Across the U.S., workplaces are shifting to the ‘new normal’. The impact of remote work and the current pandemic has been felt by B2B businesses since March, and will assuredly be affecting targets over the next few months. B2B marketers are now starting to compare the goals set at the start of the financial year and their actual numbers. In doing so, they must consider marketing performance across different channels, find the gaps, and prepare an action plan to achieve the numbers.
In 2020, email marketing is receiving less street cred from many marketers despite being recognized as a top-performing marketing channel. Content marketing giant HubSpot has some valuable statistics that demonstrate the ongoing credibility of email marketing – most pertinently, the fact that 93% of B2B US marketers use email to distribute content.
What Recent Email Outreach Studies Show
The success of email campaigns depends on three major factors: content, audience, and data health. Data health is the quality of the database used in your email campaigns. Maintaining data hygiene is a must when it comes to getting your emails delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.
Top Reasons for Maintaining Data Hygiene:
- Inaccurate data wastes 27.3% of sales reps’ time. That’s 546 hours a year.
- 88% of companies have a direct impact on the bottom line
- The average company is losing 12% of its revenue.
- 21% of brands experienced reputational damage.
How Data Hygiene Helps Your Businesses to Improve Your Email Campaigns’ Performance
Data quality is paramount for every organization that engages in email marketing. Businesses may overlook data hygiene at their own risk, as poor-quality data impacts their marketing efforts.
Working with inaccurate data information can significantly reduce the amount of profit you can make from your email marketing campaigns.
Poor data hygiene will reduce the email delivery rate and negatively impact open, respond, and click-through rates, which, in effect, would result in a decrease in the amount of revenue you will produce from email marketing.
Performing email data hygiene regularly will ensure you are only emailing the people who want to read the information you share. Quality data will help you reach potential clients, while poor-quality data will lead to wasted effort.
At a high level, reliable and up-to-date data of your prospects helps you to do the following:
1. Make Better Decisions
Some businesses make decisions based on a hunch while successful businesses make decisions based on the data they have. If you want to generate more revenue through email marketing, you need to focus on making decisions based on the data you will use for executing your email campaigns.
A BI survey publication shows that 58% of companies reported that, instead of making data-driven and information-driven decisions, at least half of their business decisions are based on a gut feeling or experience. Having accurate, quality data is crucial if you want to make strategic decisions that will have a positive impact on your revenue.
Marketers must realize the need to maintain clean data by removing recipients who are not responding to the emails. Sending emails to recipients who are not responding will force them to mark your email as spam. Spamming will affect your sender score. Spamming also harms your domain authority and ultimately affects your SEO performance (or Search Engine Ranking).
3. Improves Delivery Rate
Data quality directly impacts your email delivery rate. Here’s how.
Let’s assume that your email delivery rate is 95% and the data is accurate. For every 100 emails, you get 2 conversions in the form of an inquiry or a meeting request. Now, if your delivery rate is 70-75%, you will have to send 125 emails to receive 2 conversions. Here, you are probably wasting 25% of the efforts due to inaccurate data.
Thus, the better the data quality, the higher your email delivery rate will be.
4. Create Buyer Personas Before Executing the Email Campaign
Creating buyer personas is an integral part of the lead generation process. A buyer persona helps marketing teams develop marketing messages and campaigns that appeal to the target audience effectively.
You need to have reliable B2B data to build buyer personas. To ensure you create the personas fully, you need to have additional quality data that includes:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Job title
- Income
- Interests
If you are creating ideal accounts that fit your MQL (marketing qualified leads) and SQL (sales qualified leads) profiles, you need to have complete firmographic and technographic data that includes:
- Company Size
- Annual Turnover
- Technology Used
- …and more
This data about your prospects and accounts help you personalize your emails and boost your email marketing effectiveness. While it may be difficult to have all this data by yourself, you can auto-populate the missing data using SalesIntel’s Data Enrichment feature.
5. Personalize Your Emails
You probably know how critical it is to personalize emails to make your email campaigns successful. Unfortunately, data quality is one of the biggest obstacles for B2B marketers to personalize email campaigns.
- Personalizing emails result in higher open and click-through rates.
- 79% of consumers respond to personalized marketing messages.
- On average, prospects who receive personalized emails are 10% more likely to convert than non-personalized emails.
- Businesses with a personalized email marketing approach generate 760% more email marketing revenue compared to businesses that send generalized emails.
If you have the additional data (firmographic and technographic data mentioned in the previous point), personalizing your email campaigns gets easier.
Quality Data Always Works
Recipients who have opted for your emails/newsletters or showed interest in your brand have higher chances of responding to your emails. Inaccurate data will increase the bounce rate.
According to SiriusDecisions, businesses have witnessed nearly 25% higher conversion rates using clean data where people either responded with an inquiry or progressed to marketing qualified leads in the lead funnel.
Wrapping Up
Email marketing is a viable strategy for generating leads. Given that the data changes every 12-14 months, you need to maintain data hygiene to ensure higher productivity from your email campaign efforts. However, it requires your sales reps to invest their productive time and efforts in re-verifying the data. On the other hand, you, as a business owner, lose productivity and increase the cost-per-hour of your sales team.
For high-conversion email outreach campaigns, businesses prefer to work with data partners that provide human-verified data. Hiring a reliable B2B data partner or using a reliable data platform has helped businesses focus on optimizing the effectiveness of their email campaigns.
Salesintel not only maintains high accuracy – but it also avoids data decay as we re-verify our data every 90 days. Download our extension for free human-verified data or request a demo!
