Is Your B2B Campaign Doomed to Fail? - Lighthouse List

According to Dun and Bradstreet, in a 60 minute window based on a eight hour day, 211 businesses will move, 429 business telephone numbers will change or be disconnected, 743 new businesses will open their doors, 12 businesses will file for bankruptcy and 284 Chief Executive Officer or owner changes will occur.

Just this week, here at Lighthouse List, we received direct mail from a national large cable brand and a large financial brand to two ex-employees, one who left the company nine years ago and another seven years ago, as well as another piece of mail for a business who moved out of our office nine years ago and is now probably out of business. In fact, we’ve received in total over 50 bad letters in 3 weeks from the cable brand to the same people every week as well as 6 bad letters out of 9 from the financial brand.

Yet this is the reality of B2B marketing. If you’re not taking regular action to update your data, you could be wasting your marketing budget, which can become extremely costly, especially for B2B campaigns that often rely heavily on direct mail campaigns.

Return to Sender

So what exactly can a company do to improve the state of their B2B marketing database?

First of all, marketing teams should be using returned mail to update their campaign lists. The same way that email marketing platforms make a note of hard bounces and remove these from email lists, marketing teams need to do the same with their direct mail lists.

Yes, it might seem tedious but with tools like business card scanners, it’s becoming increasingly quicker and more efficient to update your CRM using physical data. And, given the additional costs that go into direct mail - printing & postage - updating your direct mail lists is arguably key to ensuring your ROI.

Prioritize Recency

Once you’ve cleaned up your CRM using returned mail, take a look at the rest of your database. When was the last time it was updated? Stale data will most certainly result in a low-performing campaign. As a rule of thumb the average CRM data decays at a rate of 30% per year, though some say this can even increase to 70%. If you’re planning a future campaign, be ruthless and only select data this is fresh and up-to-date.

De-dupe If Required

If you work with contact lead forms, you may also find that you’ve been inadvertently creating duplicate contacts within your CRM. In a report by Integrate examining the data quality of more than 775,000 leads, 15% of the leads were duplicates. Consider using a data cleansing tool that can clean up your database in minutes without the need to manually search for duplicates.

Data Linkage For Higher Quality

Another possibility to test the accuracy of your database is to use linkage. Using data from other channels, such as email, marketers can verify and validate their data to ensure maximum accuracy. This is an exercise we do as standard at Lighthouse List, using cross-channel data sourcing to be sure of the quality of the data we hold.

Work with a B2B Data Partner

Taken a hacksaw to your CRM and need to increase your reach again? According to research from Demand Gen Report, 77% of those surveyed state they have a data acquisition strategy in place, yet only 16% of companies rated their data acquisition strategy as solid. With Lighthouse List, you can achieve both accuracy and scale! Lighthouse List only provides quality and accurate data, ensuring your B2B marketing yields results.

Our data has been validated multiple times by independent evaluator TruthSet and each time it was found to be amongst the most accurate when compared to other leading data providers. Our strength lies in our cross-channel data sourcing and verification process. Our data has at least 5 matches from different data sources ensuring maximum data accuracy. Plus our B2B data is truly multi-channel and available for direct mail, email, telemarketing, cookie and IP address targeting.

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