There has been so many changes for marketers to deal with related to email marketing in particular. For the final installment of our three-part B2B marketing-focused Business Chat discussion, Tony Romero from the Experian product team shares tips marketers can employ to improve email performance. In today’s chat, we focus on ways marketers can improve campaign performance by incorporating analytics and models.
Be sure to register to attend Tony’s 15-Minute Sip and Solve talk “Increasing Email Campaign Performance With Analytics“, he will go into greater depth and offer actionable tips to you execute successful B2B campaigns.
Watch Our Interview
What follows is a lightly edited transcription of our talk.
[Gary Stockton]: Tony, can you share some examples of models marketers can use to segment and target prospects?
[Tony Romero]: It’s very important for a marketing manager or CMO to take a deep dive into their marketing plan. What are the objectives? What are they trying to do? You know, it could be a variety of things. One is that they could try to grow their existing market space with the same type of customers they already have, or they could be trying to penetrate new markets or try to go after a specific type of company or consumers. So, depending on the marketing plan, it’s important then to do deep dive analytics to provide the right type of target audience for that marketing plan.
[Tony Romero]: So what custom modeling can do is identify what attributes constitute the ideal customer. Again, whether that ideal customer is an existing type of customer or penetrating a new market, it could be using SIC or NAICS codes to identify those new market spaces or looking at specific attributes on demographics or credit data. It could be numerous things. And so Experian Data Sciences scientists can create custom modeling to clearly define those types of businesses and individuals to promote them effectively.
[Gary Stockton]: Excellent. Now let’s talk a bit about metrics because some metrics are no longer helpful, such as open rate with the iOS update. What other metrics should marketing departments focus on now with all of these changes?
[Tony Romero]: Open rates are not going to be significant anymore because Apple has set up a proxy server to take in emails coming in from a service provider. The provider opens them up in a proxy server first before it reaches the actual individual who’s opening that email. And the purpose of that is to disassociate the IP address so that the consumer has privacy. So open rates are no longer a valid KPI for marketers to use. You’ll see very, very high open rates, but what you can do to effectively email marketing to consumers is, first of all, ensure that your deliverability is high. And again, that’s where data hygiene comes in. You want to make sure you have the most current and correct email address possible. You want to ensure they’re not part of the don’t email list. So again, deliverability is one of your key KPIs now to focus on. The second one to focus on is your clicks, making sure that your content is as effective as possible so that your audience is actually going to click on that call to action. And again, that’s where segmentation, as we discussed, is very important. So your message is hitting the mark. It’s resonating with your audience. And then finally landing on the site. So once the user clicks on that and lands on your site, ensure that that individual is then taken to the right place to be given the information they need. So making sure all of that is effective throughout their journey is going to be critical.
[Gary Stockton]: Yeah, because with the Apple changes, you know, open rate, that used to be quite important. But now the proxy server will look like everything’s opened, and you can’t always trust that. So you do have to be looking at other metrics. But the other thing I hear about is intent-based campaigns where people have implied interest or shown an intent to buy. Can you talk a little bit about how those campaigns work?
[Tony Romero]: Intent data is excellent information. Basically, when a consumer is on a website, they’re clicking on particular things. For example, they may be downloading a white paper, or they may be asking for more information or having a salesperson contact them. Those are very specific triggers that can be used to identify that a consumer has intent on purchasing, and all of that can be pulled together to create a score to provide a marketer with information about how much intent a consumer has. So intent data is very valuable, and here too, Experian can provide intent data to marketers to be able to use that to promote and do effective campaigns. Now, one other thing too about intent data is, again, third-party cookies can track it. It can be tracked by first-party cookies, or it could be tracked by tracking pixels. And as Gary had mentioned, you know, third-party cookies are going away, but that doesn’t mean that intent data is going away. There are still plenty of other ways to track intent.
[Gary Stockton]: Yes, also for account-based campaigns too, you can use that intent-based data to show you which accounts have got that market problem that if you’re listening to those signals solutions like 6 Sense, a lot of B2B sites are using things like that. So, on the analytics front, any final thoughts on how marketers can improve campaign performance?
[Tony Romero]: On the analytics side? Again, I think the main thing is focus on your target segments and be able to define your objectives; how can you really focus in hyper-focus on who that target audience is so that your message will resonate. Also, one other thing I would say with analytics is to measure your KPIs. You know, after a completed campaign, look at your KPIs and say what went right? What went wrong? or what needs to be changed? And then being able to then either assess, pivot, or refine whatever your next campaign will be, is a very critical thing to do.
