I jokingly refer to myself as a digital hoarder, I have every email (sent and received), every document, presentation, spreadsheet and more at my fingertips and now, thanks to the beauty of cheap digital storage I don’t see that stopping now. Woohoo! The power of the cloud! I recently ran across a really good article on decluttering your life, both mentally and physically, and it got me thinking, as marketers and technologists are we doing the same thing to our systems?
The first place to start looking for the clutter is among the contacts in your marketing automation platform. It is easy to forget how much your old contacts can be harming your campaigns and frankly dragging down your metrics. If you are sitting atop a database full of inactive contacts you aren’t doing yourself any favors.
Okay, so you’re less concerned about your metrics (not sure why but ok), how about the carrying costs of that dead weight? Most marketers forget that they are paying for automation (at least some of the bigger vendors) based upon the feature set they have access to but also based on the volume of contacts in their database.
How do you take action? Here are our simple steps:
- Define what “inactive” means to your company. Make sure to take into account how people interact with your marketing efforts and how long your sales cycle is and how often you are reaching out to these contacts.
- Create a few cuts of the database to understand how many of your contacts have been inactive for 6 months, 9 months and a year. One example of how this might look:
- Create a reengagement campaign. Think creatively, obviously these contacts were not interested in your usual content, think about being radically different for this. What’s the worst that happens? I’ll tell you what it is, that they don’t engage, in which case you are no worse off than you already were.
- Measure, optimize, repeat. After you have your campaign off and running, look for ways you can optimize it and set a frequency for when you will be re-running it, you want to keep the database clear of that clutter on an ongoing basis.
As the year winds down remember to think about cleaning house a bit before you start pumping new programs out do a little bit of de-cluttering too.
Originally posted: Uncluttering your Marketing “Life” | Demand Generation | Revenue Marketing Agency | Pedowitz Group