Every B2B seems to understand that personalization is important, but their efforts across the board seem to fall short.
According to the latest research from Seismic and Forrester, 88% of businesses agree that buyers expect relevant and personalized content now more than ever.
However, only about 20% of businesses can effectively personalize their experiences for each buyer.
Why?
Data.
There’s a good chance critical errors in your B2B database are throwing off your personalization strategy. Here’s how to clean it up and avoid bad data from entering your leads database in the first place.
What’s Wrong with Your B2B Database?
B2B data is just prone to collecting dust and dirt. That’s just the way it is.
In B2C, you can reasonably assume the buying preferences and needs of a father with a young child won’t drastically change in the next few months. In B2B, people get promoted and companies go out of business or merge all the time.
That’s one reason why roughly 25% of all B2B databases contain fundamental errors – not good.
In fact, 62% of businesses rely on data that’s up to 40% incorrect to guide their marketing strategies – even worse!
It makes sense then that 40% of new marketing goals go south due to bad intel.
Why Are Errors in Your Leads Database a Problem?
Your entire personalization strategy needs high-quality data. What’s high-quality data? It needs to be
- Correct: Real people in your target audience
- Current: Up-to-date data as close to real-time as possible
When one little piece of data goes bad – like a lead switches her role within the same company – imagine how it could throw off your entire personalization strategy. It doesn’t mean you’ll stop communicating with her, but your content should change to address her current needs, right?
That’s just a microcosm of how bad information screws up your B2B database.
Errors in Your B2B Database Cost Money
Don’t get too frightened but it costs a lot of money to clean up your leads database.
Let’s say someone enters a fake email address, location, and name on your lead magnet form when they want to access a report on your website. It will cost you $10 on average to clean up that error once it enters your B2B database.
If the fake lead just sits there and you do nothing to fix it, it will end up costing you $100.
Now, imagine this over and over again for every piece of bad intel in your database. It adds up quickly.
Errors in Your Sales Database Cost Current Customers
65% of buyers say they’ll consider switching vendors if a company doesn’t make any effort to personalize communications. Personalization is critical if you want to avoid losing the customers you already have to competitors.
Your customers expect personalization. They want to feel like you value the relationship and are trying to improve their experience on a one-on-one basis.
Errors in Your Leads Database Cost You Sales
Personalization isn’t optional anymore and it needs to work correctly. 85% of buyers say they’ll dismiss a company that doesn’t personalize the very first interaction. Not only that but buyers complete between 57% and 90% of the sales process before they ever speak to someone in your company.
In other words, no generic sales pitches and no generic website content. With an accurate B2B database, it’s really not difficult to create highly personalized content that lets them self-nurture as they browse your website (and your competitors’).
How to Keep Your B2B Database Clean and Accurate
Of course, if you’ve already started collecting contact information for your leads database, you can’t exactly start fresh. You can, however, clean up what you already have and put new strategies in place to make sure you’re only working with the best information from here on forward.
Get Rid of Forms
Bots make up 52% of all internet traffic. It’s nearly impossible to protect your forms from spam.
Even if bad data isn’t coming from bots, it’s coming from visitors who aren’t in your verticals or even your industry who just want to access your gated content.
Let your content breathe. 70% of all B2B searches are on mobile and forms are preventing them from self-nurturing when they arrive at your site.
Instead of gated content, give your visitors a hefty sample and let them provide a business email address and country location to download the full piece of content. Not only will leads be further along in the buying process by the time they give you their email, but you’ll also have collected more relevant data about their browsing behavior.
Use Human Lead Verification
Start with high-quality data from the get-go with human lead verification. Ask for a business email and country – that’s it.
From there, you can verify data through LinkedIn to create a comprehensive leads database profile that can update itself as information changes.
Should You Buy B2B Data?
Yes and no.
Buying email lists is never a good idea. For one thing, it’s a legal gray area. For another, those leads don’t want to talk to you. Instead, focus on personalizing communication with the leads who truly want to hear what you have to say.
However, you can buy B2B intent data to drive your personalization campaigns. Intent data tells you why someone is visiting your website and where they’re at in the buying process. It’s much more effective for marketing than other types of data, like cookies.
Create the Website Your Leads Expect with Your B2B Database
Your website is your most valuable marketing asset.
Your sales team only has control over between 10% and 43% of the buying process. For the rest, your leads need the content and tools they need to self-nurture through your website.
Create the website they expect with high-level personalization and content bingeing features.
Hushly can help. You’ll never pay to use the platform – only 100% genuine leads. In about 30 minutes, Hushly can help you take personalization to the next level and help you skyrocket lead conversions by 51%! We guarantee it.
See Hushly software in action now!