Updated on November 1, 2021
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure”, says W. Edwards Deming, the father of modern management thinking. Deming is right. If you’re focusing your energy on one-size-fits-all emails and expecting them to win over all of your leads, it’s time to switch up your marketing strategy. Time to ask yourself what are mistakes are you making in your marketing efforts?
To better understand how marketers can use data in their email marketing strategies for data centralization, metrics and segmentation, we researched how some of the top data-driven companies resolve mistakes that B2B companies keep on repeating and expecting good results.
Common marketing mistakes
Not getting all the data into a single place
Nowadays, with so many sources available for finding prospects, still, the biggest challenge for companies is getting the data into a single place from where it can be analyzed and than used to make decisions. Unfortunately, many marketers find themselves handicapped by segmented data and incomplete analytics. It’s hard to maximize marketing ROI with this kind of limitations.
In order to solve this data chaos, Salesforce created Marketing Cloud as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for marketers that allows for creating and managing marketing relationships and campaigns with customers. They are using single, comprehensive view of each consumer to power 1-to-1 journeys and only one platform to capture and activate data from any source on a unified platform, engaging both businesses and consumers alike.
What you can learn from this:
- Centralized data is the only path to a data-driven culture. Data is a dynamic asset and marketers rely on its accuracy to run effective campaigns. According to McKinsey & Company, proper marketing analytics will save you 15-30% of your budget.
Forgetting about marketing automation
It seems like everyone is talking about “big data” these days, but few businesses have a grasp on how to collect and utilize it. Marketing automation allows you to effortlessly embrace big data, collecting valuable information and putting it immediately to work.
By providing a single platform for dashboarding and analytics, marketing automation platforms are the most comprehensive solution for measuring campaigns and predicting consumer behavior.
Marketo is setting positive trends with their marketing automation platforms, developing a set of metrics and reports in their automation system that looks beyond the traditional marketing metrics (clicks, opens, etc.). Instead, Marketo’s platform looks at a set of revenue performance and prediction measures that speak directly to current and future revenue potentials within your wider prospect pipeline.
What you can learn from this:
- Today’s buyers have changed. It’s difficult to engage in a conversation about B2B email marketing, without mentioning marketing automation or lead nurturing.
- Managing qualified leads in advance, is quickly becoming one of the most important practices of B2B companies. If you’re considering marketing automation for your company, it’s important to have a good understanding of what to expect, and what the key benefits are before you begin comparing the various tools.
Manually adding contacts to your list
If you’re trying to guide the conversation’s content and timing, with each individual buyer, based on buyer’s needs and interests, it cannot be done manually. Although there are many tools available for adding contact details or checking them in your CRM, which companies still do manually. Sales.Rocks resolved this issue by using automated data validation. We eliminated up to 80% of their clients’ manual data on order to save them a lot of time, effort and waste of money.
When it comes to data quality, we figured it out that by knowing your audience and their interests, we can provide a better experience and increase their sales revenue.With the Bulk feature, Sales.Rocks is helping companies to find their prospects based on geography, employees, industry and many other filters and download their prospects in Excel in a matter of seconds.
What you can learn from this:
- Generating high-quality leads without a systematic approach for handing them off to sales is next to pointless. You should use demographic data relevant to your leads and customers.
- For B2B companies, age and gender aren’t as useful segmentation conditions as for retail and e-commerce businesses. But individual attributes such as location, role, and job title can completely be used as segments.
Final thoughts
Data-driven marketing is taking over the marketing world, and if you don’t jump on board now, you may get left behind. Take steps to ensure that your company is fueling all its efforts with meaningful data.
