Blog

Have you ever thought that your last b2b marketing campaign was not really as ineffective as it may have seemed? Are you sure your CRM or lead management software analytics tools are not blinding you with wrong reports? 

Alright. I’ll admit it’t completely wrong to blame CRMs, lead nurturing software, lead management tools or even email marketing applications for giving anyone wrong reports or false analytics of the effectiveness of your campaigns. Analytics and reporting are based on logic and calculations, they can’t really go wrong. If there can be anything to take the blame for erroneous reports, its the data!

Imagine you spend several days brainstorming and trying to come up with a copy for an email campaign that is so compelling and so well crafted, that it should be enough to lure readers to your sign-ups or landing pages and generate a flow of leads for you. Imagine you select 1000 prospects from your marketing database and send your “sure-shot” email to them as you wait in anticipation for the results. Imagine you watch your campaign performance results and learn that only 100 of your thousand leads actually opened your email and 5 of them responded showing interest. That’s a 10% open rate and a 0.5% sucess rate. Does that mean your email campaign was a failiure and you need to start from scratch with a new copy?

Analytics and campaign reports are only as accurate as your data. They will give you figures on the effectiveness of your campaign assuming every one of your leads and contacts was a valid, active prospect and your contact data 100% accurate. If that campaign was sent to 1000 contacts of which 500 were not really the right people to target, 100 of them were no longer with the same company as when they were added to the database and 100 email addresses were wrong or changed, you effectively ran that campaign on 100 prospects. Your open rate would have been 33.33 % and your success rate 1.67%. So when you send out an email campaign and analyze the results, ask yourself:

• Is every contact on the list a valid decision maker and receipent for this message?
• Is every contact on the list still with the target account? Have any of them left the company?
• Is every email address valid and active? Are there any on the list which are destined to bounce before an email even goes out to them?