I see a lot of companies finally starting to dig out of the financial mess we’ve been living in for the last few years and for a lot of them that means finally taking a look at some of the messier details that have been swept under the carpet. It’s not pretty.
A big casualty has been the quality of many company databases. Mind you, not all of them are bad and many of the bigger, stronger, more technically sophisticated organizations have done a better than decent job of maintaining the quality of their data. But, as is the case with so many different types of programs, there’s a big divide between the haves and the have nots. And most companies are in the “have not” camp, which only means that they are dealing with a few extra problems – like bad data, not enough staff and an overall shortage of marketing resources (like for example no marketing department at all).
Database clean up has always been a task that sits at the end of a long line of priorities – which is pretty stupid when you consider that most sales and marketing initiatives use that database. It’s a lot like a home renovation I guess. Owners are happy to put in new granite counters in the kitchen but hate to have to replace the plumbing.
Title only voice messaging campaigns are a great way to not only kick start your marketing communications programs but also update the quality of your data and they’re simple to run as long as you’re working with a program that allows for human intervention on each of your records. You can simply set up a priority on your contact attempts. The first attempt goes to the exisiting name ( assuming you have one) and if that fails, designate your second contact to go to that job title. Build in a mechanism to capture the phonetic name from the voicemail box or from the receptionist (although they aren’t as likely to provide that as they once were) and in a perfect world, put in a third attempt to verifiy the information. You can verify the information either with another call to the company – strangely enough, the same receptionist who refused to provide you with a name in the first place is usually very helpful when you only need to correct the spelling or you can use a site like LinkedIn to verify the name and title information. The real beauty of using LinkedIn as a verification source is that there is usually some very handy additional information you can glean.
Where can you go to run a campaign like this? Try calling Boxpilot. We can help