4 Factors Reducing Customer Acquisition Campaign ROI Now – and What to Do About It

As B2B marketers seek to impact brand growth through new customer acquisition campaigns, the first thing they need to focus on isn't the content, the creative, or even the channel strategy. It's the quality of their business contact data. Without clean, accurate data driving your campaigns, the ability to reach (let alone “convince and convert”) the right decision-makers is compromised.

Consider this: B2B data regularly decays up to 70+% per year. So honestly, why even invest in content and creative if your database isn’t going to get your message in front of the right people or even get it anywhere at all – due to data decay or costly errors?

Not only that, but the rise of omni-channel has made it critical to ensure the prospect profiles in your database are comprehensive. They must be capable of fueling campaigns across multiple channel points, including direct mail, email, social, programmatic, and more.

Today, these profiles also need a B2B2C upgrade. With the blending of our personal and professional lives, it only makes sense that prospect contact data should encompass both personal and professional channels. This gives you a better chance of reaching them, wherever they might be. To do this well, marketers must make the shift to a modern business contact database with company- and contact-level social URLs, MAIDS, mobile phone numbers, and a range of LinkID overlays to reach prospects on all of their preferred channels.

New Data Quality Challenges

A few short years ago, the pandemic set off layoffs and a high unemployment rate. Then came the Great Resignation, where people began switching jobs at an unprecedented rate. (In 2020, all of these changes created massive business contact data decay, making it necessary for OMI to purge over 6 million businesses and 13 million contacts from our massive Living File®database.)

Now, we are seeing the following new trends re-shape the workforce. As a marketer, if you don’t react quickly enough to these shifts with database updates, your customer acquisition campaign ROI will surely take a hit:

• Big-Tech Layoffs: As reported in Forbes, 384 tech companies laid off more than 124,000 employees in 2024, adding to the 428,449 tech workers who lost their jobs in 2022 and 2023. More layoffs are continuing, too. 
• Retiring Baby Boomers: Recent study findings show that between 2024 and 2030, employers will have to replace between 10.8 million and 14.8 million “Peak Boomer” employees who are retiring, including 1 to 2 million each in manufacturing, construction, health care, education, and professional services.
• Fast-Growing SMBs: While larger firms may be faltering, many SMBs still plan to grow. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, more than 70% of small business leaders in the U.S. expect revenues to grow over the next year, the most since the pandemic. In addition, “entrepreneurship continues to surge: the U.S. is averaging 430,000 new business applications per month in 2024, 50% more than in 2019.”
• Vertical Markets on Fire: According to recent reports by Robert Half, the global talent solutions and business consulting firm, “the government, education services, manufacturing and distribution, and healthcare industries demonstrated strong annual job growth in the first half of 2024.” In addition, while “the professional services, finance and insurance, and technology industries saw declines in job growth in the first half of 2024, compared with the same period in 2023,” they have “still contributed over 745,000 jobs to the U.S. economy in the first half of this year.”

If you’re targeting any of these sectors with your customer acquisition and prospect marketing campaigns, that’s a lot of change to keep up with. Stay tuned because next week we’ll cover our modern strategies for building and maintaining a robust, accurate database – one that delivers reach and engagement with the right prospects and decision-makers at scale.

You can also reach out directly to our team now for tips on ensuring database accuracy during times of tremendous change.