How to leverage the actionable lead database for higher ROI?

Introduction:

I am sure you all would like to know more about how the “actionable lead database” will help us to improve the ROI and generate a good amount of revenue, right?

Okay!!

let us understand it in this blog, based on our research of various campaigns and success factors of them.

Modern marketing agencies recognize the importance of having a lead database. Be It a small size company or an enterprise, every agency builds its own unique database that fuels up the marketing process.

We know, you do keep a database and you leverage it to drive the leads through the marketing funnel. But before we move on, we ask you, have you ever questioned yourself, is my database (really) actionable?

What is an actionable lead database and what are the benefits of having it?

The actionable lead database is a lead database within which the leads are intelligently scored and smartly segmented.”

How does an actionable lead database help marketers?

To achieve high efficiency to identify and prioritize the sales ready-ness of leads.
To sort out leads that needed to be nurtured well before handing them to the sales team.
To improve the conversation rate and improve the ROI on campaigns.
To gain better confidence and hence better alignment with the sales team

In other words –having an actionable lead database is no less than having a superpower.

So how could a marketer harness the superpower of a lead data?

First, Let’s start with building the database:

Part I – Building an actionable database:

We follow the three-step process to build an actionable lead database:

1. GIGO approach.

2. Intelligent lead Scoring.

3. Smart Segmentation

GIGO Approach:

“Life is not all about what you take, it is all about what you give.” You may have come across with this philosophical statement about life.

This is indeed good thought; we agree on it. But if you ask us about building the database – we would say, the vice versa of this thought is true. Building a healthy database is all about what you take –in!!

Yes, it is true that to turn the database into an actionable lead database one must keep it first healthy.

You may have come across with the term GIGO. GIGO (Garbage in, Garbage out) is a common concept in computer and mathematics. It may also apply to the market.

Not stressing the point further – “If we don’t let any bad lead data in the database, things start becoming easy further.”

One of the top concern every marketer has is having a bad lead data or leads that take much energy and budget to rule them out from the database. It is way hard to sort out bad lead data from the lead database than to prohibit it from entering the database.

Here are some quality checks we follow before we make the leads a part of an actionable database.

a. Missing or incorrect contact information:

Not every personal info of a lead has to be right. You should always look for the quality and authenticity of the data.

What contact data is missing and how important is it? You should always audit it.

Some practices for data cleansing are:

Ensure whether we have the most required attributes of a lead data present – such as valid email id and telephone number, Name.
Further – validate the demographic and firmographic details
If you encountered with the invalid contact data, then lookup for the correct one and replace with it.

(Here are some data cleaning tools and sources that save your time and budget:)

Reference – Analytics India Magazine

b. Duplicated leads:

There are some leads in your database that are being repeated one or more times within the same campaign.

You should always push up your team to identify those repeated leads which the identical contact information.

Some criteria you may apply to filter out those leads from the database:

Duplicate email address.
Duplicate First name and Last name combined.

C. Outdated leads:

Leads are not a tree, they move. some leads are agile, they move from one department to another in no time.

Does your marketing team keep an eye on lead’s, including changing department and account time to time?

Once interested lead can be outdated, as it switches through Job title, job level and department within the account or from account to account. Identify them and segment them right

Lead scoring:

What is Lead Scoring?

According to Marketo, “Lead scoring is a shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales-readiness.”

Why lead scoring is important?

Lead scoring is a well-known concept and it is being used to determine prospect’s current level of interest in the product and services. Lead scoring, when done right, has been proven a critical step to accelerate the conversion rate.

When you rank leads according to their interest shown in the content or your brand, you can confidently tell the sales team that which leads are highly interested and could turn as a customer. While the leads that rank below the threshold must be sent back to the nurturing team.

How does the lead score?

Ideally, marketers score leads based on two factors –

Explicit behavior:

Explicit data the data either given by contact itself or information which is directly identified – such as contact information, demographics, budget, job level, and needs.

Implicit behavior:

The information you gather by observing online of a lead.

Such as – clicks, download, and shares.

You can score lead in segments like hot, warm and cold or on a scale of numbers or name it as alphabets.

