Data-driven marketing tells you volumes about your prospects and customers, their motivations, and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Even with the best data collection, it’s possible to leave blank spots on the map unless you’re optimizing your marketing database and working with a team that knows how to make the most of the information you gather. Database services are essential to getting complete, truthful insights from your data.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the areas most commonly overlooked or misinterpreted when gathering and storing data.
Who Is Reading Your Email
It’s simple to send your email to a known address, detect when that email is opened, and monitor clickthroughs. How well do you know the person who opened it, though? That’s critical information to know if you want to implement a customized marketing strategy. Database management solutions let you expand on the knowledge you already have about your prospects, enhancing files with new knowledge to give you a more complete image of every lead who opens your email.
Why People Forward Your Messages
Your latest email has made the rounds at a new lead’s office, getting forwarded five times and to three different departments. Sounds like good news, right? It probably is, but you don’t know for sure unless you see that information in context. When aligned with that lead’s demographic and firmographic information and combined with other signals of interest, it’s great news indeed. If your lead has been otherwise silent, the sudden flurry of activity could be a blip on the radar or a sign that the email reached a non-lead – even a competitor. Database services contextualize lead activity and give you opportunities to follow up in other ways so you have a better handle on the kind of interest your email sparked.
Which Verticals to Target
Too many businesses struggle with identifying their most important and lucrative verticals. They base decisions on who they believe their market to be instead of the customers they actually have. It’s an easy mistake to make, especially without sufficient data to identify high-yield segments of your market. For example, off-market uses for everything from software to silicone powder have driven huge new markets, but identifying these early adopters is tricky without a firm foundation in data. With a well-maintained marketing database, businesses see the trajectories of their leads’ buying journeys clearly.
Where to Find Referrals
The corollary to knowing where your customers come from is knowing where to find more like them. Referrals are an outstanding source of high-scoring leads, but not all your customers are equally forthcoming in providing them. Database management earmarks the thought leaders and influencers among your customer base so you can support them via social media, loyalty programs, and other customer relationship builders.
Why Leads Leave Your Sales Funnel
Sometimes it’s as important to learn why someone leaves as it is to understand why they stay. Who is choosing not to take the next step in the buying journey, and at what point are they opting out? Is this group of lost leads lost, or were they never actually leads from the outset? Is there a significant percentage of departing leads that can be brought back? Data can provide answers here, especially as part of a larger recovery campaign and analysis.
Gathering and storing data is only part of the story; to discover the rest, you need database services that help you derive deeper insights from the knowledge you’ve gained about your leads and customers.
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