Your Business Prospect Lists for 2013: Have you validated the lists yet?

Increase sales… Is that the 2013 goal for your sales team? As you well know, it is very important to clearly define your company’s yearly and monthly goals for successful campaigns implementation.

Outbound marketing techniques such as email marketing, direct mailing, cold calling and event marketing – all are very dependent on high-quality prospect lists. This year when you are ready to start your outbound marketing campaigns make sure that you have a good quality prospect list which is called and verified for accuracy before you start using them. Companies mostly spend more than 50% of their annual marketing budgets on outbound marketing activities. Though our topic today is not about Outbound marketing vs Inbound marketing, it is important to consider the significant amount of time and resources spent on your cold calling, email, mailing and event marketing campaigns. The ROI justification is critical when you invest so much on these campaigns.

Now that you realize the importance of ROI justification on outbound marketing activities, make sure that all your campaigns are using validated and targeted business prospect lists.

Databases are often filled with wrong and out-of-date information. Almost 10% of a typical database has missing information. With 30 % industry attrition rate, 20% of your B2B prospect list database gets outdated every quarter. aMarketForce, a B2B prospect list development company shares some tips towards successful outbound marketing campaign execution.

Identifying and validating business prospect lists from your email database:

1. Identify your target prospects for each campaigns based on –

a. Geography of focus
b. Target business vertical – business type, number of employees, revenue etc.
c. Target audience

2. Identify matching target companies in your database
3. Export the matching companies and contact details onto an excel sheet for validation
4. Remove duplicates – by companies , contacts, email id
5. Remove general email ids such as info@ and sales@ and try to replace it with the contact’s email address
6. Research every company for target titles and go to the company website or Hoovers, Jigsaw and LinkedIn for more details
7. Call and verify all the contacts and email addresses
8. Do a test campaign on the target list using non-company email id and remove all the hard bounces.
9. Update the list in your database

You can also hire a database validation vendor for verifying your database. For more information about aMarketForce prospect list development and database validation services, email us at  info@amarketforce.com