Now that Millennials are reaching adulthood and infiltrating the workplace, the job market is changing like never before. Today’s young workers are more prone to job-hopping than their older counterparts, and they’re willing to take risks to advance in their careers rather than rely on the corporate ladder.
Voluntarily jumping from one job to another has long been a popular way for workers to gain new skills or beef up their résumés. It peaked in the early 2000s but took a hit during the Great Recession. Now, the churn rate is back up to around 68%.
That means that every year, as much as 68% of your marketing data could be going bad.
Job churn can be a good thing for workers and the economy, but for marketing departments trying to keep their prospecting data fresh, it can be a nightmare.
If your marketing team is using a contact list that hasn’t been updated in a year, you’re wasting time and money trying to reach people who probably don’t even work at the same company anymore. For example, if you’re paying two business development professionals $75,000 a year and they each waste just one hour a day going after the wrong people, that’s $17,000 down the drain. Scale that number up for a larger team, and you can see how costly this problem really is.
Reduce Dollars Lost to Job Churn
You might not be able to do anything about the job-hoppers out there, but there are some ways you can make sure your team doesn’t waste time on stale information:
- Refresh your data regularly. Every three to six months, audit your marketing data to ensure it’s accurate. There are several ways to do this, from hiring a third-party service to enlisting the help of a staff member or intern whose sole responsibility is to maintain the integrity of your data.
Auditing your data internally allows you to keep customer information in-house, but the manpower it requires can be extremely expensive.
Hiring a third-party partner is the most cost-efficient option, as these companies have processes and resources in place to verify your data for you. Overstock.com incorporated one such address verification and correction system and reduced costs by more than $1 million.
- Collect all possible information. Obviously, customers’ email addresses are a must-have because email marketing is such a low-cost and effective way to reach people. However, gathering more than one piece of contact information will greatly increase the strength of your marketing efforts.
According to marketing expert Dr. Jeffrey Lant, it takes seven touchpoints over the course of 18 months for a consumer to try your product, and having multiple ways to reach customers increases the likelihood that they will buy.
Naturally, having stale information isn’t helpful, but if you’re diligent about refreshing your contact information, you’ll find it much more profitable than having only a customer’s email address. Using third-party services can also help bring light to the gaps in your existing database and facilitate in appending the missing information.
- Segment your data. What’s the point of sending an email to your entire list if a large portion of those messages are undeliverable? Segmenting your list into “good” and “bad” contacts will help you clean up your database in a measurable way. Marketing tools such as HubSpot allow you to create lists based on criteria such as “haven’t opened an email in 90 days.” You can also find out which email addresses are no longer valid.
Once you’ve done this, you can begin to update the information you have on those contacts. However, you don’t want to rely too heavily on these types of solutions because your sending domain can still be penalized for undeliverable emails and using bad data in the first place.
Marketing, like the job market, is experiencing a radical upheaval, but the quality of your prospecting data is more important than ever. No matter which new social network is hot next year or how consumers are interacting with digital media, the fact remains that reaching out via email or phone is still going to be a highly effective way to get in front of your target audience.
Don’t let your list grow stale. Do some spring cleaning on a regular basis to set your team up for success and reach more potential customers.
Jennifer Groese is director of marketing at The List.
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