There was a well written post by Robert Vanselow, VP of Sales and Marketing at Newsmax Media titled: “When it comes to e-mail lists, more marketing is better” published on DMNews’ The 2009 DMNews Essential Guide to Lists & Database. The article made some pretty good points and there was just one particular point which I can’t completely agree on particularly with B2B and thought “there must be others who wont completely go with this either. With regards to list size for email marketing campaigns Robert says:

The size of a list is very important. When it comes to value, many marketers will argue against large files. We constantly hear that “Quality, not quantity, counts.” What is wrong with having both? It is true you can have a small list that really works, but unless the list has critical mass, it may not be worth the time of your marketing team to prepare and implement the campaigns. The key is to use larger lists. If you have your own list, put money and resources into expanding it. If you market to lists, look for larger list files. As a rule, we will never market to any third-party e-mail lists unless they have more than 200,000 names. 

Now just so this isn’t taken out of context, at no point does Robert say quntity is more important than quality when it comes to email lists, he says ideally, you should have both. Also, the larger your list, the more odds you have of more replies and better results in terms of overall number of leads generated from the email list. However the line that stood out for me is “The key is to use larger lists“. Is bigger really better?

I am one of those who you can often find saying “Quality, not quantity, counts” although as Robert puts it, there is nothing quite like having both. What if you had to pick a stronger focus between the two? I would say “The key is to use better quality, better qualified lists”. Especially if it’s for your inhouse database. Quality data at the cost of quantiy is okay. Quantity at the cost of quality is the cause of inefficiency. In a laboratory conditions scenario with all things being equal, if a company X generated 150 warm leads using an email list of 5000 contacts and company Y generated 150 warm leads with their list of 700 contacts would you agree company B owns the more valuable list? If you did agree, then essentially you believe the value of an email list comes from its “quality” and not from its quantity. If the above scenario were possible in a real life situation, it means you can do “more with less” and if you keep that focus and continue to build out your list, you can really achieve more as the size does increase. 

So now the question….. is bigger really better?

Conversation between marketers (names have been modified to protect identities)

Kermit The Frog: Just look at these statistics from our last email campaign! They are terrific! 100 percent of the emails we sent went out, 90% were delivered and 40% were opened! 

Batman: How many responded or converted into click throughs?

Kermit The Frog: Mmmm less than 1% but we achieved a delivery rate of 90% percent which means we had a great target list with accurate email addresses. Thats impressive huh?

Batman: Kermit, dont you think you are missing the point here? How can you say you had a great target list when less than 1% converted to click throughs or some action.

Kermit The Frog: Uhh well we did everything right, we had a big list of contacts, we had a good level of accuracy in email addresses, we had an eye catching subject line and a great copy…

Batman: Who were those contacts on your big list?

Kermit The Frog: They were key executive decision makers from a bunch of companies…what kind of question is that?

Batman: Were they the right decision makers?

[Fade out with swirling Batman cut scene graphics]  Batman made a good point. It’s easy to miss the point when it comes to analyzing results on any kind of campaign whether its email or direct mail. High delivery rates mean your email address data must have been quite accurate and its fair to consider some margin for emails that get blocked by spam filters or other reasons. High open rates could mean the subject line was effective in grabbing the receivers attention and made them curious enough to open it. Poor end results still mean something went wrong somewhere no matter how great things seem on the surface.

Having a large target list of business contacts or decision makers isn’t a good enough foundation for any campaign. Simply because they are list of decision makers it doesn’t mean they are the right decision makers for what you have to offer their company. If you are a regular reader of the blog, one of the things you see us stress on over and over again here at ReadyContacts is keeping focus on the roles and responsibilities rather than job titles when building target lists and focusing on building high quality “rich” data rather than quantity lists hoping some will be the right decision makers. When you target someone in the “right role” with the “right message” you benefit from better results and better ROI.

A 90% delivery rate means very little when those 90% of the list were not the right person within a target account to hit with your email campaign.  Even a smaller campaign carefully executed on a very qualified list of decision makers could see better results than a large unqualified one. As great as analytics figures are it’s good practice to translate what they mean to you rather than look at them at face value. The next time you see something didn’t quite work out in terms of responses look beyond the delivery rates and go back to where it starts: the data…and ask yourself “who is on this target list?, are they the right people?”

