Making the Most of B-to-B Lists

Business-to-business multichannel marketers all face the same challenge today: how to maintain or grow our active customer databases despite the increased cost of prospecting and the declining sizes of the lists we traditionally use for prospecting. Often, B-to-B list owners do not even rent their lists and certainly will not rent their e-mail lists. A recent trend report by Abacus revealed B-to-B house files dropped 9% in size from 2007 to 2008.

Fortunately, there have never been more options available to B-to-B marketers than today. We can use traditional data like Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) and North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) coding and/or we can access large databases with buying information or we can do both. When we match our prospects and buyer files to these data sources, we can perform predictive modeling that will help us answer critical questions like:

(1) How many prospect versus reactivation versus retention names should we promote?

(2) How do we decide who gets what channel and how often?

Major B-to-B marketers have apparently already begun to turn to their customer databases, in combination with smart prospecting, to meet the challenge of maintaining optimal database size. They are reaching out to their customer files to reactivate old customers, retain good customers and convince so-so customers to buy more.

“Our strategy has been to continuously invest in our marketing efforts with added focus on leveraging the investment we’ve made in our existing customer lists,” said Steven E. Lehukey is vice president, marketing and communications at Tessco Technologies, a provider of wireless infrastructure systems. “We have been more diligent in the penetration of each customer relationship so as to maximize our contacts while communicating the overall savings realized by the consolidation of purchases from one source.”

I participated in a recent webinar that addressed one approach: appending firmographic and/or transactional data to customer names to maximize return on investment (ROI). Eric Zilling, vice president, data services, and I presented specific case studies of how B-to-B multichannel marketers can append online and offline data to new customers, one time buyers, average customers and older customers to assess their potential expenditures. Then, based on this potential, we can test the channel (and the corresponding investment) that matches that potential. Likewise, data can be appended to rented B-to-B lists for prospecting.
For example, a B-to-B marketer can send out an e-mail, direct mail or catalog accompanied by a message directing prospects to a landing page for more information. Once there, they can fill in their names and addresses as well as some basic information about their needs, which helps build the database with qualified leads. This promotion can be applied to prospective customers, lapsed customers, and domestic or international customers. An effective variation is to use this technique to get more new customers at companies that are already buying from you (site penetration).
Even in today’s economy, there is a lot of potential to drive sales and increase customer database retention and ROI for B-to-B marketers who can figure out how to integrate not only their channels but their prospecting and marketing efforts as well. Using data more effectively can help with this integration.

Mary Ann Kleinfelter ([email protected]) is vice president of marketing at L-com Global Connectivity.