Cleanse Your List with Every Registration

Challenge: How to maintain a clean database when customers, resellers, consultants and others are constantly registering for various materials on your website.

Great marketers have learned the value of the marketing database. Most companies have built websites with offers that encourage visitors to register by providing key information. Moreover, there are different forms: Register as a reseller; request a demonstration; download a whitepaper, etc. This becomes a database hygiene challenge when customers and partners come back and register for a whitepaper, then later show up as a new prospect. If you’re doing your best to offer information targeted at customers versus partners versus customers, how do you keep your lists clean?

What’s required is diligence in the use and maintenance of your salesforce automation systems. You likely have a process by which the finance group creates an account for new customers as soon as they purchase their first product(s). Whether this involves your salesforce automation software or an independent application, you need to create a monthly process to identify all new customers that month and specifically to add the email domain associated with these contacts e.g. ‘apple.com’ for Apple computer. Likely a bit of manual work is required to modify this list so you can have a customer account name matched with the email domain name for that customer.

With this list, the last step is to upload to your marketing automation system creating a file representing all of your customer accounts and their associated email domains (e.g., xyzcorp.com). Build a program in your marketing automation system to match all new web form registrations and then create the appropriate object in your salesforce automation. If the prospect registering uses an email domain that matches a customer account, the marketing automation system will create a contact associated with that customer account. If there’s no match, a lead will be created.

So with a bit of monthly manual work – and creating an account matching program, you can have most all registrations fill into the right buckets. The result is a database that is more accurate, so your messages to customers, partners and prospects go out with the right content. For marketers, it’s all about getting the right message to the right person at the right time. Your hit rate will increase dramatically with good database hygiene.

 Lesson: Database cleanliness is next to godliness.

Author: Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies

For the last 20 years, I have led demand generation teams supporting high growth technology companies. Now working as an independent consultant, my responsibility is to apply best practices in the creation of these programs. My goal is to enable marketing teams to become self sufficient with a data driven culture of KPI's, test and measurement in service of achieving company revenue targets. My approach is to work with senior management identifying objectives and wildly important goals. With these in mind, we work together to build programs, processes and systems that will reach these goals along with the measurement KPI's to evaluate progress. Along the way we will enable the team to manage and maintain these systems so achieving these goals becomes a natural cadence of the marketing organization. View all posts by Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies