NetProspex - Blog

Find the love in your B2B prospects with lead nurturing

Here at NetProspex, we know to get the most value from a prospect database, marketers have to be agile and skilled in managing leads at various stages.  One of the most important things on a B2B marketer's endless to-do list is to develop an on-going strategy for prospects who are not ready to buy. The old days of relying on the cream of the crop (sales-ready leads) to drive pipeline while ingoring the rest are over, as best-in-class companies reap the benefits of a lead nurturing and lead scoring strategy. 

Eloqua's Jesse Noyes has developed a wonderfully original way of looking at buying stages and nurturing folks from one to the next, and back:

Eloqua's 8 Stages of Lead Nurturing

Source: http://blog.eloqua.com/8-stages-of-lead-nurturing/

Locking Eyes
You lock eyes at a bar or the supermarket, and you think there’s something special. This is where you approach to see if there’s that initial spark. This stage involves a lot of small talk. You don’t know much about your prospect – he or she might have filled out a form or downloaded a white paper – so this is where asking the right questions is vital. It’s all about seeing if there’s any chemistry.

First Date
You’ve determined there’s some mutual interest. Now it’s time to see if that spark has lasting power. This is where you go out for a bite to eat and ask a lot of questions of each other. You have explicit criteria to investigate (how big is her or his company, what’s your prospect’s title, etc.) as you build a basic prospect profile. This is where you are both deciding whether it’s worth a second date. If you’re not already, you’ll want to employ a robust lead scoring program to keep track of your lead’s movements and makes sense of his or her behavior.

Dating Casually
The first date went well. Next, you spend your time getting to know each other better. What is it your lead’s larger aspirations? How can you be part of accomplishing your lead’s ambitions? Likely your lead will want to take it slow and easy while you pursue him or her. At this point you know you have a qualified lead, but you want to get your lead more invested in buying specifically from you.

Getting Serious
Dating is going pretty well. Your lead has shown a level of engagement with your content and brand. You know he or she is looking at a more serious relationship. You keep the nurture campaign going, providing high-value content, as you try to take your burgeoning relationship to the next level.

The Boyfriend’s Back
Doesn’t it always go this way? Once your lead starts getting serious about you is probably right about the time the competition will show up. This might be a pervious relationship your lead is having difficulty letting go of, or someone else just vying for his or her attention. You’ll want to differentiate yourself. This could be with price-point comparisons, demonstrating the level of ROI you bring to the table, etc. The idea is to appear as the better bet.

Engagement
So your lead is sold. Now it’s time to meet his or her family, and vice versa. You want to make a good impression among the other stakeholders in the relationship. Be ready to show why you are the best match to the executives and other internal teams your lead reports to. Also, prep your company to be warm and welcoming.

Marriage
This is a pretty obvious one. You’ve impressed your lead, his or her family, and everyone has come together for the wedding. The champagne may be flowing, but remember a successful marriage requires just as much, if not more, work than dating.

Remember the Anniversaries
Every healthy relationship requires work. To keep the marriage healthy you need to make sure your customer is getting stellar service. But you also want to ensure they are taking advantage of all you have to offer. You’ll want to gauge how they are using the product. Are they using several features or just one? Are they engaging with educational content you send their way? Be sure to check in early and often. Like any relationship, you want to keep the lines of communication open.

Source: http://blog.eloqua.com/8-stages-of-lead-nurturing/

"If done well, successful nurturing can build a strong brand and solution preference long before a prospect is actively engaged in a buying process. Lead nurturing software allows for leads to be tracked and content delivery to be automated through various marketing channels." - Eloqua

Are you feelin the love? 

 

100 Million Contacts!

We've officially hit the 100 million mark for the number of contacts traded to the NetProspex db!

Read the full release.

"B2B companies share a common need to create demand today, this month, this quarter," said Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex.

"This milestone recognizes the success of crowd-sourcing as a way for companies to turn contacts they have into prospects they need. Gaining access to all potential buyers in their audience has accelerated the sales process of our clients, and is a great example of crowd sourcing in the fast-growing data cloud."

Clients using the NetProspex contact trading platform use the service to pool contacts gathered (i.e. at a trade show) and download carefully targeted new prospects.

"The trading community at NetProspex has been an integral tool for our sales and marketing efforts," said Tim Doscher, CTO of Enteracloud."What sets NetProspex apart is the information is consistently higher quality than other contact record providers. Their accurate data and ease of accessibility has been our secret weapon for direct access to decision makers."

According to Dave Kalstrom, founder of Outbound Excellence,"NetProspex's trading feature is a zero-cost way to grow prospect databases for clients."

Additionally, Michael Turi, President of Health Care Reach commented, "I continually use NetProspex as the trading user-interface is easy to use, I can find targeted emails for contacts, and the support team is great."

The Jig is Up. What’s behind Salesforce.com’s re-branding of Jigsaw to Data.com

Gary Halliwell, CEO NetProspex

• Read Write Web article about data.com
• Discussion on FOCUS.com

Along with 42,000 other people, I attended Dreamforce in San Francisco last week. It’s a staggering event, from the Jobs-like keynote by CEO Mark Benioff, to guest speakers like Google CEO, Eric Schmidt and even an appearance by Metallica at a private concert for thousands of Salesforce customers. 

Amidst all the hoopla, Salesforce surprised many with its announcement that it is rebranding Jigsaw to Data.com. Concurrently, the company announced a deal with Dun & Bradstreet to include its company data in the new Data.com product. 

What’s with the Jigsaw brand and why is Data.com better? What does a deal with Dun & Bradstreet mean? 

With attendance almost doubling each year, Salesforce’s momentum is testament to the company’s vision. By being first to market to harness cloud-computing with a platform business model in the CRM space, Salesforce has single-handedly fostered a bloom of innovation in business processes delivering significant value to thousands of nimble Salesforce customers in an area that really matters in these tough economic times - sales. 

Salesforce has considerably disrupted the CRM market by fundamentally shifting the innovation model in the CRM marketplace, taking it out of the imaginations of a couple of dozen product managers at Oracle or SAP and putting it into the hands of thousands of product managers and developers across Salesforce’s AppXchange ecosystem. This allows hundreds of partner companies to offer an array of sales tools and services to Salesforce customers.  

So what’s with the abandonment of the Jigsaw brand and the Dun & Bradstreet announcement? The answer to both is quality. The Jigsaw database continues to grow through its crowd-sourcing roots as B2B customers pool contact data, but we hear directly from partners and customers alike – and our own testing confirms - that the quality of the contact data continues to underwhelm.

The D&B partnership is focused around improving company data - something NetProspex did a good while ago to provide marketers with reliable company affiliation data. In other words, this partnership within data.com is much ado about nothing, beyond its deep integration into the Salesforce interface.

The quality of the Jigsaw contact information remains an issue.  The mechanism of sales people cleaning bad data just isn’t working because too many people game the system to gain points for free data. One adjustment to a contact record earns a point towards viewing another record. Besides, who wants their sales people cleaning someone else’s data? Crowd-sourcing business contacts clearly works in gathering data, but getting the crowd to clean the data is something NetProspex realized early on is not a viable solution. 

In the past couple of years, Salesforce has been busy building or acquiring various strategic assets in the areas of collaboration with Chatter, social media monitoring through its acquisition of Radian6, and crowd-sourced Jigsaw for integrated sales data. Clearly Salesforce is revolutionizing the sales desktop and this bump in the road with Jigsaw is something it needs to overcome. We believe we can help.

For Jigsaw customers in marketing who need to drive leads, NetProspex has solved the quality issue, maintaining our database of millions of contacts at a continual accuracy level suitable for marketing automation. Our process validates data as it is contributed by users with a three-dimensional approach to verification including email, social, and manual phone validation. By aging out old data automatically, we strive to improve the accuracy of each customer’s purchase. No customer is harmed in these processes, as we do not ask customers to correct data. So if you are a Jigsaw customer and need a cleaner source of data, or new verified contacts at a scale that suits your business, let us know.

How to Create B2B Marketing Buzz: Part II

The Buzz Marketing Formula

Alice Farmiloe - Marketing & Katie Martell - Director of Buzz

What is buzz? For marketers, buzz is the amplification effect that happens when great content meets great promotion.

 

In B2B marketing, buzz-building incorporates content marketing, PR and web 2.0 platforms including email and social media.  

Buzz-building is one of the many tools for marketers today who want to create positive association, awareness, excitement, or anticipation about their product, message or service. 

In this two-part series, we'll explore the content and promotion strategy behind a successful buzz-building campaign by NetProspex.

• PART I: The Buzz Formula Part I: Buzz-worthy B2B content
• PART II: The Buzz Formula Part II: How to Create (and measure) B2B Buzz

***

The Buzz Formula Part II: How to Create (and measure) B2B Buzz 

 Part II of the buzz formula is using PR and Web 2.0 to generate awareness, excitement, and positive buzz about your content. 

[ Great content] + [ Great PR & Web 2.0 Strategy ] = BUZZ

 

How to generate exposure:

1. Partner with a great PR agency

2. Target high profile media outlets, key industry pubs, and relevant bloggers

3. Empower your community of clients/employees/partners to share

4. Reach targeted prospects via email

5. Engage with the buzz, repurpose content and extend the conversation

Our strategy:

PR: We partnered with the North 6th Agency to develop a targeted media outreach plan that included top-tier media platforms such as Fox Business News and The Huffington Post, tech publications such as Business Insider and eConsultancy, as well as key industry bloggers including The Funnelholic and Savvy B2B Marketing. 

Web 2.0: We made it easy for everybody on the NetProspex team to share the social report with their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter networks, and encouraged them to do so via email.

We also reached out to organizations whose audiences would also benefit from the report, like Eloqua (marketing automation), who helped spread the good buzz: 

 

Email Marketing: Eating our own dog food, we downloaded a list of VPs and Directors of Marketing across the nation from NetProspex.com, and shared the report with them as a means of introducing our brand in a valuable, helpful way.  We also shared the report with our clients and newsletter subscribers.

Engagement and repurposing: We had staff on hand to answer questions about the report publicly via Twitter, on media sites that allowed comments, and on LinkedIn. To repurpose the report, an upcoming episode of The Social Call was dedicated to the findings, and one of the companies featured in the report, Volt Information Sciences, issued a press release announcing their spot in the rankings of our report.  

Measurement:

Following the launch of our 4th Social Business Report, we decided to see just how effective our content marketing campaign had been. While hard to quantify the readership of publications, the sharing of articles across Twitter is easily trackable. We used Tweet Reach to measure how many Twitter accounts had been exposed to our social report in the 2 weeks immediately following the launch by mentions of the term "NetProspex".

The results: we reached 1,200,218 people and created 4,582,340 impressions! 

Click here for TweetReach's definition of these two figures.  

Hint: TweetReach reads up to the last 5 days, so it's necessary to run multiple reports every 5 days or upgrade to their enterprise service.

Are you under pressure to explain the result, ROI, or value of your content marketing or PR spend? Figures like this demonstrate the exposure gained, and the reach achieved by your buzz-building strategy. 

 Special thanks to Alice Farmiloe, NetProspex Intern, for her buzz-building contributions! 

 

 

How to Create B2B Marketing Buzz: Part I

The Buzz Marketing Formula

Alice Farmiloe - Marketing & Katie Martell - Director of Buzz 

What is buzz? For marketers, buzz is the amplification effect that happens when great content meets great promotion.

In B2B marketing, buzz-building incorporates content marketing, PR and web 2.0 platforms including email and social media.  

