With email such an essential marketing tactic in the life sciences and almost every other industry, your customer and prospect lists are one of your most important marketing assets.
But marketing databases can quickly lose their luster. Most experts estimate that email lists degrade at a rate of 20-30 percent a year.
That can result in a lot of bad data, which can lead to negative results, including:
- Lower email deliverability rates
- Increased spam reports
- Negative perceptions of your company and brand
- Blacklisting by ISPs if spam and undeliverability rates reach certain thresholds
- Decreased effectiveness of marketing campaigns
Why lists degrade so quickly
The biggest reason marketing databases degrade is that people change jobs and email addresses, rendering their old contact information obsolete.
Other contributing factors include business mergers that result in people getting new email addresses and manual data entry issues. These include both honest errors such as typos and intentional errors such as people filling out forms wrong in order to access content but not be contacted by you.
Even if your databases are fairly accurate, if your engagement rates are declining, your list may still need attention. Engagement rates can be measured by email opens, clicks, and conversions. If those metrics are underperforming your goals, your audience isn’t engaged with your content.
How to clean a marketing database
You can deploy a number of tactics to freshen up your list, avoid the negative results of a dirty list, and increase the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Everything you do will be easier and produce better results if you use marketing automation or email marketing software. These solutions have features to segment lists based on undeliverable emails or inactive recipients, and you can remove the bad addresses and plan a campaign to re-engage an inactive audience.
Purge or fix bad addresses
Whether you use software or manual processes, the first step in cleaning a database is to identify and purge or correct bad addresses.
If your list isn’t large, you might be able to manually spot duplicates or identify misspelled domain names and correct them (for example, the error gks.com gets corrected to gsk.com for GlaxoSmithKline).
However, beware of appending email addresses to records that are missing email. If you then market to that address you will likely be violating opt-in and spam laws.
Improve data entry
The way to improve manual data entry performed by your own team is to be more careful and to check your entries or check the data as it is entered against a third-party address list.
You can also improve the data inputted by prospects on web forms in several ways:
- Ask users to input their email address twice to make sure both entries match. This can help avoid basic entry mistakes.
- Send opt-in users an email with a link they must click to verify their desire to opt-in. This mandates that the user input a valid email address.
Conduct re-engagement campaigns
One reason your marketing databases might be underperforming is that your audience is not engaged with your message and content.
You can fix that.
Choose a time period that’s relevant for your situation—go back three months, six months, or some other time period—and create a list of customers and prospects who have not opened any of your emails or clicked on any link. It could be that they never bothered to unsubscribe or have been too busy to pay attention.
However, if they haven’t been responsive and the email address is accurate and valid, you’re most likely not being relevant to them.
Conduct a campaign to this new list asking them to confirm their desire to continue hearing from you. Ask them to confirm their email address. Remind them of why they opted-in in the first place by reiterating the value your emails provide. Or make a promise of sending more relevant content, if you’ve had issues in that regard.
You could also ask them the type of content they’d like to receive and their preferences for frequency of communications.
Inevitably, some recipients will not opt-in again. Your list will become smaller by some degree, but your list will also become better and higher-performing.
Supplement your database marketing efforts
Some marketers may be tempted to purchase a third-party email list if their own list falls short. We definitely don’t recommend this. Purchased lists are much less likely to include recipients who have agreed to receive email communications from you, putting you in immediate violation of spam laws when you conduct a campaign. Plus, your results will be disappointing.
A smarter and more effective way to enhance your email marketing efforts is to work with third-party vendors such as Biocompare. Biocompare’s audience is actively engaged in sourcing life sciences products, providing you with an audience that has the authority to make purchasing decisions and budgets to buy. All of our subscribers are opt-in and have specified that they would like to receive messages from our partners. Click here for more information.