On one side of the scale, you’ve amassed a wealth of information about your leads. On the other, you have volumes of outstanding content to share with them and guide them along their buying journey. There’s just one problem: data bottlenecks that throttle access between the two and limit the potential of your marketing strategy. How do you organize and distribute information to leads in a nurture program effectively, and how do you collect relevant feedback?
Opening New Channels with Data Enhancement
If your house list contains limited data, you’re limiting the scope of your interactions with your prospects. Without complete contact information, you’re constrained to connecting with them solely on familiar territory and can’t branch out into other ways that could benefit you both.
Let’s take a look at an established company with a robust list of names, job titles, purchase histories, and other key pieces of information. Some of these customers have been buying from the same company for years and never needed to enter an email address, so account records have mostly blank spaces in this vital field. Although the firm’s house list contains plenty of relevant information for a direct mail program, it lacks strong email marketing potential.
Data enhancement opens up a broad new avenue of communication for the organization, adding email addresses to records and allowing customers to deepen their relationship with the company through newsletter subscriptions and regular contact. The same principle holds true for firms that lack phone numbers, mailing addresses, or other key bits of contact information.
Trusting Your Mailing List
When companies work from clean, well-maintained lists, they earn high marks for trustworthiness from email service providers. Conversely, working with outdated lists stuffed with invalid data could lower your ranking and limit deliverability. Email that goes to an invalid address doesn’t just count against the deliverability of that individual message; it’s also a signal to ESPs that the sender may be working from an outmoded list, which in turn could mean your relevant mail could be filtered before it reaches the intended recipients.
Data enhancement processes purge old information from files and update it with new knowledge so your deliverability rates remain high and signal ESPs that you merit their trust. Working with your own list after enhancement is one possibility, but you can also expand your market with expertly maintained lists from a list management company.
Gathering Clean Data
It’s just as important to know you can trust incoming behavioral and contextual data as it is to know the data behind your outgoing marketing activities is accurate. If you’re getting insufficient or inaccurate information about your leads’ behavior, you risk misreading their signals. If you don’t know how sales-ready a prospect is, you can’t market effectively to that prospect. Only when you have unobstructed access to the analytics coming in can you pinpoint your leads’ exact position in their buying journeys and deliver the appropriate content to them.
Marketing automation systems that gather and process vast amounts of data also make the information they contain accessible to your marketing and sales teams. By putting data into context, the technology lets you see where your marketing efforts are paying significant dividends and where you can afford to scale back.
Data bottlenecks hold your firm back from its full marketing potential, but they’re simple to fix. With data enrichment, marketing automation, and a data management consultant to put everything in place, your data and the insights that come from it flow freely.
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