Buzz-building is one of the many tools for marketers today who want to create positive association, awareness, excitement, or anticipation about their product, message or service. 

In this two-part series, we'll explore the content and promotion strategy behind a successful buzz-building campaign by NetProspex. 

• The Buzz Formula Part I: Buzz-worthy B2B content
• The Buzz Formula Part II: How to Create (and measure) B2B Buzz

 ***

 

PART I: The Buzz Formula Part I: Buzz-worthy B2B content

Part I of the buzz formula is developing something worth the buzz. "Let's give 'em something to talk about" should be your mantra! 

[ Great content ] + [ Great PR & Web 2.0 Strategy ] = BUZZ

How to create buzz-worth B2B content:

1. Do your research. 

Just as markets can be saturated with similar product offerings or services, the media your audience consumes can be overwhelmed with lookalike content. Write and create something different, something valuable, and something new. 

2. Tell a story

We're inclined to relate to and digest stories, with characters, settings, and plots. This style is a surefire way to write your content so it hooks and engages your audience. 

3. Be entertaining

What is the most viewed content on the web? Funny cat videos and silly memes like dancing hamsters and people laying face-down in unexpected places. There's enough distracting your audience, even your technical B2B buyer, so don't waste your (or your readers) time with boring content. 

4. Be informative

Is your content useful and valuable to your reader? Will it help them do their job better today or next week? Does it position you as a brand to trust and work with? Let's hope so. So much marketing is fluff, BS, jargon, and gobbledygook. Knock it off. If it's not useful, don't try to pretend it is. Be a resource, be informative, and always create value.

5. Relate to your bigger brand picture. 

Your brand story connects your company mission to your products/services in an engaging, relatable way. Your content should add to that story, and speak to what kind of company you are and how you can help. 

How NetProspex created buzz-worthy content: The NetProspex Social Business Report

As a business prospect database, we have millions of records containing job titles and social media profiles for contacts in thousands of industries and geographic markets. This asset was the foundation for our Social Business Report. 

1. 12 million contacts with social media profiles in our database were analyzed. 

2. We told a story of the evolution of business communication by illustrating the widespread adoption of social media within the US business community. 

3. The data was easy to digest visually with stellar-looking infographics. 

4. To maximize relevance, we categorized our findings by company, industry, job function, and city. 

5. Our branding story was the key here. As the first B2B prospect database to incorporate social data in our records, the report reflects our dedication to helping clients reach new customers with the latest aspects of business communication, including social media. 

Read the full report -- and check out Part II to find out how we created buzz around the report and its findings. 

Talking Quality with Jimmy Becker

Some specifics on NetProspex’s approach to quality:

I recently joined NetProspex to lead our strategy to continue to enhance the quality and quantity of the content we offer. I wanted to use this opportunity to summarize our approach to quality – how we define it, how we measure it, and most importantly, how ensure it is as high as it can reasonably be.“Reasonably” is an important qualifier because there is always a trade-off between maximizing quality and maximizing quantity.

For us, quality is straightforward:  

Can you connect to this person via the phone number and/or email address that we have provided in our business contact record?

If you can reach that person through email and/or phone, then we have provided an accurate record to you; if you cannot, either because the person has moved on or because the contact information is incorrect, then we have not provided you with a quality record. In our world, quality is perishable and dynamic. People change jobs and what was a good contact record yesterday may be a bad one today. We estimate that the accuracy of our database “decays” at a rate of 1.5% per month. That is, 1.5% of the records that were good last month are no longer accurate one month later. This is simply the dynamic nature of the information and why we constantly replenish and refresh the data that we have.

Before I describe how we measure our quality, I want to first discuss how we compile our database and what content is contained within it. We have a database of 24+ million records of B2B business contacts, where each record contains a full business card profile. This contact information includes a phone number, postal address and an email address with a business domain (i.e., no personal emails). For each person, we also have her/his job title and company affiliation.

