Your Database is Sick

Your marketing database is sick.

Not sick like rad. Sick like ill.

And it's the root cause of (almost) Every. Single. Problem. 

Here's how we know. 

At Air Traffic Control (ATC) - when our customers first sign in and connect ATC to their HubSpot instance, we run a host of analytics on the contacts in their database. This process is essential for enabling 1:1 content personalization (and after ATC trial users become customers they have those analytics run everyday thereafter BTW).  

The byproduct of our first initial comprehensive analysis of any customer marketing database can often reveal a disturbing window into their health.

The Common Marketing Database Ailments

Tell me you have NO records in your database like this

And I will personally shout your name in praise from the rooftops. No matter a company's maturity, tools, revenue, or a team's total awesomeness, we see the following issues ALL the time:

• No names: Contacts without names are a major gap. Personalization is impossible without knowing who you’re talking to.
• No organizations for contacts: Without knowing the organizations your contacts belong to, you can’t tailor your messaging to fit their specific needs and contexts.
• No email for contacts: An email address is the most basic piece of contact information for digital marketing. Missing this renders contacts practically unusable.
• Zero historical engagement: Contacts without engagement history mean you’re flying blind on their preferences, interests, and past interactions.
• Tons of junk: Test accounts from devs, vendors or other random persons mismarked and segmented into customer or prospect categories

Forget really deep enrichment. We're talking about absolute basics here. These gaps severely limit your ability to create meaningful, personalized marketing strategies.

The Power of Targeted Engagement

Get Small to Get Big

I’ve always advised my teams to "get small to get big." This means focusing on a smaller, high-quality segment of your database rather than trying to manage an enormous, unwieldy list. 

It can be hard to give up a database that’s been cobbled together from years of marketing efforts however. It may also require approval from multiple stakeholders or be done in a piecemeal way (and usually slower) way. 

Ultimately it will take a shift in mentality. Sometimes it takes assigning a Sheriff to start of your database, (if you don’t have one of these marketing operations wizards, you might need one)! Once you’re aligned on how it’s going to happen, its important for your database to pull the plug and do a purge. 

So, why get small to get big?

• Quality Over Quantity
  • Deep Understanding: It's more valuable to have an in-depth understanding of 10,000 contacts than to have a superficial connection with 100,000. Knowing your audience well allows for more personalized and effective engagement.
  • Resource Efficiency: Managing a smaller, high-quality list requires fewer resources and can lead to higher returns on investment. It’s more efficient to nurture a smaller, engaged audience than to attempt to engage a larger, disinterested one.
• Enhanced Engagement
  • Personalization: With a smaller list, you can tailor your messaging and offers to meet the specific needs and preferences of your audience, leading to higher engagement rates.
  • Better Metrics: Focusing on a targeted segment can improve your email open rates, click-through rates, and overall campaign performance.
• Data Integrity
  • Accurate Information: Smaller lists are easier to keep clean and updated, ensuring that your data remains accurate and relevant.
  • Less Noise: A smaller list reduces the noise in your data, making it easier to identify trends and insights that can inform your marketing strategy.

Healing for a Healthy Marketing Database

Game-Changing Cleanup Strategies

To address these fundamental issues, here's what we recommend every single time:

• Run the entire database through an email verification tool. These tools are incredibly cost-effective. Options like NeverBounce by ZoomInfo, BounceBan, and ZeroBounce are reliable, but there are many others. This process can often be done as a one-time clean-up, so you’re not talking about a long-term commitment. Email verification helps ensure that you’re not wasting resources on invalid addresses, reducing bounce rates and improving deliverability.
• Revitalize contacts with past engagement but now-dead emails. These contacts represent a goldmine of potential pipeline. ATC offers an in-product solution to track down where these contacts have gone, but there are many tools available that can help with this. Reconnecting with these individuals can reignite interest and bring them back into your sales funnel.
• Purge dead emails of unengaged contacts. For contacts with zero engagement or those whose last interaction was over two years ago, it’s time to just delete them. Keeping these contacts only clutters your database and skews your metrics, making it harder to focus on the engaged audience that matters.
• Enrich contacts with missing emails. If you don’t have email addresses and aren’t actively prospecting these individuals, you have two choices: delete them or enrich their profiles. Tools like Apollo.io and Clay can help you find missing information. Using these tools in combination can significantly enhance your database’s quality and completeness.
• Build an interest graph around your contacts. This involves collecting data such as company news, LinkedIn profile information, and engagement data from your website and emails. At ATC, we automate this process, but even if you only have an email address, building an interest graph helps you understand and segment your audience more effectively.
  

You will Rebuild (Your Database)

Re-Building a High-Quality Audience

Now you should have an audience (or at least a segment of your audience - Rome wasn't built in a day) that you feel absolutely sure you know inside and out. Their content preferences are known, website activities known, subscription preferences validated and their data squeaky clean. 

Some are customers, and I bet some are even ideal customers. What a great segment to study as it relates to what you should be trying to find in new customers!

You likely now have prospects and contacts from all stages of the funnel. We think it's a great exercise to dig into this data so you can put it towards rebuilding an audience of like-minded humans.

• Demographic Analysis: Look at the demographics of your most engaged contacts. What age group, location, or job role do they belong to?
• Behavioral Insights: Analyze past behaviors such as purchase history, email engagement, and website interactions to identify patterns.
• Psychographic Profiling: Understand the interests, values, and motivations of your audience to tailor your messaging effectively.

As you continue with your evaluate demand generation activities and seek to start  to refilling your database and drive pipeline this analysis will enable you to make highly targeted decisions that ensure you are speaking to and guide where to find your ICP. 

Nurture Like you Mean it

Alongside driving net new prospects it's vital that unless you want to fall back into disrepair that you put some time into cultivating strategies that nurture the existing high-quality audience that you have. A few ways key ways to do that (understanding there are hundreds of other ways):

• Regularly Personalized Content: You should be putting a regular effort into producing new personalized content based on feedback from your sales and customer success reps. Even more important in our opinion: you should also be looking inward and back into your content database and sending the best fit content to the person it will interest the most. (Hint: ATC makes this super easy!)
• Engagement Campaigns: Implement targeted engagement campaigns to nurture and strengthen your relationship with your audience. Loyalty campaigns, early access to new features, community offers, swag. Remember all that demographic, behavioral, and psychographic analysis you did? 😉 That should help determine the types of campaigns that will be the most engaging. 
• Feedback Loops: Encourage feedback from your audience to continuously improve your marketing efforts and address their evolving needs. You can integrate ticket information, survey responses, and more from in-app support software solutions like Zendesk or AppCues. Common questions? Write some content on how to address the issue

The Path to Recovery: Conclusion

If I've convinced you  that is marketing database health is important here than I've done my job. This is admittedly a very oversimplified analysis of the deeper problem that is database health and one that deserves more than just a blog post to encapsulate because, once more, from the rafters! 

A SICK DATABASE:

• IS INEFFICIENT AND INEFFECTIVE
• WASTES YOUR TEAMS TIME
• WASTES YOUR AUDIENCES TIME

There's a better way. If we can be a resource in anyway feel free to reach out. And if you'd like to see the Air Traffic Control in action, feel free to request a demo.