Cleaning Up Your Contact Lists

As a sales representative for Parmac, I can safely say that a clean, updated contact list is key to maximizing efficiency. It contributes substantially to the success of a campaign when you are reaching out to the right people, at the right numbers, at the right places.  It only wastes time when I mean to reach out to an office and I reach a flower shop; or the customer I am trying to reach has since retired and closed shop.

This begs the question: Why do so many companies strive for quantity when it comes to collecting those emails or phone numbers, rather than building a high-quality list full of people or businesses actually interested in their brand?

I remember going to the university fair in Toronto and only really being interested in 2-3 schools. That being said, 17-year-old-me was also very interested in collecting free “swag” from all the other attending schools though. So of course I submitted my “fake” contact information for the free t-shirts, sunglasses, pens and bags. Complete with a junk email that I set up specifically for when I sign up for emails I don’t want to receive. To this day (over 10 years later) those schools are still wasting their time emailing an inbox that is never checked. I’m contributing to un-open rates and other key performance indicators because I wasn’t a quality contact. Interestingly enough, deleting my contact information would improve the statistics and make the marketing initiatives more successful.

The other big reason why businesses should conduct regular clean up is to eliminate old customer’s no longer in need of your product or service. They may have loved your company once, and businesses hate this, but, consumers do have a lifetime value. At the end of the day, they only need you so much.  As a former swimming instructor – the customer only needs your services until they know how to swim.  Why should we as a business be spending our time marketing and contacting a family who now has children who have grown up and are quite capable of swimming? The answer is that we shouldn’t.  

One of the services that Parmac Marketing provides is a contact & database clean-up while we do lead generation for you.  If the contact within the company has left, we find you the new point of contact. When the extensions have all changed, we go through the directory to seek out a new one for you. When a customer no longer wants to receive phone calls, we remove them from your list.  That way, you can target your efforts, and improve upon your list for the next campaign. The best part is, we can do all this while generating leads for you. It’s a small and seemingly simple concept that can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your marketing team.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash