As a long time B2B Marketer I know I typically have to “touch” a lead 5 to 6 times before they become a prospect in my sales funnel. With that in mind, I am using multiple tactics to get suspects to raise their hand. I have a feeling direct mail is on the comeback so we are about to give it a try again. Yes, it’s still expensive and postage rates are still going up but with email boxes being filled up with spam, suspects may be more likely to act if we can figure out how to stand out in the crowd.

As Marketers, when we start to build out a campaign we spend time on the WHAT we are going to deliver, the HOW we are going to deliver our message and the WHEN the program is going to go out but when it comes to the WHO, we haven’t had many options. Our choices were either an in-house database (how old and accurate is this data really?) or to rent data from a title-based list broker. And do we know who these people are or how these names were really acquired?

So as we get ready to build out a direct mail program I’m reminded of a tragic story one of our customers told us. They had a total budget of $100,000 for a direct mail campaign. This was going to be the program of the quarter and they were very anxious to get it out the door so the responders would start rolling in. Of their total budget, they spent $5,000 on the WHO they were trying to reach. The rest of the money went to creating an elaborate piece with “exactly the right messaging”, an attractive call to action and web components for tracking. They felt good about the program and believed the number of responses would justify the cost. They dropped the piece, then waited and waited and waited. Not only did they not get the overwhelming number of responses, they only got one. Now that’s one expensive lead if you ask me.

Obviously when creating a direct mail campaign we need to create a compelling piece with a strong call to action. But the WHO is where a lot of B2B Marketers go wrong. The most successful campaigns, direct mail or otherwise, are those that are targeted at the right people in the right companies. So how do you decide what the right WHO looks like? Here’s what I’m doing –

To find the right businesses, I go straight to my sales pipeline and recent customer wins. I’m looking for where we are winning and what kinds of companies are moving through the funnel the fastest. Then I build out an initial database of other companies that match this profile. Now that I’ve identified the right companies to go after, I’m just left with finding the right contacts for my message. Lucky me, we’re in the business of building custom role based contact databases for lead generation initiatives. So I use our own role-based contact discovery service to find the right decision makers within those target companies. By paying a little more attention to WHO I’m targeting, I feel confident my upcoming direct mail campaign is going to deliver.

Just in case you’re wondering, the person who was responsible for the $100K campaign lost their job. And the person that took their place now uses ReachForce to help keep their job.

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As some of you may have noticed, we at ReachForce were founded on the principals that B2B direct marketing was failing due to the poor quality of lists – it was and is egregious that we get less than 1% response rate from e-mail campaigns and that the list industry had not changed in 100 years and I quote are like “dinosaurs in a marketing 2.0 world”. Then, this week I see a picture of a dinosaur on the cover of the BtoB magazine and it alludes to the “L-word”.

The article titled “The List World - List managers unable to adapt and create new products and services that dig deeper into data are in danger of extinction” is a very interesting piece. Carol Krol, great job on this article, you absolutely GET IT!

Here are some of the points covered in the article:

1. The “List industry” is undergoing dramatic change and consolidation is underway – the OLD way of list marketing is dying
2. Database marketing is emerging (my view is that isn’t that what we all learned anyway?)
3. Data now constitutes 2 dimensions: Analytics and the leads databases (not lists)
4. Custom database development is what people want with more precision
5. E-mail marketing emerging as the # 1 way to target 1:1 messages to the right people
6. Nurturing contacts using e-mail marketing is also a driver to this trend
7. Database analytics and segmentation is becoming a natural extension in marketing departments

As I say every day, fellow B2B Marketers, let’s get together on a crusade to put an end to the 90+% waste in marketing spend - stopping the bleeding on lists is a good start, let’s think about targeted databases built on analytics and focused messages to the right person at the right target company.

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Apparently dirty data and 2% response rates are global problems. New survey results from UK-based marketing communications agency Godfrey show business-to-business Marketers have ‘plenty of room for improvement’ when it comes to using customer and prospect databases for direct marketing purposes. The research offers new evidence that direct marketing campaigns could be more effective if B2B Marketers would clean up their data and use a systematic direct marketing program based on database marketing fundamentals.

Lynne DeMers, strategic direct marketing team leader at Godfrey, is quoted as saying: ” Direct marketing is not about sending 20,000 mailers to a rented list and hoping for a two per cent return.” Wow, where have we heard that before? Maybe in our Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook?

She also makes a great point about effective direct marketing: “It is about creating a programme and a system of messages, offers, information capture, measurement and refinement.”

The survey also found that:

• Only 60 per cent of Marketers use their customer database for targeted direct marketing, and only 40 per cent regularly update customers with new offers.
• While mass direct marketing techniques typically yield response rates ranging from 0.5 to two per cent, targeted direct marketing technologies are considerably more effective, according to Godfrey.
• B2B marketers can realize 40 per cent open rates, 10 to 20 per cent click rates and opt-out rates of less than one per cent with segmented email marketing and e-newsletter campaigns.

Sounds like it’s time for drastic change and there are many good lessons in how to make those changes in the complimentary Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook offered on this site.

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A reader of The B2B Lead Blog reports a B2B Marketer, who will go unnamed, recently confessed to a rather embarrassing and costly blunder that was a clear result of breaking the first commandment of Sales and Marketing – Know Thy Customer. Apparently, the newbie Marketer sent a very expensive Selling to VITO direct mailer to a UPS executive in a Fed Ex envelope. Doh!

Have any other embarrassing or costly mistakes to share with readers of The B2B Lead Blog? Submit a Post!

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ReachForce is the worldwide provider of OnDemand Data Solutions for CRM – Driving Marketing initiatives and Sales effectiveness. ReachForce Solutions are designed to quickly highlight target market ‘sweet spots’ based on customer wins and sales funnel analysis as well as identify the right decision making unit based on their role in the organization, not just their title. By enabling marketing and sales teams to focus their demand generation efforts on the right role-based decision makers in the right target companies for their products or services, ReachForce data is increasing demand generation effectiveness and accelerating sales cycles. ReachForce customers have increased results by 20 to 30 times for every dollar spent on marketing and sales initiatives – maximizing the value of CRM investments.

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