – the OLD way of list marketing is dying
Database marketing is emerging (my view is that isn’t that what we all learned anyway?)
Data now constitutes 2 dimensions: Analytics and the leads databases (not lists)
Custom database development is what people want with more precision
E-mail marketing emerging as the # 1 way to target 1:1 messages to the right people
Nurturing contacts using e-mail marketing is also a driver to this trend
Database analytics and segmentation is becoming a natural extension in marketing departments

As I say every day, fellow B2B Marketers, let’s get together on a crusade to put an end to the 90+% waste in marketing spend – stopping the bleeding on lists is a good start, let’s think about targeted databases built on analytics and focused messages to the right person at the right target company.

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B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #46 – The Survey Says…B2B Marketers Should Clean Up Their Customer Database

Pam O'Neal Mickelson — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:44:01 +0000

Apparently dirty data and 2% response rates are global problems. New survey results from UK-based marketing communications agency Godfrey show business-to-business Marketers have ‘plenty of room for improvement’ when it comes to using customer and prospect databases for direct marketing purposes. The research offers new evidence that direct marketing campaigns could be more effective if B2B Marketers would clean up their data and use a systematic direct marketing program based on database marketing fundamentals.

Lynne DeMers, strategic direct marketing team leader at Godfrey, is quoted as saying: ” Direct marketing is not about sending 20,000 mailers to a rented list and hoping for a two per cent return.” Wow, where have we heard that before? Maybe in our Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook?

She also makes a great point about effective direct marketing: “It is about creating a programme and a system of messages, offers, information capture, measurement and refinement.”

The survey also found that:

Only 60 per cent of Marketers use their customer database for targeted direct marketing, and only 40 per cent regularly update customers with new offers.
While mass direct marketing techniques typically yield response rates ranging from 0.5 to two per cent, targeted direct marketing technologies are considerably more effective, according to Godfrey.
B2B marketers can realize 40 per cent open rates, 10 to 20 per cent click rates and opt-out rates of less than one per cent with segmented email marketing and e-newsletter campaigns.

Sounds like it’s time for drastic change and there are many good lessons in how to make those changes in the complimentary Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook offered on this site.

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