Our content collection is a crowd-source model whereby anyone in the B2B sales and marketing community can trade her/his business contacts into our database in exchange them for a like number of fresh contacts. This trading community is continually trading in new records for this consideration of refreshing their contact lists.

To give you a sense of the scale, we receive millions of new records each month. However, we do not accept most of these traded records. Our quality control processes reject the majority of these trades because the records are incomplete, they contain personal emails, they duplicate existing records of ours, or the quality is not up to our standards. These rejected records never make it into our database. For the subset of records that make it through our initial screen – we call it CleneStep – we then put them through a second process of verifying the quality of the traded records. To do this, we take a sample of each trade and telephone-verify the contact information.

We also do multiple tests on the emails, including offering contacts an opportunity to opt-out of our database. We assign an accuracy score to the entire trade based on the overall accuracy of the tested sample. For example, let’s assume we receive a trade of 25,000 records and 20,000 of them make it through the CleneStep process. We then send a random sample of those 20,000 records out for tele-verification. Let’s assume that for 75% of that sample of records we were able to verify that person works at that company and is accessible through that phone number and for 25% of the records, the person was no longer there, or it was an incorrect phone number, etc. In this case, we would assign an accuracy score of 75% for the entire batch of 20,000 records and then add them to our database to be available to our entire community of users for purchase and/or trade.

(I’m oversimplifying slightly so let me clarify and be more precise. For the subset of records we actually sampled, we will assign an accuracy score of 100 for the 75% of them we verified and for the 25% that were rejected, we will not include them in the database as we know they are bad records. The unsampled records will be added to the database, all with a score of 75.)

Let me add one last factor to this explanation of how we measure quality – the dimension of time. As I mentioned above, contact information decays over time. And what is accurate today will not be quite as accurate next month. To accommodate this decay rate, we decrement the accuracy score for every contact by 1.5% each month. So, our accuracy scores are dynamic and automatically decrease each month for each record, unless we have obtained independent re-confirmation of a record’s accuracy.

As I suggested in the beginning, we must recognize that there is a trade-off between quality and quantity of the entire database. We can always increase either of these but it will necessarily come at the cost of the other. For example, if we eliminate our records with the lowest accuracy scores, the average accuracy of the entire database will increase but, obviously, the size of the database will be smaller by the amount of records we eliminated. This can be frustrating for customers who, understandably, want to maximize quality and maximize the number of available and usable contacts. However, we cannot simultaneously serve both masters.

Just as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle demonstrated that in the world of particle physics one cannot simultaneously know with certainty both a particle’s location and momentum, an analogous phenomenon is true when dealing with data – it is simply not possible to maximize both quality and quantity. Our approach to this challenge of trading off quality and quantity is to not make an arbitrary cut-off at a particular level but instead allow users to make that choice at the level that is optimal for them.

We provide the necessary tools – primarily our accuracy score – to enable users to dial in the level of quality/quantity that best suits their needs.

Next, I want to address the question of how a user should interpret our quality score. Simply put, our quality score is best understood as a probability measure. That is, what is the likelihood (between zero and 100%) that this contact record is accurate? This is most easily understood when considering the quality of an entire list. Essentially, we are representing that based on our extensive statistical analysis, the connectivity results (email or phone) from using this list should be very close to the calculated average accuracy score. For any particular record, the results are unknowable – and tomorrow may be different from today – but the results from the entire list should be predictable.

Finally, how does NetProspex stand behind our approach to quality? In short, completely. We believe that we have the most sophisticated, statistically-valid, and transparent approach to quality in the industry. As such, we guarantee the connectability of any records that you buy from us. If you have any records that are inaccurate (phone connection or email deliverability), let us know and we’ll replace them. It is that simple.

 

NetProspex Just Got Seriously Social

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Background

Here at NetProspex, the last 2 weeks have been pretty exciting. Following the success of our prior Social Business Reports, we just released the Summer 2011 edition . Our aim was to illustrate the widespread social media adoption in the US business community.

