In today’s do more with less business environment business marketers are operating with more constraints than ever before, and at the same time they are expected to have more of an impact on sales. So, how do they get the most out of every dollar? Well, this is where smart Business Data can make a big difference.
Typically many B2B companies lump their business data marketing lists for activities like lead generation into two categories: their internal house business data list and external data marketing lists which are rented or purchased. House data marketing lists offer the promise of yielding the best response rates, but they are often a big mess. This is usually because the house data marketing list is also the sales force’s contact list, as well as the service department’s customer list.
Business Data Should Be Treated as an Asset
In addition, many companies do not consider their business database as an asset, and so no one person or department has responsibility for maintaining its integrity. Over time this results in degradation of the quality and accuracy of the data marketing list. To make matters worse, sales forces typically do not do a good job of updating the records of their customers and prospects. Also, many companies’ internal data marketing lists either started as the sales forces’ contact management system, or as part of a CRM system that evolved from a contact management system.
In either case, their data structure often does not have the data fields required for today’s data marketing tactics. For example, the lack of the corrects data structure often leads to poor segmentation, which usually result in many companies hitting their house data marketing lists too many times with one size fits all communication. This, over time, reduces the yield and increases the number of opt outs in e-mail data marketing lists.
Fixing Your House Data Marketing List
So how do you fix you business’ data marketing list so that you get a higher yield on your campaigns? The first thing you need to do is clean up the data by:
- Removing duplicate records (de-duping)
- Purging the garbage data, and
- Verifying the postal and e-mail addresses and phone numbers where they exist.
Once you’ve done that, you’re ready for the final step which is data appending. In this step you’ll work with an external marketing data vendor to add data from external marketing data sources to not only fill in the blanks in your internal list, but also add data that will give you a more granular view of your customers and prospects.
Data appending will significantly increase the value and power of your business data. With a robust, list you will be able to do more granular segmentation, which should drive higher response rates on lead generation campaigns.
Hosting and attending meetings and conventions is part of our culture. Birthday parties, marriage ceremonies and home warming parties are essential in our lives. Everything that we see every day in our lives is an event of some sort.