The data quality problem

If we don’t know you, we can’t sell to you. And if we ask for too much, we lose you.

To look the problem, let’s examine just one industry, E-Commerce, and see the results of their email campaigns:

• less than 1 in 5 emails is opened (19.8%) and
• over 4.5% bounces, has an abuse complaint or unsubscribes. (Source: MailChimp).

Marketers are plagued by low delivery rates and buyer apathy.  And collecting data has been a massive problem – just think of those long signup forms.  For instance, Saba Software, a people management software firm, required 17 fields on a white paper download.  Studies show response rate drops off precipitously as required fields are added. After about three fields, response rated drop off fast.  How does one capture the data Sales wants without alienating visitors?  In the past, the answer was Progressive Profiling – capturing data over multiple visits — if you can get multiple visits. But the Salesforce.com/Jigsaw deal opens new opportunities.

The underlying cause of these challenges is the problem in keeping accurate data. In our own survey, we found that on average, only ½ of prospect records were accurate.   This drives up selling costs, reduces response rates, and leads to short tenure in sales and marketing – and as those men and women move to other jobs, the problem grows larger and larger.  And since we know nothing about visitors, we design complex signup forms with a high rate of abandonment in order to capture the information salespeople want.

Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo wrote  “Jigsaw’s a founding member of the Marketing Cloud, an alliance of cloud-based marketing services that make internal marketing functions more efficient and external marketing programs more effective. The vision is to deliver powerful marketing capabilities while eliminating the cost, risk and complexity of traditional approaches, and the more resources Jigsaw has to pursue this joint vision, the better.

Jigsaw is best known for the ability share contacts, but its long term strategic value is its ability to enrich and cleanse data online.  Further, when data services live in the cloud alongside your CRM and marketing automation systems, it creates the opportunity to maintain your lead and contact database automatically. Imagine the ability to eliminate duplicates, remove dead records, and update contact information dynamically as the data are updated – this has the potential to increase response and conversion rates dramatically.”

To illustrate take that 17 required field signup form:

Imagine if someone went to that white paper signup form and entered her email address. The system could connect with Jigsaw over the cloud and merge in additional fields like company size, revenue, and industry as well as contact information such as an accurate direct-dial phone number. Without the need to ask these questions on registration forms, you can dramatically improve landing page conversion rates and automate additional lead scoring rules to help deliver the best leads more quickly to sales.  You would achieve much improved prospect data while dramatically improving response rates.

What do you think? We love comments (click Leave a Comment at the top of the post) and people who share our content. Thanks.

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Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple.” He’s also the author of two highly acclaimed white papers, How to Find New Customers and Definitive Guide to Making Quota, as well the ebook, Prospect Driven Marketing.

Find New Customers helps business develop and implement programs to improve the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.