I’ts an important question to reflect on before giving a go-ahead on any email marketing campaign. Personally, I hate spam as much every other person out there, I like the concept of using purely opt in lists or double opt in lists to run email campaigns but practically I also know not everyone can build perfect opt in or permission based lists and rely solely on them. I am not against email marketing on custom built targeted email lists just as I’m not completely opposed to cold calling and believe they can both be effective “if done right“.  I also realized I just made a rather bold move defending the use of non-optin lists to send out emails to companies as a marketing strategy and I just set myself up for a lot of flak for making this statement. But before we go straight to the comments section below think about this question. How do you perceive spam and when do you consider an email spam?

When I get an email which is completely irrelevant to what I do, who I am and  what I may be interested in, it’s no longer email to me…its spam.

• I am a B2B marketer (at least when I am in the office and at work I am) 
• I generate leads, look for new ways to drive more customers towards our business and manage marketing projects (its what I do)
• I am interested in anything that helps me become a better marketer, helps me drive more customers, helps the business serve customers better (is some of what interests me)

If I get an email from an unknown company and an unknown person with an email on “Join Us For The IT Security Systems Configuration Training Seminar” that is SPAM simply because its irrelvant to me and I could not care less about that IT Security training seminar as a marketing manager. Similarly drawing the parallel to cold calling, I would be more than a little annoyed being called and invited to attend a conference on improving manufacturing processes or called by someone selling an accounting software solution. On the other hand, if I received an email again from an unknown company and an unknown person introducing on “Introducing our new instant landing page creation software for lead gen managers” I dont look at it as spam.  Even if  I’m not interested in buying it, the way I look at it is ‘it was addressed to the right person in our company’. It’s within my area of responsibility to evaluate such an application and its within my subject of interest as a B2B marketer. Similarly, I’m glad to talk to someone who cold called looking to see if our compnay was interested in a listing on their new B2B Marketing online directory even if at the end of the call we decide not to or that we are not interested at this point. It’s still within my area of responsibility and still related to my area of interest. 

In the first case I would say if the company had sent their email to someone responsible for our IT security, their email would have at least been read if not replied to. By sending it out to the marketing manager it was treated as spam. So is it spam when you dont know the sender or the senders company and you haven’t said you would like to receive an email from them? Or is it spam when even someone you have allowed to email you sends you something that is completely out of your sphere of interest? If you blocked out every new business contact that you have never heard of before from connecting with you through any channel… could you be missing out on some great opportunities? 

I still believe in trying to generate the best possible opt in and permission based lists and doing everything possible to get more opt in email addresses and build a strong internal list. I also believe that its not blasphemous to run an email campaign on a very well built target list where you know the person is the right person to connect with and if its done right. What would you define as spam? Whats not considered spam? Is knowing the sender and providing permission the only criteria or is there more to it?

Although the company’s internal marketing or lead database and inbound leads is the best place to start looking while building out targeted email lists for upcoming campaigns, there is a constant need to replenish these databases with new email lists and fresh leads. Inbound leads aside, whether you are looking to build target list on the basis of geography, industry, company size or any other segmentation, there are a number of different sources out there offering business contacts with email addresses. While each of them work on varied models and range from a few cents per contact to several dollars a contact, it’s important to read between the lines and understand the underlying value proposition of each source while deciding on which one will work best for you. For example a custom target list building service service such as ReadyContacts or Reachforce offers a different value proposition in terms of highly customized role-based lists built fresh as per your specific needs versus subscribing to Hoovers or OneSource which gives you a very large number of existing high level decision makers and executives in a company. Both types of sources can help you build a target list for email marketing however they are quite different in the value they provide so it’s best to really evaluate how each source works and narrow down on what would be most effective for your company and campaigns.

Here are some sources you can refer to if you are out looking to build or acquire a new b2b target email list:

These are just some of the resources you can evaluate when you need to build a fresh business to business email list. Remember to carefully evaluate what you’re getting in terms of value from each of these and select the one that is optimum. Are there any other resources you’ve tried out or any experiences you can share on this?

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

Every marketer should be proud of his/her database. It’s not till you actully run into a situation where you wished you needed something more from your data that you actually realize that thiings would have been more efficient “if my data had this” or “if only my data didnt have that”. It’s a good practice to run through your marketing database from time to time and ask yourself if you are happy with what is in it or is there something that needs to be done.

We didn’t really want to do a “Cosmo” style self test but here is a very quick check with few of these questions you can ask yourself to know if you are happy with your marketing database and how we at ReadyContacts can help you with anything you need to make you happier with it. Check it out!

So are you happy with it? How did you fare?

