One change that dramatically improved B2B marketing results

Eric Wittlake is a digital and B2B marketer with a background in analytics and online media. Based in Portland, Oregon, he runs the media group at Babcock & Jenkins. To read his original post on email list guides, click here. 
You can’t rely on your own data.

Your prospects spend the vast majority of their time doing everything except opening your emails, visiting your site or viewing your content.

Despite the magic of marketing automation and the ability to collect information on every mouse movement on every page of our sites, we only get a tiny window into the lives of our prospects. And that tiny window can turn out to be very misleading.

What happens when we start to fill in the picture? We have a better understanding of what people are interested in and our marketing performs significantly better.

Here are a few recently published results:

• Case 1: Email click rates increased 279%.
• Case 2: A 463% increase in email click rate. (Wow)
• Case 3: You say clicks don’t matter? I won’t disagree, so how about a 200% increase in whitepaper downloads.

A little bit more data can completely change our view!

There are many new ways B2B marketers can use data and when we look only at what someone does on our own site, we miss most of the picture. Of course we get it wrong!

The results above, all of which were published by Madison Logic, show how just a little more data can make a huge difference, and by extension, just how little relevant data many marketers actually have today.

Imagine for a moment: you have a database with thousands of contacts that haven’t engaged with you in at least six months. You had some indication of what they might be interested in six to 18 months ago. But you don’t know if their interest has since changed!

For your email marketing to be relevant, you need to know what they are interested in now, not six months ago.

For me, that’s pretty easy to imagine because it hit close to home. We all have a marketing database with high quality contact data (for at least part of it), and yet we don’t know what many of the people in our database actually care about today.