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Experts Size Up Contact Database Growth Strategies to Optimize Response Rates

This is Part 1 of a two part series looking at best practices for managing a contact database. Look for Part 2 in next week’s newsletter.

In order to optimize marketing messaging and generate the leads needed to feed their sales pipelines, BtoB marketers continue to wrestle with the need to “right-size” their contact databases. Industry experts suggest each organization should have a defined set of lead gen goals and demographics in place.

While marketers must tailor goals to their pipeline metrics, email service provider ExactTarget recently offered hard numbers to go on for list growth measurement. “Average list growth is about 35-40% per year after attrition (about 25% per year),” says Morgan Stewart, Director of Research & Strategy at ExactTarget. “However, this takes programs of all sizes and intentions into account. It is unrealistic for programs with very large lists to expect this type of list growth.”

Climate Heightens Need For Nurturing To Match The New BtoB Buying Processes

Considering the current business climate, it is hard to fathom that less than 10% of marketers are capitalizing on one of their biggest opportunities to drive new business, but that is the unfortunate reality. We conducted a survey of marketing executives back in December of 2008 and found that only 8% of respondents currently had automated lead nurturing strategies and processes in place.

While it can be argued that the small percentage of organizations using lead nurturing is consistent with the low adoption rate of marketing automation systems, another stat which was even more eye-opening was that only 15% of respondents planned to deploy or expand their automated lead nurturing efforts in 2009. This represents a huge missed opportunity for BtoB organizations as lead nurturing has really become a required part of the selling process in today’s business landscape.

New ROI Study Shows Firms With Ops Teams, Metrics Outgrowing Competitors

Companies outgrowing their competitors are much more likely to have a staff dedicated to marketing operations, use marketing ROI and profitability metrics, and have campaign management automation, according to the Lenskold Group / MarketSphere 2009 Marketing ROI & Measurements Study released this week.

Those firms that considered their marketing highly effective and efficient (9% of the total) showed significant advantages in having data, facts, and insight to better guide marketing spending decisions (75% vs. 33% of all other firms), using good measurements (69% vs. 30%), using customer analytics (65% vs. 31%), and having marketing operations processes to improve the business of marketing (64% vs. 29%).

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