It is our most comprehensive study to date, with more research, insights, and data than ever before. Our team analyzed 12 million businesspeople from the NetProspex database of crowd-sourced business contacts to provide a snapshot of social media activity and trends among employees of the nation’s largest corporations, industries, cities, and job functions.

This is definitely the LARGEST focus group we have ever seen.

Methodology

The findings were gathered by using the NetProspex Social Index (NPSI). This was used to score and rank social network activity across the top social networks, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

This score comprised of social media presence (the number of employees in a category with social media profiles registered under a business email address), and social connectedness (the average number of connections per employee across major social networks). 

In this fourth edition, more contacts were analyzed, more granular categories were targeted, there was a focus on Twitter use, and the methodology was substantially updated, with several new, comprehensive categories added to the analysis.

Key Findings

Our report ranks the top performers and breaks them down by company, industry, job title and geographic region and includes eye-catching infographics and data visualization.

The most notable findings include:

• The New York Times is the most social company, with Intuit close behind, both zooming past Google & Microsoft

•  Technology companies dominated the Top 10 rankings

• The Computer Technology industry is the most socially savvy industry in the US

• Recruiting ranked as the most social job category, bypassing even communications and marketing professionals

• The Silicon Valley takes the crown for the most social cities, with San Francisco and San Jose taking 1st & 2nd place respectively. These contributed toward the West coast beating the East coast in the Top 10 list.

 Media Coverage

Our previous three reports all earned coverage in hundreds of media outlets, and have been used as reference material in business and educational presentations, studies, and reports. The 4th edition has seen a phenomenal response within the first week of launch. 

The findings were published in The Huffington Post, Business Insider, and many other regional publications and technology outlets. Our very own Mike Bird appeared on Fox News last Tuesday, discussing how roots of social media are really taking hold within the business community. 

Here at NetProspex we believe social media to be a natural evolution of B2B business communication. As B2C companies know well, businesses have to be where their customers are (after all, if you’re not, you quickly become irrelevant.) In a B2B world, brands must acknowledge that their buyers, whether the Director of IT or the HR manager, are active on social networks in their day-to-day workplace. 

Today, businesspeople are having conversations in a public forum, about brands, solutions, trends and opinions.

This was reflected on Twitter where the news of our Social Report spread to almost 1 million accounts (analyzed by TweetReach).  Feedback included repeated comments such as; ‘great insights into social business’ and ‘interesting stuff you guys are doing’ with requests to even expand this study to examine global social media trends!

This social media frontier needs to be continuously embraced by B2B companies worldwide as they realize that being social is not just personal, it’s business.

You can see the full report here.

 

Alice Farmiloe - Marketing @ NetProspex

Outbound Marketing Pivots Around Creating Value

Katie Martell - Marketing @ NetProspex

I just saw an article by Ardath Albee encouraging all B2B marketers to re-think their perceptions of inbound and outbound marketing. 

Inbound Needs Outbound - Ardath Albee

We recommend taking a read through of the article and comments, especially this quote from Ardath:

"...dump the label and evolve marketing to embrace the way the buyer experience is changing to meet preferences. The principles of inbound marketing will help marketers get there. But I will still argue that outbound plays a role and always will. It will just be done differently, with inbound reflected in execution.

For example, telemarketing can be done in an engaging way. I have clients with projects that incorporate it very successfully based on a business-relevant discussion, not a sales pitch or intrusive survey. Relevance is dependent on the execution."

The outbound marketing world pivots around creating value. 

Here at NetProspex, our clients use our contact records to find the ideal audience for content marketing. They prove day in and day out that outbound marketing is not a dying or antiquated marketing tactic, but rather an ever-evolving and necessary component of growing businesses. 

Our records amplify the effect of content marketing, which centers around creating value and relevance. Simply put: outbound marketing has evolved. Today's marketers understand that to meet revenue goals and help sales reach their numbers, they have to reach out and create demand. To do that effectively requires understanding the pain points of prospects, and delivering value through solutions, education, and creativity. 

