Beware of stale food and stale data
- By Eric Sonntag
- •
- 30 Dec, 2022
- •
And what a
long year it was. As always, some things (like you and me, for example) just
kept getting better with age. But some did not....
For
example, your customer and prospect data lose value with every passing week and
month, becoming increasingly outdated as people change jobs, emails, phone
numbers, companies, roles, and even their names.
Maybe it’s
time for a data diet! Say goodbye to stale data junk food! Out with the
useless and in with the useful should be your data motto. If you are not
utilizing data, is there any point in holding on to it and clogging up your CRM
system? Did it help you deliver content? Was it timely, relevant and easy to
access? Is it worth keeping? Why not apply these lessons to your data
implementation strategy?
- Get Back in touch. Your customers and prospects still need to hear from you. And, if you don’t contact your customers, your competitors may!
- Develop
and use data-driven insights. Prospect audiences in a more relevant and
engaging way?
- Think
outside the box. Ask your data vendors for proactive recommendations – they are
the experts and may already have a solution you need.
Don’t’ be stale, start your year by understanding the quality strengths and weaknesses of your data. If you have not already evaluated your in-house database or enriched the gaps, you could be behind the curve! Make sure your data vendor can act as your data concierge, pointing you to the best that the data industry has for you.
- Reduce costs. SMS marketing demands phone validation and is a sure bet to reduce messaging costs. Phone validation can separate land-line phone numbers from mobile phone numbers. With this, you don’t have to worry about your business wasting money sending messages to numbers no longer in use or unable to receive an SMS message on a landline. Improve your insight into customer behavior.
- Better customer insight. Phone validation can reveal meaningful insight to improve your ROI. With a valid phone # you use any number of services to reverse append valid postal addresses and in many cases demographic insight to further improve your marketing results.
- Better Marketing Returns. Eventually, you will notice a significant increase in your marketing return on investment.
Did you know… there are zombies in your contacts file? And, just like zombies everywhere, you can’t always tell that they are zombies ...until it’s too late!
These are special DATA ZOMBIES
They don’t commit their evil deeds until you’ve pushed the SEND button. Then off they go into the world, entrusted with your precious message and determined to make sure that it never reaches your targets. Now, your entire campaign is infected with reduced open rates and sub-optimal ROI. Perfectly innocent-looking to the untrained eye, these decayed addresses, spam traps, catch-alls, and dysfunctional domains careen diabolically through the plumbing of the Internet, yielding only bounces and failed deliveries where real recipients once flourished and engaged.
But zombie management is just one component of the larger issue of data maintenance. Keeping data updated, validated, and complete is foundational to transforming data into insights and insights into relationships.
DATA DECAY NEVER SLEEPS
According to Dun & Bradstreet, 25-33% of mail addresses change every year. In the next hour, 58 business addresses will change, 11 companies will change their names, and 41 new businesses will open …not to mention how many companies will go out of business.
Unfortunately, keeping pace with these changes is not a problem solved with data tricks (or treats). It requires the use of information from outside the virtual walls of your company, data that has been acquired with proprietary, real-world verification processes, deployed with consistency and regularity. The data providers who manage the updating problem take the burden of data verification off your shoulders, doing what they do best so that you can focus on your wheelhouse ...and use their data and your own to make it effective.
But the referential data that you need to bring your data zombies back to life is problematic for the same reasons it's useful: It's from outside of your enterprise ...and it's outside of your data ecosystem. How do you integrate these datasets to optimize your own information?
There are two approaches to this challenge. One is to use technology to integrate the data. For this, you can look to the data vendor, who is ready to sell you a solution (and accompanying services) to enable you to consume their data. For each data source, you'll need the vendor-specific solution. Or you can look to a data integration solution provider like Matchbook Services [ https://matchbookservices.com/ ] for a stand-alone toolset that enables you to manage multiple data sources.
The other alternative for utilizing 3rd-party data is to turn to a data and data services provider that will manage the data acquisition and integration problem for you. Preferably, one that is data-source-agnostic. Ideally, one that can put decades of B2B data experience to work on helping you achieve your lead generation and account-building objectives, getting you the data you need from the right sources, and then making it easy for you to put that data to use.
If this approach sounds promising, contact me or visit Alliance 4 Data [ https://www.alliance4data.com/]. We are specialists at finding your zombies and administering the only known cure for data zombification: Updated, validated, verified, fresh-from-the-source information!