Lead scoring is vast and requires dedicated efforts. Let’s read expert here, who tells the best practices to score a lead. In the definitive guide of lead scoring, Marketo has explained the lead scoring in detail.

Segmentation:

Lead segmentation is a critical job.

Without segmenting leads according to their characteristics, needs or interest, achieving high lead conversation rate is a little messy process.

Smart marketers know how to segment leads leveraging the lead scoring model. While you can always segment leads taking various key behavior into account, It’s believed to good strategy to bring the lead scoring model into the lead segmentation.

What is lead segmentation?

Lead segmentation is an act of subdividing the leads into smaller groups based on some defined criteria.

Although keep the fact in a mind that the methods and criteria for lead segmentation may warry from campaign to campaign, the purpose of segmenting leads is the same – “to get the highly personalized message (content) in front of a right audience at the right time so they can engage well.”

How do we do it (and so you should)?

We believe and practice some major criteria while segmenting leads.

Industry
1. Within industry further, divide by Employee Size and Revenue Size
Geographical LocationJob level and Job title
Budget
Authority and influence on the decision-making process
Lead scoring metrics
Keywords / Topic of Interest

Part II – Leveraging the actionable database:

After building an actionable lead database, the next task is to bring the database to the action, so it drives a higher conversion.

As we have seen, building an actionable lead database requires serious efforts so leveraging it in a smart way. Whereas building a lead database is not a one-time settlement, you have to keep upgrading it regularly. You have to keep cleaning it, and managing it, whenever required.

How to leverage the actionable lead database to drive a higher conversion?

Marketers can use the database in the following ways to drive higher conversation:

a. Data-driven segmentation.

Digital marketing is evolving. There was a time when personal data and some key metrics were enough to create that a prospect to convert it as an opportunity.

Days are certainly not the same as it used to be, today, just having personal data of is not enough.

Smart marketers know how to engage a prospect in a true sense, they know they have to assess a view of every prospect if they want to convert it in an

opportunity.

Actionable data such as:

How often a prospect interacts with the brand?
How is her/his online body language changing?
How and where s/he is heading in the buyer’s journey?

These queries give us an idea about the data-driven

Leveraging this data, a smart marketer designs highly customized and targeted touchpoint campaign to guarantee the higher conversion.

b. To create a predictive analysis.

It can’t go unnoticed that predictive marketing is the future of B2B marketing.

We have already seen other sectors to use predictive scoring to assess the risk of doing business with an. For example – in a finance sector predictive analysis is being used to detect the possible risk of creating NPA.

In B2B Digital marketing it is feasible that by leveraging historical data with the help of AI and Machine learning – marketers can predict the possible buyer’s journey of a prospect and identify some critical factors in a purchase decision making.

The historical data of the leads from an old campaign which is identical in some manner with the ongoing campaign can be proved as a data input in a predictive analysis process.

Bringing predictive analysis in the action – marketers are likely to achieve a higher conversation rate.

Garter has predicted that marketers who practice predictive analysis are likely to achieve two-digit growth over the next years.

c. To give a seamless experience through Omni-channel marketing:

Omni-channel marketing is relatively different from marketing. In marketing, seamless customer experience is kept as a priority. Today’s buyer uses multiple devices and channels to consume content. For it is important that a prospect should be moved in the buyer’s journey by targeting all kind of devices and channels it uses without any broken experience and hiccups. Here strategy comes into the.

The actionable data plays an important role in designing and implementation of the Omni-channel marketing strategy.

The database gives a sense to marketers of specific targeting the prospect’s need with content and on the time.

Conclusion:

Data is a present and future of marketing. Digital Marketing has been shifted to data-driven marketing. With the introduction of new technology, the easy availability of data and rapid changing buying behavior of a buyer, marketing is becoming more competitive than ever.
Collecting a ton of data is a relatively easy job, managing it can be overwhelming. Marketers need to build and maintain a database that is actionable. Rule out bad data, leverage the actionable one.
Smart analytics of data is becoming necessary in marketing. Marketers need to learn from the available data. Marketers have to harness the power of AI and Machine learning to unlock the possibilities of next-generation marketing for higher conversion.