The Problem of Record Completeness in B2B Marketing

Today, contact records are used for more than simply getting in touch with the prospect or customer. Fields are used for lead routing, content serving, analytics, and segmentation purposes. Understanding as much as possible about a contact can help to tailor a prospect or customer’s experience interacting with your brand for both inbound and outbound channels. Data should not only be accurate, but as complete as possible.

Recently, NetProspex conducted a comprehensive analysis of business contact records, compiling the findings into The State of Marketing Data 2013, a first-of-its-kind Marketing Data Benchmark Report. Over 100M records were collected, representing both prospect and customer records, and were scored on a standardized five-point scale called the NetProspex Data Health Scale. Ratings ranged from “1”, which indicates a “Risky” status (less marketable), to “5” which is defined as “Optimal” (or more marketable).

In this study, we defined record completeness with the following data fields: First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Job Title, URL, Phone, Email, Mailing address, Industry, Revenue, and Number of Employees. These fields allow for multiple methods of contact, as well as basic segmentation and lead routing.

On average, study respondents’ databases were not complete enough to allow for effective segmentation and multiple methods of contact. While a reasonable amount of incomplete records are expected in a database that gets built incrementally with each prospect interaction, our study discovered the average 2.5 rating indicates marketers are relying on databases that are nearly 50 percent incomplete! This puts marketers at a huge disadvantage.

It isn’t all bad news. There are tools such as progressive profiling and registration form append services that help to improve the accuracy of—or supplement data—captured from inbound sources. However, when buying records from third-party data sources marketers should be mindful of record completeness, and only accept data partnerships with vendors who provide full and complete contacts.

Remember, prospect records with complete profiles provide marketers more options for segmenting and delivering targeted messaging for a higher probability of success. It allows for more robust lead scoring using such fields as job title and company size, as well as proper routing to sales, an area where all marketers could do better.

Undeniably, record completeness is one best practice that has a direct, quantifiable impact on your marketing program’s effectiveness. In fact, the Relevancy Group reports untargeted email programs due to lack of information about leads increase costs by as much as 3.6X! The numbers don’t lie: companies should not be making messaging or segmentation decisions based on assumptions about the prospect because they lack the data.

It might be time to ask yourself: how complete is your database?

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