5 Steps To The Best Marketer’s Contact Database

5 Steps To The Best Marketer’s Contact Database:by Zach Okun
Your contact database is perhaps your most important asset as a marketer. You work your ass off to get people to give you their names and email addresses. You devise offers and promotions, create rich content, even pay for advertising, all with the goal of getting folks “in the door”, so to speak. And all for good reason–your contact database is the low-hanging fruit. These are the people who are interested in what you have to offer or what you have to say. These are the folks who just need a little nurturing (emails) or one more compelling offer until either they’re ready to buy. In short, your contact database is like gold, waiting to be mined.
And yet, I shudder to think of how you may be neglecting it at this very moment. If it could speak, you know what it would say? It would say, “Why don’t you treat me like your iPhone? I bet you don’t have tons of typos and wrong numbers and nonexistent people in there.”
At Optify, we are in the business of making it easy (dare I say enjoyable) to keep your contact database up to date. Heck, we’re adding all sorts of helpful information in there all the time — which pages they viewed on your website and how many times they viewed them, what company they are visiting your site from, whether they opened your emails, what they said interested them on your form, etc. And we’ve made filtering so fast and easy it’s ridiculous.
And yet, I see it all the time: Marketers don’t take the time to clean and maintain their contact database. It’s like you marketers care less about this most valuable asset of yours than you do about those dishes you’re cleaning in the office kitchen (btw, I just won $5 for inserting an Optify inside joke into this blog post ).
Yes, it’s time-consuming, and yes, it’s not especially fun work, but if you want to wring that contact database for all it’s worth, follow these 5 steps. And believe me, it is worth even more than you think.
Step 1: Understand the challenges of your data
Guess what? Your data is gonna be dirty. Wait, scratch that. Your data is already dirty. While we all plan for a perfect world, the reality is far from perfect. If you are doing the right thing, you are trying to collect leads from anywhere you can. But what that means is that you are getting people like “asdf” in your contact database. I’ll bet you also probably have a few folks named “test”.
Here’s the deal. You can’t make people follow the rules. Some people want your whitepaper but they don’t want to give you their name or email address or phone number. Other people actually do want to give you their information but they accidentally misspell something (yes, I’ve even seen people misspell their own name). The best thing you can do upfront is understand that these things can and will happen. Know that you will have duplicates. Know that you will have fakes. And if you’re using software like Optify’s, which gives you all sorts of extra information like who visits which pages from where, know that there will be problems attaining perfection. Once you accept and understand these challenges, you’re ready to move on to step 2.
Step 2: Plan for the database you want to have
What do you want to know about your prospects? Do you just want their email addresses? What about phone numbers? Job titles? Geography? Favorite color? Shoe size? How do you plan to segment these people? Some of the most common segmentation we’ve seen are geography and product interest. Geography is easy, especially with Optify figuring out where all your web visitors are coming from. As for product interest, you can do this a few ways, two popular ones being based on the pages they view (for instance, you might have different pages for Product A and Product B) or explicitly asking for this information (i.e. with a question on your forms or Landing Pages)–in this second case you can keep things tidy by using a drop-down field so everyone selects from a preset list.
The point here is that the more work you do upfront, the easier this will be forever after. So think about how you want to tackle your prospects.
Step 3: Clean your existing database
You clean your car, your house, your things. Heck, I just cleaned some dishes in the office here (just won $5 more ). So why do you think that things like data don’t also get dirty and need you to clean them? You do. You need to get rid of Mr. Test Testerson, Miss asdf hlkj, and those contacts from your millennium party when you were sad that you could no longer party like it’s 1999 (yeah, I was right there with you).
The beauty of a good Contact Manager is that it makes it easy to filter or search your contacts. I just searched for ‘Test’ and found 3 contacts. Guess what I did next? Yep, delete. You can also filter down to people who have unsubscribed from your list or whose email addresses continue to hard bounce. Some contact databases (like traditional email providers) remove these for you. With Optify, you may still have a good bit of useful information in there. Heck, you might have just made a misspelling, so we leave those contacts in there for you to clean up or clean out. Another common case we see is a company having 10 different versions–Microsoft, MSFT, MS, Microsoft Inc., MSFT Inc, microsoft.com, …. you get the idea. These things can be cleaned. All it takes is a bit of time and an appreciation for how helpful this will be for you.
If you are just now doing Step 2 (better late than never), this is a great time to either bulk update (i.e. filter to a subset of your contacts and update a field) or introduce a new custom field. For instance, you can introduce that drop-down field we were talking about (Product A vs Product B) and then assign your existing contacts appropriately. Again, do the work now and it will pay great dividends later.
Step 4: Automate what you can
The joy of modern software is that a LOT of things can be automated. The whole idea of using your website as a lead generation tool is basically an exercise in automation. The best site brings people in because of great content (this is the un-automate-able part) and then automates their flow–from page to page, then to form, then to thank you page. And on the back-end, you want this lead scored and filed or assigned appropriately.
Let’s say you have two products–A & B–and you have 2 geographies–East & West. Then you might have 4 sales people–the guy who sells Product A to people in the East, the gal who sells Product B in the East, the–you get my drift. In this case, you want to automagically have a list of people for each sales person that has only the people in their territory and interested in their product. You can call this a SmartList or whatever you want; essentially this is just a filter on your contacts (we call them “Saved Filters”–guess why? ). So now in the morning Dan can call up the Saved Filter called “Dan’s Leads” and he’s off and running. If you have more divisions, have at it. With a robust contact database capable of capturing and filtering on many dimensions, you can do all sorts of wonderful things, most of which end with a sale.
Step 5 (the last step): Babysit and Improve
Again, you clean your house, your car, your hands, all sorts of things. Your data should be no different. It will get dirty. Isn’t it easier cleaning the bathroom 1 week since the last cleaning than it is 1 year later? Well same with your data. As leads come rolling in, you need to ensure that their name isn’t “a a” or their email isn’t “test@test.com”, or… you understand.
Once you get used to cleaning your database, it really isn’t that hard. And if you want to compete for people’s attention in this day and age, you can’t just go blasting everyone with the same message. You can’t call everyone with the same script. You need to tailor your message (and your product) as specifically as you can. Well, if you follow these 5 steps, you’ll be all set. Just call up your Saved Filter named “Washington Leads from Webinar X interested in Product B who have visited the website in the last 5 days and have filled out Form A” and send them an email. I guarantee the best conversion rate you’ve ever seen.