We encourage all marketers to have an open mind towards outbound marketing when faced with the challenge of meeting revenue goals in their company, and to repurpose the content critical for inbound marketing in their outbound strategy.

 

 

NetProspex User Dashboard: Everything In One Place

Author: Greg Rublev, Director of Product 

 On Twitter @grublev

We’ve made some exciting new updates to NetProspex that will improve the way our customers find and connect with new customers of their own. I know many of you will appreciate these enhancements because all of them came from your suggestions. This kind of customer feedback is really great and everyone benefits from the collaboration. Here's what's new for NetProspex users:

 Introducing the new dashboard

There’s no place like home. When you first log in, you’ll see a new dashboard, with access to recent and saved searches, virtual contact folders, traded contacts, marketer’s resources and a snapshot of our growing database of B2B contacts. The new dashboard collects everything you need in one convenient place.

 

 

Database Growth Statistics

The Dashboard includes a graph showing how many of NetProspex's most accurate contacts were added over the past 12 months.

There is also a breakdown of new contacts by job function.  These statistics will give you a sense of what to expect in the way of new contacts to fuel your campaigns throughout the year.  

Recent Searches

Now, every time you run a search, your criteria are saved for up to 30 days.  Up to 50 searches will be retained for you, allowing you to re-run, modify, save or remove them at your convenience.  This also provides an easy way to review your search history in one screen.  

Naming Saved Searches

Another great feature to help you pull multiple lists for marketing campaigns is the ability to name searches with titles like “IT Decision Makers” for easy reference in the future.

As I mentioned, these changes were driven by customer feedback, so please let us know what would help you better use NetProspex to find targeted decision makers in your key verticals and audience segments. Reach out anytime at 888-826-4877 #2 or feedback@netprospex.com.

 

Tracking the right email metrics - NetProspex in BtoB Magazine

Metrics matter, but are you looking at the right ones? That's the question that Mark Feldman, VP-marketing at NetProspex, a sales and marketing database company, is asking his customers. 

The majority of email marketers look to traditional metrics such as open and click-through rates to help shape campaigns and strategies. While this is smart, Feldman said, marketers must also follow conversion rates from leads into sales.

“This metric shows you how effectively leads are being processed by the sales team,” he said. “Sales pipeline metrics help you get a picture of your overall ROI, as well as the effectiveness of your targeting.” 

Marketers can look at the cost of campaigns and, with the right information, show how every dollar spent translates into "X' dollars earned. This puts a true value on email marketing and the employees who support email marketing efforts. It can also help marketers get a better idea of whom to target, Feldman said. 

“Marketers need a clear understanding of what's going to be accepted as a lead by the sales team,” he said. “Just because someone is in your database doesn't mean sales wants to spend their time talking to them.” 

Feldman suggested that email marketers go out on sales calls with the sales team.

“You should be listening for the qualifying questions that a salesperson asks to determine if a lead is a worthwhile lead,” he said. That information can be used to shape email content and targeting, Feldman said. 

Metrics that track conversion can also help marketers understand if their lead cadence—the number of leads coming through the pipeline—is too few or too many. Plus, if leads are sitting for too long, it may indicate that were not qualified appropriately.

“It's critical for marketing to get real-time feedback on its leads generated; but, if they sit too long, they may need to be requalified,” Feldman said. 

Finally, leads-to-sales metrics can help marketers determine where the best leads come from. If you know 10% of the leads generated from a trade show became customers but only 5% of leads from a purchased list made it through to the sales team, you may want to put more money behind trade show-generation, Feldman said. These data should be easily uncovered in your marketing automation tool and can help when it's time to ask for an increase in the marketing budget, he said.

“Marketers who can show ROI and a deep knowledge of the quality of leads can use this data to support marketing efforts,” Feldman said. “It's a really exciting time to be a marketer.”

Read the full article.