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?

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?

Have you ever moved house where everything you had needs to be moved and looked at it as an opportunity to get rid of what you wont be needing or replace what doesnt work anymore? It’s an almost natural chain of thought when you are moving things to a new setting that you would like to bring with you only what you need and leave behind what you dont need. The next time you need to migrate your CRM data to a new system or are in the process of overhauling your CRM, then look at it the same way. As an opportunity to cleanse your CRM data rather than as just a painful migration process which is a necessary evil to shift to a better system. 

Even the best CRM, lead nurturing or marketing automation software won’t deliver magical improvements without ensuring its fed with quality data and if you are going into a migration with data that hasn’t been monitored for quality for a longer spell, then it’s not likely the new solution will function at 100%. Migrating your data can be a fresh start of sorts and give you the chance to overhaul your data completely once and then put in a periodic and frequent review process to keep the data at peak performance levels thereafter. Here are a few things you can do before the data is moved to its new location:

• remove junk records 
• remove any duplication of records, accounts or contacts
• verify and update email addresses
• validate and update postal addresses, urls, phone numbers etc
• check for and filter out contacts and accounts which are no longer active
• append any missing data points for imcomplete records
• add any additional fields or data points which could be valuable like SIC codes, alternate currencies etc
• normalize and format data
• make any changes to the format or structure of the database

Once the big task of cleansing the entire database is completed, the task of maintaining that level of quality across the new system becomes incremental and won’t be as difficult. If you are planning a migration, plan a clean up too.  It’s a good time. It’s an opportunity.

For more on data cleansing best practices download a free copy of 7 Tips To Healthy CRM Data – CRM Data Management, Cleansing & Enrichment Best Practices

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

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?

It’s back to the office and back to work for most of us after the holidays. Its time to kick off the new year with some serious selling and everyone is charged up to drive more revenues this year. If you have been making resolutions for 2009 and any of them involve better practices to generate more leads and generate more revenues, then here is one which will really yield results:

Keep your B2B marketing and lead data as clean as a whistle

We have done a number of posts over the last year on b2b lead data cleansing, how to go about it and how valuable it is to have regularly cleansed and updated data. If you need re-affirmation just how valuable it can be then you really have to read Ardath Albee’s recent post “Lift Revenues 70% By Cleaning Up Dirty B2B Data”

The finds of the SiriusDecisions study that organizations can realize 70% more revenue from data quality just resonates how important data quality is to better results and increased revenues. Like any new years resolutions it’s easy to resolve that you will ensure high data quality standards in your CRM or marketing data but the success lies in carrying it out with a dedicated and constant effort all year round. It has to be an all round initiative to check data quality and integrity at each and every source, cleanse existing data, weed out dead contact data, add newer records and append data points to add value to existing ones. 

Investing time and money in clean and higher quality data is the resolution that every marketer should think about making this year. Why? Isn’t the chanace to increase revenue by upto 70% a good enough incentive?

Know your customer well. It’s the golden rule. We have all heard about it. We all know it and yet so many will still take a chance picking up the phone and dialing a random with a number from a list or their CRM hoping to charm their prospect and coax them into buying. It’s not just phone based, emails and direct mails are often send with a hit or miss strategy without really doing some background research on where they are headed. Even if they are not interested in buying what you have to offer right away, prospects always respect the fact that you know something about them or their companies. If you’ve done some homework on them the chances are they will at least have a first impression good enough to hear you through or read what you have to say.

That homework or brief background need not be a detailed dossier or deep intelligence. Sometimes a simple 50 word description on the company is all that is needed to seperate someone who knows ’something’ and someone who knows ‘nothing’ about your company and first impressions are made quickly. Most marketing lists and CRM databases will have a link to the account/company website and this is usually enough to quickly go through before connecting with a prospect. However i’ll admit even I would prefer having some kind of excerpt or company description which tells me about the company, products and background on the same screen or list to avoid that additional effort of having to open and research a site myself.

Good data is not just about volumes. Just like selling and marketing has evolved and become smarter, more information driven, CRM data and lists have evolved into more than just a set of names, phone numbers and addresses. Data enrichment and data append solutions can help add valuable data points to ensure you’re better informed and updated on prospects a quick glance. While for the complex sale, investing in more comprehensive pre sales research is worth the extra effort, for most, it’s important to identify what additional data can help you make a difference and invest in enriching your database. After all, those first impressions are important.

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?

Now I’m not talking about sitting your dying leads down and giving them a pep talk to help them see the light. When I say “giving your dying leads a new purpose in life” I simply mean “give them that ever so important email address they are missing” and give them some new purpose by putting them back into your lead nurturing cycle.

A lot of customers we have spoken to have leads that they have spent good money generating and they have been lying in CRM’s or spreadsheets over time simply because they were missing an email address and were not of much use within their email nurturing campaigns. Its common to have these leads from conference lists, purchased business lead lists, downloads and other lists and often, after the first contact or call which doesnt yield immediate results, these leads fade away into the background simply because they are missing an email address. While calling leads and qualifying them is great for the ones that are sales ready, the others should go into a nurturing process where they are touched multiple times, periodically, before they are sales ready. However since email address is often the most critical data point for carrying this out, leads without valid working email addresses are often dropped out of the cycle unless you use a suitable email append service which works for you.

