How to Avoid the Dangers of Bad Prospect Data
A campaign is only as good as your contact list. There is a direct correlation between the quality of your contact database and the results you will achieve from your email marketing and lead generation campaigns. Yet by some reports, the average prospect database is only about 65% accurate. Does your data get the attention it deserves? If not, you may be missing out on major opportunities to boost lead generation, sales and overall profitability.
No one can afford “bad” data. It is crucial to continually maintain list hygiene and keep your contact database and email lists accurate, rich and up-to-date. Whether working from your own contact database, acquiring data from a third-party vendor, or engaging with a portfolio of combined data, the importance of proper list hygiene remains the same. You must take steps to maintain a high-quality database in order to maximize marketing and lead generation efforts, keep costs down and email deliverability up.
Focus on Quality
Data ages quickly. Unless constantly maintained, prospect (and customer) databases lose accuracy at the alarming rate of 3–6% each month. Contacts move, email addresses change, and data entry errors occur. You need to perform list hygiene in order to update and validate all of the information on your mailing list and protect your email sending reputation.
Proper maintenance improves the chances that your outreach connects with the intended target. According to a study from SiriusDecisions, “for every 1% of data quality improvement marketing can generate 5–6% of incremental revenue.” Maintaining clean, high-quality customer and prospect databases will improve results. It will also reduce the time your sales staff spends on inferior contacts, increase conversion rates, and decrease the occurrence of hitting spam traps which can damage your sending reputation.
Maintaining Success
Maintaining the quality of records in your prospect database is an ongoing job. Common problems that require attention include invalid domains, data entry errors, email addresses that change due to staff changes within a company and managing inactive email addresses that could be spam traps. Whether you are looking after your own list, acquiring one from a data vendor, or using some combination of the two, these suggestions will help you keep your lists clean.
1. Establish a list maintenance process. Determine who will own data acquisition and database management. Do you need to assign an individual or a team? How often should you perform list maintenance, such as updates and data validation? Who will manage email metrics like deliverability and monitor your sending reputation? The process you establish should be based on your organization’s needs and the frequency of your campaigns and data collection.
2. Beware of spam traps. After about a year to eighteen months, inactive email addresses are in danger of becoming spam traps. It’s nearly impossible to tell on your own which email addresses are spam traps, so it is highly recommended that you remove contacts from your database who have not responded to your messages in more than 8 months. Prevention is key when it comes to protecting your reputation. Spam traps can be extremely damaging to lead generation and marketing efforts by damaging your overall sending reputation, which can make it challenging to deliver emails to all prospects in your database — even those with accurate data.
3. Keep your prospect data relevant and opt-out rates low. Does your current prospect data include up-to-date job titles for campaign targeting and accurate contact information for sales follow-ups? If not, acquiring new data may be the answer to your problems. When acquiring new data from a third-party data vendor, make sure all relevant data is included — such as job titles, industries and phone numbers. Find out what target markets are available so you can segment your marketing efforts, keep messaging relevant and opt-out rates low.
4. Know where your data is coming from. When you acquire new data, find out how the vendor ensures the quality of their data. A good third party data vendor acquires only net new names from a publisher subscriber base. This data is highly targeted, accurate and rich due to frequent, ongoing interaction and data collection. Also, make sure the data vendor does not use web-scraping techniques to obtain data, where technologies are used to troll the web looking for contacts published on websites. This technique is plagued by a high percentage of spam traps and questionable accuracy due to unhygienic and outdated data, which can lead to a damaged email reputation, low response rates and less leads for your company.
Finally, check to make sure your third party data vendor has a website and physical address. There are a lot of unscrupulous third party data vendors in the market and you want to be sure your vendor is trustworthy.
5. Look for a B2B data vendor that follows list hygiene best practices. Ensure your data provider is taking steps to maintain list quality. Ask how often the database is maintained and what the process is. How does the data provider know which contacts are relevant? Does the provider run any of their own email and lead generation programs?
Conclusion
Superior data means better leads and ultimately more sales. An accurate and high-quality prospect database can increase the chances of reaching your target audience while enhancing your sending reputation and delivering a strong overall delivery rate. You need to avoid poor list hygiene and bad data because it can cost you more in time and money to deliver campaigns and damage your sender reputation should you hit too many spam traps. It’s also important to make sure that all prospect data you acquire comes from a trustworthy source. Look for a B2B data vendor that follows list hygiene best practices and ask about their database maintenance process. If you follow these guidelines your company will reap the benefits of a maximized marketing and lead generation efforts while keeping costs down and email deliverability up.
Originally published at pureb2b.com on December 4, 2014.
