Five “Aha” Thoughts on Cleaning Out Your Marketing Database
One of marketing’s critical roles for its organization is demand generation. Basically — are there people or companies out there wanting to learn how your products or services can help solve a need or issue for them. If done well and consistently, marketing can end up with a huge database of names.
That sounds awesome, you say! A huge number of people just waiting for me to blast out my latest message!
In all likelihood, no. In fact, there’s the bigger probability that most of those names in your database aren’t even legitimate anymore.
2–3% of those names in your database will become “bad” in a given month, according to Sirius Decisions. That’s roughly one THIRD of your database in a year.
Letting Go
It can be really hard to say good bye. When you are responsible for generating interest (read: leads) for your organization, it’s hard to admit that some of those names aren’t good anymore. Plus, your organization needs some person or team charged with reviewing the data in order to identify the contact records that are no longer actionable.
As a result, most marketing databases grow unwieldy, cluttered with lots and lots of contact information that is no longer valid and / or not actionable for lead development or nurture.
Why is this a problem? Well, for starters, it makes managing your database harder and harder. What should be simple updates or changes become increasingly harder, more time consuming, and more error prone.
Databases with large numbers of inactionable leads also discourage marketers from being more hands-on with the data. An average marketer working with marketing data within a marketing automation platform (MAP) quickly becomes discouraged when creating segments if large numbers of “bad” contacts are included.
Also, cost. It can be EXPENSIVE to keep housing contact records within a MAP. With most organizations keeping an eye on the bottom line, wouldn’t it be a plus if you could identify a potential cost savings item?
So, what are some ways to identify the contact records that you could potentially archive or quarantine from marketing activities?
Start with the Obvious
But what are the obvious targets for removal? It may not be as obvious to all industries and companies, but here are two types of contact records that have no place staying in an organization’s MAP.
Hard Bounces
Hard bouncebacks denote a permanent delivery failure. These errors can be caused by a handful of common errors. Perhaps the most frequent is that the user name (the part before the @ symbol) does not exist. For example, 12345@redhat.com. This scenario may also be caused by a user leaving their job at that company.
The other most common reason an email will hard bounce is the domain (the part after the @) no longer exists. Think of the email addresses created for companies like Enron, Blockbuster Video or Pets.com.
Temporary Email Domains
Have you ever been browsing online and found something you thought was pretty interesting, but wanted to ensure that the site capturing your email address couldn’t email you later?
You could have provided a temporary, or disposable, email address at that site to ensure that you could download the content you found interesting, without receiving future emails from the same website. To provide a definition (via the Google answer box): “Disposable email is a service that allows a registered user to receive email at a temporary address that expires after a certain time period elapses.”
So, as a consumer, temporary email addresses give you the ability to sign up / register / download content on a site without providing your “real” email address. They retain your anonymity.
Why should marketers care about these types of email addresses? Marketers should care because these are people who are telling you they don’t want any email from your organization.
Take a Hard Look at Your Organization’s Specifics
Every company is different, but here are some additional tactics that can help you maintain an actionable marketing database.
Rejected Leads
In organizations with dedicated lead development team(s), you can get first-hand feedback on the quality of the leads that marketing generates. Maybe that particular contact wasn’t ready to buy. Or, perhaps the phone number and email were bad (and were not cleansed in your data washing machine) and the lead dev rep could not get in touch. Looking at the reason why that particular lead was rejected can give you valuable insight on what to do next (nurture versus removal).
Activity
If your marketing database has been collecting lead details for years, you’ve likely got many contact records that haven’t engaged with you in quite a while. For example, when you attended that tradeshow in 2009, you likely got the list of people who stopped by your tradeshow. Best practice would be to follow up with a hyper-relevant, targeted message immediately after the tradeshow and then to continue to engage with meaningful content.
The question to ask yourself is — Eight years later, how many people are still engaged with you? At Red Hat, we found the vast majority of people who click on emails have interacted with our marketing materials at least one other time in the last three months. Those swag grabbers from the tradeshow 8 years ago probably don’t still have the same pain points or needs anymore so reconsider if you should actively target them.
Firmographic Data
Since every organization is different, this last tactic may or may not be relevant to you. But many companies have states or countries where they cannot or choose not to do business. Why would you keep a lead from one of these locations?
Additionally, some industries may not be a good fit for your products or services. If you primarily sold to companies in the financial services industry, or to small businesses — targeting leads outside of those segments would be counter-productive.
Keeping a marketing database full of clean, actionable leads and deciding which ones have gone cold (or flat out bad) does require ongoing maintenance and buy-in across your marketing organization. But it’s a worthwhile endeavor to enable efficient, effective marketing.
