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As a B2B lead data company we take marketing and business contacts databases very seriously and and lay a lot of stress on keeping them in shape, updated and periodically cleansed. Yet, when you put things across in the perspective that Jon Miller did in his recent blog post on the Marketo Blog titled “Unleash Your House Database with Lead Nurturing” it makes you step back and really think about how valuable your marketing database is. The part of the post I am refering to is the same one Jason Stewart talks about on his Demandblog post “Your Biggest Untapped Marketing Asset?“ 

That database is a significant asset that gets undervalued at most companies. Think about it: if your average cost per new contact is even just $20 (a low assumption) and you have a modest database of 250,000 contacts, then your house database is a $5 million asset. Do you treat it as such? How many other assets of that size do you have in your company? How much revenue does that asset generate for your business?

The question that caught my attention was “do you treat it as such?”. Companies can be generous in spending on acquiring new business contacts and new leads. You can have a sizable budget set aside to run new lead generation campaigns, buy contact lists, subscribe to business contacts databases and so on. What about the existing databases of business contacts already in the database? How much goes into removing expired data and making sure the value of your existing database doesn’t deteriorate?

If you consider a 250,000 contact database valued at $5 million and also consider every year anywhere from 20% – 50% of that data could go bad or become invalid it would mean a minimum loss of $1 million. That is a considerable loss! How much would you invest to keep that database in shape and are you currently giving it the attention it needs? 

It’s something to think about!