Out-of-date mailing list data is a huge problem for a company trying to improve its lead generation to achieve growth. Improve your lead generation and email marketing efforts with data enhancement strategies that increase relevance and depth of your contacts.
The following is a look at three primary reasons that you need to update your email marketing list through data enhancement!
Save Time and Money
Outdated contact information is a major factor when marketing and sales teams operate inefficiently. One of the biggest time-wasters in these business functions is attempts at communication with people that rely on outdated or inaccurate contact details. Marketers waste time and money sending out promotional pieces to the wrong prospects, and salespeople waste time on phone calls with inaccurate prospect details in hand.
But as your business ages, you’re bound to run into customers and prospects that simply lose interest in your product or service. This is normal.
Thankfully, there are ways to ensure your list is up to date with readers who will value your communication including enhancement. And before you think that such a thing is a waste of money, consider this recent report which suggests that returned mail can cost businesses up to $25 per returned item due to the time required to correct the mistake, the cost to recreate and re-send the piece, not to mention the additional postage.
Data enhancement helps you ensure you have the most current and up-to-date profile data on contacts. A thorough cleanse is even necessary at times to eliminate obsolete contacts or data. The goal is that when you send out direct mailers, deliver email marketing campaigns or call on prospects, you reach the right people and are armed with accurate information for the interaction.
Improve Customer Retention
Data enhancement isn’t only beneficial in lead generation. It can also help you optimize your email marketing and other retention campaigns with existing customers by helping you gain insights about your customers.
By improving the accuracy and depth of your client profiles, you can develop a greater understanding of your customers’ motives, needs, and preferences. From there, you can segment your customer list. When you segment customers, you organize your audience into categories so that it’s easier to appeal to their uniqueness through your marketing efforts.
Offer them more precise follow-up messages that address current experiences, and pinpoint strategies for add-on or cross-selling to drive revenue growth.
Prospect Smarter
Another major advantage of understanding the persona or avatar of your best current customers is that it helps you target people that match your most profitable customer profiles with prospecting strategies.
Prior to doing business, a CEO visualizes what their ideal customer looks like. Called an avatar or a persona, this customer, while only imagined, has everything from a name and address to a job and a salary. In creating this avatar, a business comes to understand who it is selling to, providing a foundation for their marketing.
Nonetheless, a business can attract many different personality types over a period of time. Maybe customers they never imagined! So, in continuing to market to only their original persona/avatar, a business can lose thousands of customers (and dollars) over time. Customers that they could have kept if they had come to understand this new segment of people and marketing to them—as well as prospects similar to them.
Appending current database profiles with additional data points is a common data enhancement strategy. The more elements you can add to your profiles the greater your ability to build modeling analyses to predict the prospects that offer the greatest potential responses rates and return on investment.
But that’s not all. A service like Salesgenie®’s Customer Profiles can help you to match your records to existing data. Then you can take advantage of Salesgenie’s advanced searching, sorting, mapping, and exporting capabilities, easily finding prospects that are similar to your existing best customers.
Market penetration is one of the most common and impactful growth strategies a business can employ. It involves digging deeper to entrench yourself within an existing target market. Go get people who are primed for your solution, but haven’t been engaged yet with your email marketing or other lead generation strategies. Execute your messages more effectively thanks to data enhancement.
Conclusions
The evidence for updating your mailing list data with data enhancement strategies is clear. Your efficiency in lead generation and customer retention are amplified because you have accurate and deep contact data. Go after the right prospects as well, with a more precise picture of your top customer profiles.
