MapAnything deals with location data, letting you know where your customers/prospects are.
It’s a different kind of data topic than we’re used to covering on The...
Marketers today need all the right tools in the toolbox to get the job done right. Not all tools are must-haves, but comprehensive data certainly is. In a recent interview on The Corporate Data Show Dennis Arndt, Chief Technology Officer at RainKing, shared why having a proper org list can make all the difference for outbound marketing:
Rick:
Can you tell us, based on how you’ve used it, how a person could use your comprehensive sets? You’ve got to put together a really strong program.
Dennis:
In the experiences I’ve been part of, it’s relatively easy to find contact information for someone like myself. We’re often listed on the website, but we also don’t usually respond to the onslaught of marketing emails that we get. The question is, what do you do next? The way I would approach it, and what we espouse to our customers, is to offer not only information about Dennis Arndt but also about the folks who surround him. His lead lieutenants or captains. As you look for other ways to get to Dennis indirectly through other relationships, you have easy access to the fact that he has three directors or a VP. If you can’t reach him, you reach out to them next. Of course, a very important part of that is “Who are these people?” They may not be easily discoverable, since they’re not on the website or LinkedIn. But with our org charts it’s very easy to find who that next set of people might be.
Rick:
That’s a piece a lot of folks miss. They assume the coverage map for companies out there is perfectly complete. It’s absolutely not. We just started messing with looking at duplicate data. How many managers can people actually have? These company maps are a mess, so you can’t even use popular guessing tools. If you don’t have the person’s name, you can’t even take a swing at figuring out how to get ahold of them. So it really does start with having an idea that the person exists, especially if your strategy involves a lot of social. If you can’t look them up, you can’t really do anything.
Dennis:
Correct. The other important part of a comprehensive data set is that it is current and all been refreshed on a frequent basis. You don’t want to spend a lot of time getting emails kicked back, which has a whole other set of problems. If you’re trying to do a broader marketing campaign, and 20% of the emails you’re using are bad, you’re in trouble. The new world is such that if you’re using Hubspot, and they see you’re getting too many kickbacks, they’ll label you as a spammer. All of a sudden, your capacity to do outbound marketing gets curtailed because they shut you off or slow you down.
“Over a three-month period, I’d guess the IT info atrophy percentage is 20%. - Dennis Arndt"
Rick:
And that’s a minor fire you’re describing. I have customers who say they bought a $99 something or other that they downloaded and tried to run through Constant Contact. A 20% hard bounce rate is the smallest problem you’re talking about. You’re lucky if you don’t have to redo the domain name of your company half the time.
Dennis:
Well put.
Rick:
Frequent refreshers. Let’s dive into that. Having an org chart is a good way to prevent stuff like traps being in your list. If the person really exists, it’s probably not a trap.
Talk about how awesome it is to have direct dials.
Dennis:
We do an awful lot of work to ensure that our database is current. We refresh it every 30-60 days. That information atrophies rather quickly. Over a three-month period, I’d guess the atrophied percentage is 20%. That includes someone who got a promotion or has moved on. People leave a company and a lot of data sets continue to show that person still there.
Rick:
How do you get the people data you have?
Dennis:
We have a big investment in our research organization. We understand that the process for tracking down this information and keeping it current takes many different approaches. One approach may be valid this week, month, or year, and the following year it changes. So a big part of it is grunt work and research.
Rick:
Yep. Humans are still the best pattern detectors. Unfortunately, they’re also the most expensive…
Conclusion:
You’ve got to have a box full of these tools as a marketer. Hopefully, a couple of new folks find a good one in RainKing.
This post is based on a podcast interview with Dennis Arndt from RainKing. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Corporate Data Show.
If you don’t use iTunes, you can listen to every episode here.