[Gary Stockton]: Assess, pivot, excellent stuff. It’s been great to get your perspectives on marketing here Tony, I’ve learned a great deal in these chats, and ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to get a level deeper on this, don’t miss Tony’s upcoming marketing analytics, Sip and Solve webinar. He’s going to be talking in much greater detail about this element of optimizing marketing campaigns. And you can find a link to that session in the description of this video and our blog posts, or remember to like this video and subscribe to our channel.
If you want to get the most out of your marketing campaigns, it's important that they are tailored for a specific audience. We invited Tony Romero on Business Chat to talk about part two of his three-part Sip and Solve webinar series focused on B2B marketing where he explains how segmentation and targeting can make all aspects (landing page or email) more effective by using industry SIC as well as NAICS codes. Look-a-like analysis CMO's challenged with restricted budgets Analyzing portfolio diversity and targeting minority-led, women-led businesses Profiling prospects with limited data attributes Watch Our Interview What follows is a lightly edited transcription of our talk. [Gary Stockton]: So in our last chat, we talked about maintaining robust marketing data to power effective campaigns and how clean data really helps businesses conduct effective marketing campaigns. This week, we switch gears to discuss the power of segmentation and targeting using industry SIC and NAICS codes to optimize your marketing budgets. So let's dive in. In our previous chat, we spoke about the changes that tech companies have enacted to make the job of targeting business prospects harder, but it's not game over for marketers. [Tony Romero]: No, definitely not. You know, it's really important to know that there's still a lot of a wealth of data out there that can be used to identify and segment target customers. You know, the first-party data obviously is really key, as well as being able to take information that may be spotty. If, for example, you only have a name or address, you can be able to through services like ours, be able to get a full, comprehensive set of data on that customer, both firmographic, demographic, and credit information, and then be able to use that to promote to customers. [Gary Stockton]: So can you share some examples of how Experian data can help marketers hone in on their target customer, for example, how SICs and NAICS codes can help? [Tony Romero]: Yeah, Gary, you're right. SIC and NAICS codes provide information about what industry the business is in. And so, by knowing that, you're able to target those consumers. So again, as I mentioned before, you can take a look at your existing customer base and find out who's your ideal target customer. And from that, then you can compare that to prospective businesses that look just like that. And that's what's called a lookalike analysis. And by using SIC and NAICS codes, you're able to use that to segment the market and then be able to promote effectively. And Gary, you also mentioned that with the economic state, CMOs have to watch their budgets and be as efficient as possible these days. So again, by doing very good segmenting of your target audience, you are making sure that your finance and financial output to a campaign are as efficient as possible. [Gary Stockton]: Excellent, regulators, they're focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion. How can Experian help clients in that effort? [Tony Romero]: You know? Yeah. That's a very key point and definitely more than ever. It's important to focus on identifying your existing portfolio and seeing how many customers in your portfolio are minority-led or women-led businesses. So you can do benchmarking, you can see how you fare against other businesses in your market space. And that helps you to determine how much more do you need to market to these minority or women-led businesses. So what's number one is the benchmarking, but secondly, you need to be able to go out and look at your prospective target list and find out who are minority-led or women-led. And there, getting an indicator about a Woman-led or Minority-led business allows you to promote specifically to those types of businesses to help increase your portfolio. [Gary Stockton]: That's good. So if all I have is a name and an email address, and in a lot of cases, you know, if we're driving a newsletter, can I still profile this contact? Or are there other ways to do that with minimal info? [Tony Romero]: Yes, there is. You know, even just having a name and address is enough data to go through our type of service and be able to append all of the other information that we talked about, whether it's firmographic with SIC or NAICS codes, it could be demographic information where we look at the business and find out who the consumers that are tied to that business are? So that's called a B2C linkage. And from that now, you know who the actual individual is and go target those specific individuals. So that's also another key point to bring out [Gary Stockton]: Excellent stuff, Tony. Well, folks, if you enjoyed this chat and want to go a level deeper, don't miss Tony's campaign targeting Sip and Solve webinar – Fine Tuning B2b Campaign Targeting. He goes into greater detail on targeting B2B prospects, just click the image to be taken over to the recording. Related Posts
We’re talking B2B marketing data hygiene with Tony Romero from our product team today on Business Chat.
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