Home or Office: It’s All a Blur for Marketers, Courtesy of Coronavirus

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Kitchen table or desk, where do you send your direct marketing campaigns?

Thanks to COVID-19, work is where you live for many professionals. When the kitchen table may be the office, direct marketers face a new hurdle when trying to reach their primary targets. As traditional workplace models are forced to change, it is essential that B2B marketers strengthen their target contact data by including more residential information. This is not necessarily a shift to a B2C strategy, but rather an embrace of residential channels as part of a thorough and timely approach to direct marketing.

Keep in mind that workers may have reduced access to their business mailboxes or none at all, based on company policy or basic convenience. With onsite staff kept at a minimum, mail collection may be infrequent and exclude services such as forwarding mail to remote workers. While marketers may be able to verify delivery of their campaign, that is no way guarantees the piece was seen. Even a workplace phone call is ineffective follow up when the desk chair is empty. Today it may be far more useful to enhance business target data with residential information, no longer presumed unnecessary or inappropriate.

Getting smarter with identity matching

Ideally, direct marketers utilize full contact intelligence, connecting a target’s professional and personal data into a single contact. For example, using identity cross-matching tools, direct marketers’ can find a contact’s email, phone number, and their residential address. The process marries deep consumer data with a broad range of third-party datasets, empowering marketers to locate John Smith at ABC Company and connect information to reach him at home. Identity matching tools fill in the data gaps, often capitalizing on a single piece of contact information, such as an email, address, or phone to complete a more robust contact profile. To optimize this approach, data tools must source information from a wide array of global databases, ranging from telecom data, USPS records, title and deed information, financial records, GIS data, and much more. These multi-sourced datasets are then linked with an equally wide variety of datapoints that may only be found in proprietary data records. All these factors allow data associations to be quickly validated for correctness, ensuring that B2B marketers have the best path to top-notch personalized communications.

It’s worth it, don’t forget that mail means more now

Intelligent data is always a valued asset, especially for direct marketers’ mail campaigns, which are shown to have a better conversion rate than any other marketing tactic in a multi-channel plan. In turn, prioritizing data management ensures long term data quality. Without consistent upkeep, lead data can decay by as high as 25% a year, possibly wasting a fourth of a yearly marketing budget on bad information. Today mail is more important than ever, as direct marketers are faced with an audience that is both captive and in need of some normalcy. In a topsy-turvy world dominated by pandemic challenges and fears, the simple act of receiving the mail helps offer feelings of consistency and familiarity that may be in short supply.

Stronger data, backed by intelligent tools, lets direct marketers find their footing in an evolving business landscape. It is truly a moment – and blending B2B and B2C channels is just smart business and good marketing.

Greg Brown
Greg Brown is vice president of Melissa, provider of global data quality and address management solutions that span the entire data quality lifecycle and integrate into CRM, ecommerce, master data management and Big Data platforms. Contact Greg at [email protected].

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