Marketing Database Optimization Best Practices

Magazine Opt-in Lists have been a consistent source of “names” for B2B marketers for a long time. Logic was that is a person subscribed to a VoIP magazine then she must be a qualified buyer or some sort of an influencer. Also if she has opted in to received the magazine then she knowingly has opted in to receive messages from number of other businesses that she may not even know of. Guess what, both these assumptions were wrong all these years and they will be (more) wrong going into the future. Like everything there are some exceptions but the truth is the a large number of people subscribe to trade magazine for FREE by simply filling out a form and barely read them. If you charged $1 for the subscription, a majority of them may not even fill out the forms. Secondly, the opt in in much magazine subscription forms is not evident at all to the end user. So even if we assume that a particular user wanted to seriously subscribe to a trade magazine, we cannot be sure at all that she is ready to receive messages from other business hawking their products and services. 

More importantly, in today’s world of permission marketing, its just a waste of time to use someone else’s opt-in list to send your messages. Magazine subscriber lists are a good source of cheap bulk list of names but you must carefully determine if they can deliver any value to you whatsoever even if they just cost a few hundred dollars. For B2B marketing magazine lists are dead because: 

• The subscribers may not be your specific decision makers or buyers
• The subscribers may have already moved on from the companies they worked at when they subscribed to the magazine
• The subscribers tolerate 3rd party emails being sent to them only because they get the magazine for free and not because they want to be marketed to

Opt-in lists are critical but they can be only valuable when you build them internally via your own websites. Ardath Albee has a good post on how you can do this. Also I believe traditional trade magazine subscription lists will be replaced by the new generation online trade communities like ITSecurity.com or Times of Virtualization. 

I came across Mike Damphousse’s interview on Craig’s Funneloholic blog (which has a lot of great reads!) and thought this answer of Mike was right on – something we educate our customers on all the time. 

5.    What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?

Don’t spend the budget on every idea you know. Diversify, but stay focused. Pick a handful of effective programs as opposed to all of them. Use experts, use technology, but DON’T use your sales team. Serve the leads to them in a quality package that’s ready to be sold to. Don’t inundate them with names, numbers and email addresses. They shouldn’t be doing the marketer’s job.  They should be face to face with prospects that have real issues to solve.

This answer has a lot of different dimension to it but the central theme is how marketers can serve their sales team with leads that may result in conversations – so sales can focus on identifying opportunities than on identifying decision maker contacts, gathering account intelligence or finding email addresses. Leads that are ready to be sold to are critical and its important for marketers to focus on 

• Quality of leads being passed over to sales. Make sure the leads are accurate role-based decision maker or influencer contacts. 
• Completeness of leads sent to sales. Make sure the leads are complete with direct or one-hop numbers (Don’t just pick a company number you get from the website or Hoovers) and email addresses. 
• Qualification of accounts done specifically for every campaign so that sales understands the account intelligence before they pitch. 

Laser focus on lead lists that are sales-ready and you are bound to see increased effectiveness of your sales programs. 

If there was a prayer that would automatically de-dupe all the leads and contacts data in your Salesforce.com or other CRM applications, would you say that Prayer? Everyday? If you answered yes to that, we’d love to talk to you today.

Unfortunately, as we all know there is no such prayer but answering the question above will help every marketing manager realize and take notice of this grave problem that is eating away at your campaign effectiveness and sales team productivity everyday. See this post and this report for more on how bad data can be bad for business.