When it comes to sales, marketing and looking through good crm data there is a quick acid test that I use. If you can look at a record and it helps you completely visualize the company/customer and instantly help you profile or score it as a good prospect or not…then you have good data. It may not be as comprehensive as a lead profile created by having conversations with a target account but good data gives you enough key information points for you to answer a few questions with a quick glance and give you a fairly clear idea of what kind of an account it is. When you look at a target account, the least it should answer is:

• What is the name of the organization?
• Where is it located?
• What is the website url?
• What vertical is it in and what do they do?
• How many employees does it have?
• Whats their annual revenue?

From these data points you can conclude the kind of company, where they are located and its size in terms of revenues and employee strenght and see if it fits your criteria. However based on your product or offering, there are always other questions that you can have answered by adding additional data points to your crm data. For example:

• Is the company listed on an exchange?
• Does it have a holding company or what is the company structure like?
• How many outlets or locations does it have around the world?
• How many locations does it have operating within the United States?
• What were the last major press releases and news events related to this account?
• What are the divisions and product lines of this organization?
• Which countries does it operate in?

Everyone who is visiting your website is atleast somewhat interesting in your products and services or something within the domain. Most traditional analytics solution give you just a purely digital description of web traffic. That is helpful but not actionable, atleast for B2B marketers. Most B2B marketers want to know WHO it was who visited the website and if she is coming back again, and how many times and what is she looking at. That is actionable information and now there is a superb tool available for anyone who wants to do this, for FREE. Its the newly launched Demandbase Stream solution that has a slick interface for keeping you and your team abreast of WHO is coming to your website. I would highly recommend using a data cleansing and lead qualification process to whet the leads before calling them “actionable” from a sales perspective. Give it a swirl and post your comments here. 

Trade Shows are a predominant source of leads for companies in a number of segments. While I know that trade shows don’t deliver high quality leads to companies in some verticals, there are other verticals like healthcare, telecommunications and biotech where trade shows are invaluable in generating qualified leads and opportunities. 

The most valuable outcome of a trade show, other than a on-the-spot-sale or opportunity (which is rare), is the list of attendees. A natural thing to do for most marketers is to take the list and upload it to their CRM system. But that is probably the worst thing one could do with that list, as doing this leads to trade show lists getting lost  once uploaded to CRM, become tough to measure for what they delivered in terms of opportunities and sales and most importantly are tough to monetize if the data is not complete or qualified. 

Here are 3 simple things that everyone can do right after the trade show to maximize the value and ROI: 

• Cleanse the list fully and ensure that the data is both, complete and accurate. The best way to do this is to use internal marketing operations team or an outsourced lead generation or data cleansing vendor to ensure that all name, company, URL, address and phone number data is accurate. The next thing to do is to verify all the email addresses of the contacts by doing a simple email campaign thanking them for their time at the show and may be add a plug or two. The main objective of this to test and ensure that the email address is correct. However, if you do not have email addresses for the contacts as the trade show administrators don’t provide those, then it is a MUST to acquire and append emails to all contacts using publicly available information leveraging a good email append or email verification service. All this ensure that you have lead data that is complete, accurate and actionable. 
• Next, qualify the list to ensure that you are not going after accounts and contacts who are just not the right prospects for your company. This process may be quick for some of you and not-so-quick for others, but essential for everyone. An automated way to segment and qualify is by checking for data that helps you qualify like location, number of employees, revenues, contact titles/roles, and such other high level data elements. For a more deeper qualification, its best to use an outsourced lead qualification service provider who can call and research the target account to qualify against your parameters. For example, if your solution works only with the SAP ERP system, then accounts who do not have SAP are simply a waste of time for your team. The net result of this is a qualified list of target accounts with complete, accurate contact information that is ready for the sales team to call on. 
• Lastly, before you upload the list to the CRM system, make sure how you want to allocate the list across the sales reps and add any parameters that are required for this to the list. This is critical to ensure that you can make the sales reps accountable to call, qualify and report on the status and quality of the lead for you to generate a trade show ROI report. This last step is as important as the first two and almost critical for your ROI calculations. 

All this will definitely take more time than simply pushing the list as is to your CRM system but it will pay for itself with a happy sales team that values your leads, a happy boss who can clearly understand your trade show ROI sheet and overall a scalable process that puts you in complete control to drive leads from trade shows to revenue. 

One last point. In a recent conversation with one of our prospects, I heard an interesting point. He said trade shows drive 80% of their leads and one policy they follow is to only attend trade shows that give them a full attendee list WITH email addresses. If a show doesn’t give them a list with email addresses, then they just pass!