The Marketer’s Power Quarter: Updating Lead Databases

This is the tenth in a 12-part series of quick-fix tips to improve your digital marketing results. Catch up on our last tip, and subscribe to our newsletter to get the rest.

With social media algorithm updates constantly changing who sees what—and making it harder for brands to reach people on social—it’s become even more essential to build and maintain a database of email addresses. With proper hygiene, you can strategically mine your database to make sure you’re getting the right marketing messages in front of the right eyes at the right time. But your database is only as effective as its accuracy when it comes to up-to-date contact information.

Job turnover contributes to stale database 

You work hard to earn people’s trust (and contact info) by producing useful resources like white papers and e-books, but if you’re not also putting work into keeping your database updated, it’s all for naught.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, job turnover for the first half of 2018 hovered around 3.6 percent per month. These numbers cover layoffs, firings, those who quit, and any other type of separation.

“Your email marketing database decays at a rate
of 22.5 percent or more per year.”
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This factor and others mean your email marketing database decays at a rate of 22.5 percent or more per year. In other words, your database of leads is regularly becoming irrelevant.

Database maintenance is key to an effective database 

To keep your database information from going stale and drastically reducing the effectiveness of all connected sales and marketing efforts, regular maintenance is essential. So here are three quick database hygiene tips to help you keep it up to date:

1. Run a quarterly maintenance process to flag old and non-responsive contacts (like accounts that have been inactive in the past 12 or so months).
2. Create a re-engagement campaign to reactivate non-responsive contacts before permanently archiving them.
3. Set up a data refresh schedule to periodically augment your CRM with new contact data at key target accounts.

Follow these three suggestions and you’ll weed out bad records, revive old relationships, and bring fresh contacts to your database to keep campaign performance humming.

Next week in the penultimate installment of The Marketer’s Power Quarter blog, get a design tip to boost the effectiveness of your visual marketing.

Related resources:

• The Marketer’s Power Quarter: Improve Sales Emails
• How to Build and Nurture an Email Marketing Database of Quality Customers
• 29 Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List