Duplicate records is one of the most critical problems in CRM databases today and I am positive that majority of organizations who have this problem have not yet figured out a good solution for it. Before researching any tools and service providers, I think it is important for marketing managers to first define how they want to attack the problem and what logical methods they think they can live with. Figuring this out is a great first step to the problem and here are some of the best ways to look at your de-duplication problem: 

• De-dupe and merge all records that have the same email addresses. 
  • This is perfect except that you must account for common problems with this logic and excluding all info@, careers@ and such other email addresses. 
  • Another way is to first look at all info@, careers@ records and see if that are of any value to you and purge those records. 
• In the absence of email addresses in contacts and leads tables, the next best way is to de-dupe and merge based on “firstname + lastname + companyname” and this will most likely work. One thing you must do is to export the list of such records as you merge them so your marketing operations team can eye ball them to find any discrepancies. 
• For all new leads that are being added to the database, the best way to avoid an ongoing problem of duplicate records being created is to use a product or service that compares and remove duplicates from any list before it is added to the CRM system. The ReadyContacts service or RingLead or CRMFusion tools are an example of this. 

What are other tactics and strategies that you are using for de-duping and what has worked and scaled for you well? I’d love to know your experiences and ideas. CRM database cleansing and enrichment is a crucial new area for all marketing organizations and we are seeing an increasing number of marketing departments that are recognizing this as a priority for 2009, when doing more less has become important due to economic recession in the markets. 

“Cheap Lists DON’T deliver Rich Results, they deliver Cheap Results”. If you have read the Sandra Boynton book (see image above) to your child, then you know what I am relating this to. If not (which most likely means you are yet to step into parenthood), then you will. 

I find it funny when I talk to marketing managers who are looking for high quality contact lists for < $1 per contact. High quality and cheap price never go along, have never gone along and will not go along in the future. This is more true about business contact lists than many other things and here’s why: 

• Business contact lists that are sold at < $1 per contact are worse than last year’s conference lists as they are generated from databases which may or may not have been refreshed for months or even a year. Its not the database’s problem though as its impossible to refresh large contact databases with accurate and current information even once or twice a year. They know it and you should too. If you are buying a contact for <$1, then please make sure you don’t spend any time or energy on the campaign as that effort (which would cost you a lot more) will just not be worth the results you can expect from such a list. 
• Cheap contact lists lack the accuracy and completeness that is critical for your email and direct mail campaigns. You won’t get the specific mailing addresses for the contacts but just the company HQ address. Similarly, most such lists won’t have email addresses or may have some that are programmatically appended and have suffer from high bounce rates. Sending a direct mail to such a list will result in huge losses and dismal response rates. 
• Low priced business contact lists can never be made of specific role-based decision makers that are responsible for an area that your product or service addresses. If you get 10 contacts but don’t get that specific one that is responsible for evaluating your kind of solution offerings, then you have just bought something that will waste a lot of your sales and marketing team’s time. 
• There is no competitive advantage in buying cheap broad business contact lists. Even if we assume they deliver some value, you can be sure that the vendor is selling the same exact list to all your competitors as well. In fact this is a fact with many niche business contact lists where list vendors sell the same data to all companies effectively wiping out any advantage that a marketing team can build by reaching certain decision makers prior to their competitors. 

Business contact lists are the primary drivers of campaign effectiveness and it is critical to get the right list with the right decision makers to start with. Its never easy to do this but if you can get the right process in place or work with the right vendor for your marketing database requirements, then it becomes a competitive advantage that is not replicable. Quality is more critical than quantity in B2B marketing & lead generation and cheap lists pollute your database with bad data that infects your campaigns and lowers productivity. What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear your experiences. 

Business to business marketers who have been generating leads for enterprise software or software application development companies have seen better days than the times we live in for sure. When you’re selling software consultancy services and development solutions the cycle is long and generating qualified ‘sales ready’ leads is a process that constantly needs a supply of qualified prospects and business contacts in target accounts.

I’ve often seen software development companies go after volume of business contacts and try and sell their services to just about any “IT” contact who is manager level and above irrespective of his exact responsibility and relavence as the correct decision maker. Whether you sell directly over the phone or nurture your leads through several messages, when it comes to software development, knowing roles, responsibilities and knowing they are the right decision makers within the company for the area of application development is extremely important. An IT Director isn’t necessarily your right decision maker because the letter I.T. are in his/her job title. The IT Director may be repsonsible for hardware, IT security, application testing or other areas. Similarly even a single Director of Applications may not be your best bet in every single case because he/she maybe repsonsible for only Java applications, only SAP applications or only web applications. While building an internal marketing database to use, be as specific as possible while identifying your decision makers.

