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Webbula Intelligence Reports

What’s the Key to Marketing Automation Success?

Marketing Success

Marketing automation is a proven tactic for driving lead conversion and the shortest path to purchase. But if you’re not getting the great results you hoped for, your data might be to blame. Even if your marketing automation program is humming along, chances are there’s room for improvement. Whether you’re launching a new automation program or you need to optimize an existing one, you can enhance your efforts and your ROI with good quality data.

The cost of poor data

Poor data includes missing, duplicate, outdated, or inaccurate information. Whatever the issue, bad data has real costs associated with it, and keep in mind that data is constantly changing. Your prospects move, change jobs, have children, retire, take up new interests, and make countless other changes that affect the way you market to them. The only way to stay current with data (and thus, relevant messaging) is to routinely clean, verify, and enhance your list. There are a few ways you can go about this.

Be proactive. You can actually clean and verify your data before it ever enters your list so you don’t have to waste time and resources marketing to invalid prospects. This gatekeeper functionality is available by adding services like Webbula’s CloudHygiene API to your web forms to mitigate fraudulent email threats and bounces in real-time. Keep in mind that just because an individual hits “Submit” doesn’t mean they’re a valid prospect. People quite often enter false email addresses on purpose to avoid getting spammed.

Additionally, if you’re setting up a new marketing automation program, you can have your email data cleansed and verified before launch. If you’re worried about losing out too many potential customers, you can opt for a lighter cleanse. Solutions like Webbula’s CloudHygiene offer various customizable levels of list hygiene based on your risk tolerance.

Be reactive. New threats arise daily that in-house cleaning and monitoring can’t possibly identify. (Remember that spam traps don’t bounce, trackers can open your emails, and robots can click links.) Also, people’s lives and levels of interest change as time goes by. People who were once hot prospects might now be unengaged. If they haven’t opened your email in six months or more, it might be time to cut the fat from your list. Regularly cleaning your data and enhancing your dataset will help you stay ahead of threats and stay on top of customer and prospect insights.

Be smart. Even if your data is clean and verified, your list might not provide sufficient information to align customers to your funnel. You need more data. Maybe your list includes accurate names, emails, addresses, and purchase data but lacks individual-based information like interests, behavior, demographic, financial, and automotive information. Enhancing your existing data brings new possibilities for sales across devices, as well as the ability to better understand your prospects. Matching your CRM data to quality third-party data will help you reach the right user at the right time on the right device.

You’ve invested the time and resources into creating a marketing automation program. Ensure you reach your full ROI potential by fueling the machine with quality data. Hygiene and verification are best practices for any marketing automation program. Utilizing double opt-in protocols and routinely removing unengaged users will also improve results. From there, data enhancement can fill in the holes and update your list so you can precisely target down to the individual.

Marketing automation glory begins with good data. Contact Webbula to set up an account on our portal or try our free Email Health Check to gauge the quality of your marketing lists.