Did you know that about 40% of your contacts become invalid each year? That means that if you aren’t proactively growing and maintaining your list, you face losing almost a third of it.
Experts say that one reason is because leads change their email address. This seems likely, seeing as the average person changes jobs between 10 and 15 times in their life. That’s less than 5 years at most jobs.
The other reason is that your content becomes irrelevant for part of your audience each year for other reasons. This group stops opening your emails and might even unsubscribe entirely.
In today’s post, we tackle how to maintain and upkeep your database to retain as many usable contacts as possible. We also talk about how to get more contacts to maintain a steadily increasing number.
Database Upkeep
What changes can make your data inaccurate?
Any time a critical piece of information changes about a lead, they go from a usable lead to someone who could range from just not being targeted accurately or someone changing their email address.
Any of the following could change:
- They switch organizations
- They switch job roles
- They change their email address or phone numbers
- Their company moves buildings
- They change their name
If one of these fields in your database is off, you might not be segmenting leads properly or you could be sending emails to “leads” that have long since left the company you have in your database.
What can you do to prevent these sorts of issues?
Clean Data Before Use
Instead of just plopping in new data straight from whatever form you got it from, ensure that all the data you’ve acquired is complete and valid.
The data points that are truly important are:
- Full, correct name
- Email address
- Phone number
- Title
- Company
These are the bare minimum that need to be correct to ensure that your email gets delivered and to the appropriate audience.
Schedule regular data hygiene intervals to keep it up-to-date.
Why does it matter?
Just because a lead doesn’t receive or read your message, doesn’t mean that you aren’t paying for it. If the email bounces or the person simply sends it to their trash, then you wasted time, effort, and money.
Not only that, but too many bounces will make ISPs and webmail apps view your accounts as spam.
Clean out outdated, corrupted, and incomplete data. This will ensure you don’t waste time and resources on leads that don’t exist.
Get More Leads
Between replacing the leads whose data changes and those who are no longer interested in your offering for whatever reason, you need to constantly be gathering more data to ensure that it keeps growing as opposed to shrinking constantly.
How do you get more leads?
Invite Them In
Don’t go overboard with annoying pop-ups, but do make a point to make it easy for anyone reading your content to sign up for your mailing list.
Make sure the signup is clearly visible somewhere on your website always, you don’t want to create any friction between the thought of “I want to keep reading this” and the “Sign Up” button.
Create Incentive
Another way to build your database is to create great gated content that your audience will love. Make content that is highly specific to what your company does and highly valuable to those who would buy your offering.
Create tools and other interactive content to get your audience interested and excited about what you are offering. Make content so good that it should cost money, but instead trade it for a lead’s data.
Buy Engagement Data
Instead of manually building your database, consider purchasing engagement data for the entire audience you are attempting to target.
Ensure that the data is good and clean, then nurture those contacts and it will quickly become apparent which contacts are fit to become leads.
Using these methods, you should manage to avoid losing that third of your contacts every single year.
Did you enjoy today’s post? Why? What could we do better? Let us know in the comments.