For example: If you are in the application integration space, then verify the roles of your target decision makers to ensure they are responsible for applciation integration and would be the right person to connect with. Once you build a strong database of role based contacts, they can be leveraged in a lead nurturing program to help identify regularly which of these are ready to be engaged by sales. So if you are into software development services sales or marketing, go role based, it will help considerably.

The interesting thing about the economy slow down and its impact on marketing as well as sales is that it’s driven us all to do more with less. Yes budgets are tightening, recruiting is reducing and the workforces are either downsizing or remaining constant. Sales and marketing quotas? No, they haven’t reduced. They have gone up. However it’s not just the recession and low budgets which are making businesses think of alternatives to increasing workforces to do more. It’s part of the evolution of businesses in general and how staying lean and being able to contract certain activities to dedicated providers started becoming a logical strategy. The noose around budgets in this recession is just going to push this trend further as businesses seek alternatives to scaling their interal workforces and operational costs while scaling their business.

How The Virtual Workforce Is Changing Everything by Jack M. Germain is a great read on how perceptions on workforces are changing. Marketing data management is an area this applies well. Building, maintaing and managing lead and marketing data is a time consuming and tedious process but it needs to be done and needs to be done very well. Working with virtual teams at other locations or professional solutions providers in this area is a good alternative for marketers to explore at this stage especially if they are considering hiring more staff to manage marketing data. There are several companies with expertise in list building, lead qualification, lead profiling, CRM data cleansing, email list management, data append and enrichment and more. Other than the more obvious benfits of cost and flexibility paying for support as and when you need it, it can really help free up your internal teams time to focus on other areas such as inbound marketing, lead nurturing programs, social media marketing and generating newer sales ready leads instead of spending it on data.

Perhaps you’ll run some risk of engaging vendors or providers who don’t gel with your requirements till you find one that works for you and build a relationship but this is a risk you face while recruiting a new person for the job too. While considering how to re align your existing marketing team to meet lead quotas give some thought to using vendors for your marketing data needs. It may just give you the edge you need. 

A lead database is no longer a rolodex. Lead data doesn’t come from standard business cards. Lead sources are plenty and highly varried whether it’s from social media, free trials, whitepaper downloads, landing pages, custom built lead lists, webinar registrations or other sources. Lots of lead sources can mean a lot of leads for your marketing database which is great news! The bad news is lots of lead data sources can also mean a lot of different formats, a lot of different data points and a lot of inconsistency in your database records. That is something you need to avoid.

The cleaner and more consistent your marketing lead data is, the more effective it will be in generating consistent “sales ready” leads whether you use a lead nurturing solution, an email marketing application or just simply run individual campaigns off your data. If you imagine your lead generation sources, your lead database or CRM and nurturing machine as three parts of a larger machine connected by pipes, you can’t really do much about data being inconsistent at the lead generation level. Different sources collect different data points. A newsletter subscription form may collect nothing but a name and and email address where as a landing page form fill can collect additional details like telephone number, Job title and company name. Changing the sources is not always an option.

The pipeline between the lead generation sources and the lead database (or CRM) is the point where you can fix this problem. One of the biggest causes of inconsistent and incomplete data is allowing leads generated at different sources to flow straight into the database assuming it can be corrected or dealt with later. It almost never happens! However, this is the point at which you need to put in a data normalization process which helps fill in missing data points and standardizes your lead records before they get to your CRM. Some of the things you may want to do before they get past this stage are:

• Filter out any garbage records which will just be redundant
• Maintain a “minimum required” fields like name, company, address, email, phone number and job title which have to be filled in before considering it a completed record
• Append missing data such as email addresses, postal addresses, account information which is missing
• Check for duplication
• Format and standardize job titles, number formats, naming conventions and so on