As part of being in business, you will be trying your utmost to generate leads. This really goes without saying, otherwise you’ll quickly find out that your business is not viable. In generating those leads you will almost certainly be using a multi-pronged approach - PR/advertising, networking and marketing being the avenues that probably generate the majority of leads for most businesses. In this article I’d like to focus just on marketing, as that is one area where how you manage your data is of utmost importance.
Traditionally, marketing has involved running mail-shot or telephone campaigns. You spoke to a marketing company about what your message was and who you wanted to target, they purchased the data on your behalf for this one-off use and, usually, sorted out the logistics of envelope stuffing and posting or making the phone calls. And this still happens…a lot. Done well it can be a very successful method of generating warm leads; if someone responds to a good campaign, then you know they are very interested in your product or service (or, at least, the freebie you’re offering). If it is not done well, though, then you may as well throw your money down the drain for all the good it will do you. Done really badly, a marketing campaign could even seriously damage your company’s reputation, and a lot of time and cost will be needed to restore it.
Traditional marketing campaign styles have been augmented over time with alternative methods of getting in touch with their potential customers. Email campaigns have been around for quite a while now, and more recently viral campaigns have appeared which, although they are in a sense more advertising than marketing, they do target a particular type of person. Regardless, the basics of marketing still apply…create a good message, target the right people and make sure you can deal effectively with the responses.
So why should you consider purchasing your data outright rather than pay for one-off use each time you run a campaign. After all, if you do run your own database you need to worry about things like keeping the data fresh and making sure you record the various preferences (such as email opt-in status) accurately. Things that your data provider does to a greater or lesser extent now. To answer that question, I believe you need to have three considerations:
- Size of your potential market
- Frequency of your marketing campaigns
- The data you require to accurately target the right prospects
Size
Size isn’t everything, but if you have a highly specialised service or product, and are targetting every single company in the UK, then maintaining that database is going to require a lot of resources. However, if yours is very much a local service or product then you will probably have a limited amount of data that may well be manageable with your available resources.
Campaign frequency
If you run a lot of campaigns then it can get very expensive buying the same data over and over again. Bearing in mind that you will still need to maintain an opt-out list, and de-duplicate your purchased data against that list each time, it is certainly worth consider whether in the long term it is cheaper to make the extra initial outlay of purchasing your data for multiple uses, and purchase the resource needed to refresh that data on a regular basis and check for changes (e.g. change of address or the death of a contact).
Data Required
Sometimes the data you need to accurately target a market either isn’t readily available, or is expensive to purchase on a regular basis. So whilst, for instance, you can segment your market based on postcode quite cheaply, it would be more expensive to target companies running a particular brand of CRM software as that information is not so easily gathered. Therefore, you may need to segment as best you can to restrict the initial data set and then carry out a telephone-based data cleansing campaign to gether the required information. Having doen that, haven’t you already carried out the steps necessary to create you database in the first place? So it’s sensible to consider maintain that hard-won information rather than throwing is away when the campaign is done. After all, someone else may be will ing to pay you for it (assuming you gathered the relevant opt-in) !
Having the correct answer to all three questions is only the starting point to making the decision to maintain you own data. You still need to be sure you can afford the investment needed to maintain that data, as it will degrade more quickly than you think. Using year-old data in a campaign is almost guaranteed to cause you problems, with wrong addresses, deceased recipients, etc. So either you or a telemarketing company will need to look after your data on a regular basis. Although the cost can be spread by, for instance, targetting a quarter of your database for cleasing every three months, and by using internal resource to carry out data cleansing should they be in contact with a customer/prospect for any other reason. A bit of lateral thinking goes a long way in the world of data maintenance.
One last word, be very careful of the method you use to cleanse your database. This is one time when you want response rates as high as possible, so post and email campaigns should be used sparingly as you will get responses in the region of 2% and 10%-20% respectively, if you do them well! Done badly, you may get no response at all, and your data will still be out of date. My experience is that a telemarketing campaign works best, and again a little lateral thinking may also generate some leads in the process too - but that should always be viewed as an added bonus.