According to our primary research, 85% of B2B marketers cite email marketing as their top tactic used to drive account-based marketing (ABM) efforts. So, you may think it is a perfected practice, but we receive daily requests from customers asking for email marketing best practices and ways to improve their results. The email game continues to change, and new findings are always being revealed. Follow these tips to ensure your campaigns garner strong results and generate the optimal amount of leads for your marketing and sales teams.
1. Segment Your Audience
Sending a generic email out to a large list of random prospects will only get you marked as junk and result in a ton of opt-outs. Email segmentation and targeting are among the most difficult marketing tasks, but they can yield the greatest rewards when done properly. Knowing exactly who your ideal audience is will also help you create targeted messaging that can help drive conversion.
2. Use Quality Data
You can spend hours creating engaging content and eye-catching images for your campaigns, but if you do not leverage the most clean, accurate data to build your B2B email lists, you will be left with a high bounce rate, low deliverability, and a reduced ROI. You do have to set realistic expectations when it comes to increasing email marketing deliverability. Yes, it can be discouraging to receive many bounce backs, but it is important to note that according to Constant Contact, the average bounce rate can be anywhere between 6% and 13% depending on the industry.
That is why data and messaging you use is so vital. Clean your data, validate email deliverability, and enrich.
3. Watch Your Image-to-Text Ratio
To increase higher open rates and your campaign’s effectiveness, try to use a ratio of 80% text to 20% image. Sure, image and design elements can make an email look modern and sleek, but they should be used sparingly if you want to keep your deliverability rates high.
4. Check Those Links
Avoid using shortened links (such as Bitly) in the body of your email. You can always hyperlink text, but make sure the hyperlink you use is the full URL. Spam filters check your URLs, so be sure to link to reputable, safe sites.
Quick Email Marketing Tip: Do not forget the unsubscribe link! Giving recipients the ability to opt out of your emails is a requirement of the CAN-SPAM Act. Plus, weeding out those who are not interested allows you to spend your time, and money, on the audiences who have the highest propensity to buy.
5. Get to the Point
As marketers, we know better than anyone what it is like to be inundated with emails and offers. That is why it is so critical to create targeted, concise messages that speak directly to your audience. Do not waste their time with overly florid language and empty promises. Tell them exactly what you want them to know. Are you entering them into an email nurture campaign with the hope of selling them a tool or service? Tell them.
Make sure you entice readers to stay with relevant content, honest messaging, and a way to contact you if they are interested in learning more information than your email copy provides. It’s also tempting to include a copious number of calls to action (CTAs), but sticking to one primary ask of your audience will likely result in higher click-through rates and better conversions.
6. Skip the Aggressive Email Subject Lines
One of our team members recently received an email from a retail brand that said “DO NOT DELETE” in the subject line. Not only did that make her distrust its origins, but she also felt it was quite off-putting and not very descriptive.
Sending emails with overly aggressive subject lines and phrases (such as, “Act Now!”) can severely compromise your email deliverability and your brand’s reputation. Instead, focus on copy that will catch your buyer’s eye in a positive way. Be forthcoming about what is in the email and skip the excessive exclamation points.
7. B2B Email Marketing Examples — What to Include:
A high-resolution banner image.
Clear, relevant banner copy
Professional, clean template that is easy to read.
Web-friendly font
Body copy that is engaging, informative, and concise.
A clear call-to-action link or button (one or two max) that directs readers towards the action you want them to take
The post B2B Email Marketing Best Practices [ https://www.alliance4data.com/b2b-email-marketing-best-practices/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campa... ] appeared first on Alliance 4 Data [ https://alliance4data.com/ ] , March 20, 2021.
Eric Sonntag
IT organizations and business units turn to iPaaS providers to eliminate the rigidity that burdens SaaS integration; allowing business users to compose workflows between these platforms, data, users, and business processes. The ensuing obsession among iPaaS providers is a drumbeat of no-code or low-code API middleware-like solutions that tout a simple GUI, workflow, and process orchestration capability.
"Once you start on the integration journey, it isn’t very long before you have hundreds of integrations ..." – Dell, February 2020, (Murali Anakavur, IT Director, Gilead Sciences)
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The SaaS explosion has scattered data across a dozen workspaces. Years of SaaS investment has created a remarkable set of digital products to manage our work - a broad range of capability and an alphabet soup of CRM, HCM, MDM, UcaaS, BI, SCM, and ERP capabilities to produce better business outcomes.
These integration-as-as-service delivery models "enable integration across the cloud, making it possible to share data between systems as well as third-party vendors in real-time” – says Mulesoft, 2020.
But effective data-use, not integration alone, is the keystone to iPaaS solution success.
