Data Management

Creating content for nurturing campaigns is a challenge even for season marketers, therefore any case studies outlining success in this area a hot commodity. A recent webinar, hosted by the B2B Lead Roundtable blog featured ECI Telecom’s Associate VP of Marketing Programs Michelle Mogelson Levy, sharing a great nurturing roadmap for marketers.

The webinar, titled “How ECI Telecom Developed a Content-Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results,” explored the success the company had it with its lead nurturing campaign.

While ECI was already having success marketing to its targeted database of prospects, Levy pointed out that the company was looking to generate more leads in new markets for its broader base of technology solutions. 

The high-profile data breach Epsilon Interactive reported April 1 caused quite a stir, as the company noted on its web site that “a subset of Epsilon clients' customer data were exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon's email system.” BtoC brands including Best Buy, Kroger and Walgreen were among the estimated 2% (of Epsilon’s approximately 2,500 clients) affected by the attack.

While the breach was primarily limited to BtoC organizations, industry experts caution that the incident should serve as a serious wakeup call to BtoB firms. Realizing that a breach like this could have even deeper implications for BtoB organizations, many vendors have been taking proactive steps to help their customers secure email data.

By Kristin Hambelton, VP of Marketing, Neolane, Inc.

In a world inundated with communication, information is power. Marketers use information to try to target buyers with the right products and services; sales uses information to address buyers’ needs and desires in an effort to win deals; and customer service uses information to meet and exceed customer expectations. But, the reality is your company probably doesn’t use information as effectively as it could.

Online privacy has come under the microscope following the February introduction of a bill that would regulate the collection and use of information obtained from Internet tracking. The "Do Not Track Me Online Act of 2011" would give the Federal Trade Commission the right to create regulations that would force online marketers to offer online users the ability to opt-out of online tracking.

Given marketers’ pressure to focus on relevant, targeted offers, this could potentially impact the way marketers track and collect behavioral activity. “In a business environment, IT professionals may start to set company machine browser settings to a default do not track status which could have a pretty significant impact on online data collection and analytics,” said Dick Reed, CEO, Just Media. “The results in either case would be some very significant and negative impacts on both campaign targeting and analytics.”

ZoomInfo recently announced the addition of a new plug-in designed to find active business contacts in users’ email messages and automatically upload the information to the ZoomInfo BtoB directory. The plug-in offers salespeople, small business owners and jobseekers ongoing access to the entire ZoomInfo Database of millions of BtoB profiles.

The company said that during a market test of its new ZoomInfo Community Edition, more than 25,000 people installed the email plug-in, contributing approximately one million new contacts to ZoomInfo.