You may think that a business contact’s direct mail data is accurate, but is it?
Like more and more companies today, you may be returning to direct mail to engage your customers and prospects, especially after experiencing the disappointment of declining email response rates. However, finding and maintaining accurate direct mail data for contacts is a challenge, especially if you are conducting B2B lead generation. When it comes to database building and maintenance, business customer contacts can be difficult to trace when they relocate to another company or even just change roles or offices within their organization.
You can run your list of contacts through the National Change of Address (NCOA) system to verify mailing addresses for each contact’s business, but it won’t confirm where each contact is located. For example, you may get the current address for a contact’s business headquarters, but there’s no confirmation that the contact is in that location or another. You might consider using a data scraping service that extracts contact information from email signatures or electronic business cards. However, that data is often only 70-75 percent accurate.
The Lowdown on How to Build a Database
At SimplyDIRECT, we “curate” contact list building, gathering as much sales intelligence as possible on your target customers. Our contact lists are hand-crafted in that we research each contact individually and employ a two-step method for this contact research:
- Research the Internet
We will go to the Internet and thoroughly research each contact based on their job title, function, and keywords, and use that information to determine their mailing address rather than simply scraping it from the Internet.
- Call the Contact’s Company
Based on our Internet research, we’ll then call each contact’s company to verify their mailing address and other contact information.
With that confirmation from the contact’s company, we have a highly valuable piece of account based marketing data for direct mail purposes. The data’s accuracy is 95% or higher, which can be achieved only through this deep, focused, and practical research in which we directly contact the business to confirm the contact’s location. No other company that offers database building employs this type of contact research. Unless you have someone reaching out to the contact or their business, you’re not going to achieve the data quality or database accuracy needed to perform the data-driven targeting that is necessary to ensure your direct mail campaign effectively reaches your target audience.
This two-step method is part of our research-based selling approach, which uses market research surveys to gather in-depth data on target customers, including the systems they have installed, their challenges, and how they plan to address them. We focus on not only capturing as much customer data as possible but also collecting accurate account based marketing data, which you can only get by going to the source, the customer contacts themselves.
Effective ABM execution and demand generation marketing begin with our contact research process. To prove our value to you, we offer a Free Trial: Send us 25 of your contacts and we will verify them at no charge, delivering them with over 95 percent accuracy.