Whether for a 360-degree customer view, smart market segmentation and message personalization, supply chain logistics, or effective team collaboration, the insights derived from data are fundamental to a better customer experience. Most iPaaS solutions don’t promote a meaningful discussion around data-integration, much-less effective data-use. Celigo is on the right track promoting "Data integration [as] a combination of technical and business processes used to combine data from disparate sources into meaningful and valuable information”.
But what is valuable data?
For data, the hallmarks of value are accessibility and clarity.
Can the right people get the data they need when they need it? And does that data expand their understanding to drive better decision-making? When data is available and useful, it feeds a positive, heuristic feedback process in which good data supports better decisions while enhancing the team’s willingness and ability to integrate data into their work activity. But if data is ambiguous, it generates a loss of trust in the value of data itself.
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The resulting under-utilization of data will diminish further investment into iPaaS.
iPaaS and customer experience will fail.
Enterprise teams can connect their touchpoints and interactions with a given customer with good data. But in the real world, holistic data management strategies take a back seat to the near-term needs of the functional teams that own their own data silos and enterprise applications. CRM and sales force automation and spend management applications have their own ways of building databases that are not easily shared. Fortunately, iPaaS technologies, solutions, and services can bring an organization closer to its data integration goals.
Data is Behind every Successful Integration
The ideal iPaaS solution will Provide:
Robust Data Integration and Virtualization.
The expertise or the third-party partnership that can put the appropriate skills and data management solutions and practices to work behind the integration.
Capability (or integration) to process data, validate and enrich data to an enterprise-wide master data management platform, analytics, and the data stewardship practices that enable it.
If your iPaaS provider is incapable of providing data-expertise, governance, and integration design oversight – move on.
is data that exists in a state of being unknown, unintelligible, and opaque. With obscurity comes the loss of trust in the data, its under-utilization, and lack of value that is required to make informed business decisions.
A single record of truth for your business decisioning needs doesn’t have to be elusive; nor the broken promise of your Data Officer or CIO who committed to deliver the trusted information you expect – without obscurity.
From frequent company moves to ownership changes resulting from mergers and acquisitions, to even seemingly benign shifts in the normal course of operations, a vast array of events eventually lead to customer data becoming more obscure. The accurate and timely reflection of these changes can vary greatly across the organization’s line of business applications.
Each root cause of data obscurity supports a strong business case for data clarity that hinges on a data quality foundation built with processes, governance, and active oversight.
Removing data obscurity is further complicated by classic Big Data challenges that create an unwieldy variety, velocity, and volume of information moving around your enterprise. For example, your marketing team’s data challenges when performing customer segmentation analysis can likely be traced back to your organization’s multiple, siloed CRM, marketing automation, and other data storage systems, each of which has its own way of organizing and using data. Customer data is a painful example of data that is prone to obscurity. The sheer weight and speed of data input to your organization from sales interactions and marketing campaigns can be overwhelming. Poor data governance further clouds the lens by which you view your data.
Each root cause of data obscurity supports a strong business case for data clarity that hinges on a data quality foundation built with processes, governance, and active oversight. Whether for informed customer 360 analysis, market segmentation, supply chain risk mitigation, or vendor stability monitoring, data clarity is fundamental for effective enterprise data management.
There are many paths to take as you begin your journey to data clarity. It starts with a simple but mission-critical process of identity resolution: a process to match your customers to a trusted, structured data source and assignment of a unique, persistent identifier for each company you do business with.
Identity resolution always begins with another data “v”: verification – and more and more enterprises are looking to pre-mastered, pre-verified referential third-party data to confirm business partner identities. Your data stewards, the people who gather, analyze, and curate your data, play a vital role in preparing your source data for identity resolution, governing the valuable frame of reference for your decision making.
Fortunately, there is a spectrum of solutions that can bring you closer to your data clarity goals. These can range from the ideal of an enterprise-wide master data management platform and the data stewardship practices that enable it, to more tactical, scalable ‘start small’ data stewardship practices and automation services that enable more timely identity resolution.
The data quality solution provided by Alliance 4 Data Services is an example of a 'start-small-and-grow' approach to address the data quality needs and challenges many organizations face. By matching your data to Dun & Bradstreet’s pre-mastered commercial content on hundreds of millions businesses globally, you can master your business records based on confidence criteria you define.
It’s no surprise that data quality remains a key aspiration and critical need for organizations. But achieving and maintaining data quality requires processes, governance, and active oversight. The combination of trusted third-party pre-mastered data with the tools and technology that best fit your organization will set you on the right path.
Obscurity squashed; clarity achieved.
