IMAGINE SPENDING ALL YOUR time preparing for an extravagant dinner party. The champagne is bubbling, the cutlery is shining, and the platters of hors d’oeuvres fill the candlelit room with a pleasant fragrance. But no one shows. And you’re left with a hefty tab and an unsuccessful event.
For years, companies have been throwing parties that nobody attends. And their solution often is to fire the agency that designed and sent out the invitations.
But the invitees aren’t the problem. It’s the list.
Creative gets most of the attention in direct marketing. But great campaigns begin with data, not with the big idea. It pays to remember three simple concepts:
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Business and the data supporting it drive every creative decision.
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The sales cycle is as important and complex as the product cycle, and marketing needs to support each equally.
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The sales cycle begins with clean data, which results in stronger leads and faster, higher-dollar deals.
But back to the dinner party and the invitation list.
The sales cycle starts by identifying prospects, learning as much as possible about them, pinpointing their needs and pains and tailoring a pitch to fit the situation. In today’s competitive market, renting a list is the wrong way to initiate such an important process.
This is because there are two problems with rented lists. The first is that everyone uses them, so your invitation will be one of many. The second is that rented lists can be as much as 30% dirty. Fields might be missing, contacts could be out of date, or the lists themselves don’t target specific roles in the sales process. So your dinner party is potentially 30% empty. And worse, those who do RSVP and get in the sales cycle are often the wrong people, frustrating your sales reps and heightening the already difficult relationship between sales and marketing.
The solution is to create a foundation of clean, proprietary data that will distinguish your campaigns from the competition and create an ongoing, productive dialogue with your market. This means shifting from unreliable, overused rental lists to ones built and maintained in house.
Results show time and again that by using a strong validated list built from the ground up, your campaign will get much higher response rates
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