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?

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?

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. 

Autoresponder is a killer application in the B2C world. B2C marketers like online retailers have long used autoresponders to engage customers, bring them back, drive sales and increase the value of every customer on an ongoing basis. Some of the tricks that work really well include:

• Send follow-up emails at regular intervals within 21-30 days after the transaction with a logical sequence of order confirmaiton, thank you, new promotions and so on.
• Send a follow-up email every time a shopping cart is abandoned with a few items in it
• Personalize recommendations based on the user’s transactions in the past
• Do not send the follow-up emails from a transaction beyond the 30 day period

As I was reading a related case study earlier this morning, I couldn’t help thinking about how an autoresponder strategy is completely missing or broken in B2B – lead nurturing is the closest to autoresponders, I know but its just no where close to the level of sophistication in B2C. At ReadyContacts, we build a lot of targeted business contact lists, profiles and qualify inbound leads, so I can extrapolate and predict how few B2B marketers are doing systematic lead nurturing today. Here are some ideas to think about:

• Apply the autoresponder strategy to every inbound lead and every website visitor that can be identified
• Follow-up within minutes of the activity with an email
• Trigger an alert to the sales person for that account or geography suggesting it might be a good time to call the lead
• Personalize the reachout based on where the lead came from, what pages on the website did the lead read, and if the lead downloaded any documents. This data must be handy and communicated to everyone involved instantly.
• Schedule a combination of email and phone follow-up loops within 7 days of the activity only.
• If relevant, end the loop with a direct mail trigger which can sit on the lead’s desk as a reminder.
• Then add the lead to your CRM database for reachout via other scheduled initiatives.

These are just a few ideas. I am sure there are a ton more that are common place in B2C that we can learn form. Add your thoughts in the comments and share your B2B autoresponder stories.

Email verification software solutions have been around just as long as the need for email verification was felt and if you are looking for a solution to have your business to business email campaign lists verifed there are several options which may vary in terms of accuracy and effectiveness. Other than the pricing factor for each software have a look to see what exactly each email list verifier does and if it fulfils your expectations of accuracy?

If you have tried several email verification tools, you would know there are instances when your verifier software tells you that and email address is good while when you send an email to the same address from your webmail account, it may bounce or show you a failiure. This is because some software mainly strips the domain part of the address and validates whether the domain is correct without really checking the validity of the entire email address. This is useful for very large email lists where you may just want to filter out the complete junk records but it wont give you a very high level of accuracy. The other, more comprehnsive type of software will first check the domain with a DNS request and also emulate sending a mail and connecting with the receipients email server using SMTP. These will tell you whether the user is a valid one or not and give you better accuracy. Although there can still be issues in accuracy caused by company email security setups like anti-spam filters, firewalls and email catch configurations, there are a large number of tools that will do the job and filter out bad email addresses. Some sample options of email list verifiers are:

Advance Email Verifier by G-Lock Software 

Bulk Verifier

Maxprog’s eMail Verifier

Dynamic Mail Validator By Dynamic Software

Fast Email Verifier by Lencom Software

Atomic Email Verifier

If your marketing relies heavily on large email campaigns then investing in an email list verifier can be a good option. Here at ReadyContacts.com, while executing CRM data cleansing and email list verification for our customers, to get that extra edge in terms of accuracy, we use a combination of an inhouse email verifier software as well as a manual process. By running the lists through a combination of different software checks as well as being thouroughly scanned and rechecked by our database team, we are able to update or correct wrong emails as well as check them for bounces caused by email filters or blocks which the software checks may not be able to do as well. In any case, evalute whats best for your requirements well and if you decide that purchasing a verifier is not the best option for you, we can always help you with your email lists.  

When you are selling into mid-sized and large organizations, most likely you have multiple business contacts within your target account who drive, influence and take decisions. Depending on the industry vertical as well as the way your target accounts are organized, it is possible to have varied business contacts who take part in the decision making process. For example, if you are selling a web security product in the Education, Banking and Health care markets, you will find that the types and roles of contacts who drive the final decision in each of these verticals are varied. Understanding the web of contacts that drive and influence decisions for your product is critical for your sales and marketing success. Before you embark on expensive email, direct mail and telemarketing campaigns, the first order of business must be to acquire all business contacts at your target accounts who are expected to take part in the overall decision making process.

It is also critical to understand how every industry vertical may be different before defining who are your target contacts in each of the verticals. We recommend that you identify these by the roles and responsibilities they hold so that you get the right set of contacts to start with. Missing the mark on this critical foundational piece can lead to failure of all subsequent sales & marketing campaigns. Focus on understanding your decision makers and define them well for every vertical. Then simply build out a list of such role-specific decision makers and influencers to create your core CRM database of business contacts who you care about the most. Getting this right is crucial and its important to use the right team internally or outsource list building to the right vendors who gets it.

Fail on the core list and you will just see more failures in your sales & marketing campaigns. The list is at the heart of your sales machine, and its success or failure.