Running a simple email append on these records can breathe new life into leads which would otherwise end up just sitting in your CRM database with no real purpose. The process is usually a two step process of identifying the missing email address through research (cost effective but slightly less accurate) or by a calling based method (more expensive but very accurate) followed by an email verification process which ensures whatever method was used to identify them, the end results are working email addresses. The process can be time consuming to execute but the results are certainly worth it and it ensures you are getting the most out of your data.

If you have dying records and leads lying around which are not in your lead nurturing cycle, try an email append solution and give them new purpose. They could be your next customers.

Your CRM data is probably one of your organizations most valuable assets. Companies can go through great lengths to protect and secure their CRM data but just how much emphasis goes into the quality of the CRM data? Everyone is well aware about the value of their organization’s CRM data and if there was a straightforward way to put a financial price tag on them perhaps it would put things into perspective better. However CRM data is a perishable asset and left on its own it doesn’t appreciate like an antique with time, it’s value will diminish unless you look after it well. Although data quality management may rank among the most neglected area of CRM management and definitely one of the major pain areas for administrators and managers, following a strict CRM data cleansing and data enrichment regiment is what will help maintain and enhance the value of your data.  

Here are some practices to keep your CRM data quality at its best:

Identify A Drop In Data Quality Quickly

Bad data is often ignored until it really starts to affect daily work by which time it needs a lot of work to get it back in shape. Its important to identify whose responsibility it is to monitor the data quality and keep the maintainence process going on an ongoing basis. Whether its a weekly scan of records to see if outwardly everything looks alright or a periodic email or contact sample check, keeping an eye on your data will help you identify changes in quality earlier rather than later. Sometimes your sales persons or marketing department who frequently use the data to call or email prospects or customers using the data will be the first ones to experience any change in quality and keeping a regular and close feedback loop will help you know how up-to-date your data is or what issues they face while using it.  

Have An Organizational Policy On Data Standards

Bad data in. Bad data out. While CRM administrators and managers are finicky abut ensuring  any data they upload into their CRM is checked and entered exactly how it should be, most CRMs are accessed by several end users across the organization and there is very little control over what data is entered or edited and how it is entered or updated. This is where it can start going wrong. Educating the end users or the company’s data standards and making them aware of healthy data updating practices can help standardize what goes into the CRM. For example if one user enters contact names in the form of initials with currency values in dollars and another enters them as full names with currency values in increments of a thousand dollars there is bound to be a data which is not standardized. Coming up with a well defined data standards policy which is made available to all end users can help considerably.

Put In Stringent Quality Checks At Your Data Sources

CRM data usually comes from several sources from conference lists, whitepaper downloads, website form fills, purchased business contact lists, online ad clicks, business contacts databases and more. Common practice is to upload them to the CRM straight away assuming it can be normalized or filtered later. Its a good practice to manage, normalize, format, qualify and filter out your leads outside your CRM and then have it uploaded so that what is not valuable or quality data does not get added. We’ve covered more on this in an earlier post titled ‘Data Management – Manage Your Leads Outside Your CRM‘. If you check and clean your data right from the source, it will save you a lot of trouble later. 

Check For & Tackle Incomplete Records

Despite most CRMs having validations to check for mandatory data fields its not always easy to ensure a value for every field at the time when a record is generated. For example if your contact source is a conference list of attendees with only contact names, job titles and phone numbers, although it’s been added to your CRM, it has very little value if it needs to be used in an email campaign or a direct mail reach out. Appending missing data is not always easy to automate and often does involve a lot of manual effort which will seem time consuming. However it is a necessary evil and a periodic data append effort for missing data is important.

Check For Duplication And Redundant Data

Duplication of records and having large amounts of junk data is a sign of a sick CRM database. While putting in software checks for validating records and ensuring an entry is unique is a preventive measure thats good to have in place, there are a number of software or technology based deduplication services which can help weed out duplicates some of which are mentioned here in a previous post. With a growing number of leads coming through sources like form fills and online sources where leads can often fill up gibberish values, doing regular scans for such junk records will help you keep your data free of what should not be in there. Its importnat to note that having a lot of duplicates and other redundant data can result in your analytics and reports reflecting false results so it has to be kept in check.

Periodically Filter Out Expired data

Companies and organizations merge, get acquired or shut down, contacts change addresses, change jobs, move within an organization …CRM data does expire. This is an area which is not easily automated and again does require a considerable investment of time and energy. The more regularly you can carry out a check for expired data, the healthier your CRM will be. A database which remains untouched or unchecked for an entire year can see as much as 30% expired data and the longer you have between checks, the worse it can get so making sure its checked periodically is paramount. While being able to run through the entire data once every quarter is ideal, twice a year should be the minimum.

Enrich Your Data, Increase Its Value

If data cleansing is what helps you maintain your database quality then data enrichment is what will help you enhance your data quality and make it more valuable to the end users. Ask yourself what additional data points in each record could help your users do more with the data and give them a better insight on each account. Would it help to have the annual revenues listed in multiple currencies? Would it help to have a list of all countries each account operates in? Would it help to have a link to the press releases of each account to stay updated on recent events? These additional data points can be added with a data enrichment effort after identifying what additional data would help provide value.

If you practice good data management practices and implement a constant cleansing and enrichment process for your CRM you will be able to actually realize its full potential. Thats when your CRM data is really an asset!