Keeping It Real
Marketing automation platforms are continually evolving to be more sophisticated, taking on the latest trends in the digital landscape, like mobile commerce, wearable devices and incorporating Internet of Things (IoT) data points with Predictive Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to further automate and create efficiencies. However, whether you are using Adobe’s Marketo, Salesforce’s Pardot, Hubspot, or Infusionsoft, they all share one basic building block: the sales lead.
While marketing automation platforms like Marketo are good at monitoring a sales lead’s engagement and triggering personalized marketing messaging based on their actions, they are not great at knowing if the lead is an actual person. This ‘real person’ comes with unique contact record data, like their name, email, mailing address, phone numbers, and business name.
“Marketo Consultant Justin Gray estimates that 50 percent of marketing database content is useless.”
This contact data needs to be accurate and up-to-date to get optimal performance out of your marketing automation efforts. And even though marketers understand the importance of accurate contact data, over 50% of leads collected have fatal errors. To compound the problem, 70% of viable leads will have a significant change in their contact information over the course of a year.
Making sure your data is thoroughly cleansed, up-to-date and of the highest quality is one of the more cost-effective ways you can maximize the performance of your marketing automation platform.
