The future of work is changing. And not just for businesses. No longer limited by location, employees have realized they can work from anywhere, and they can also work for a company anywhere. They’re evaluating their priorities, and if their current workplace isn’t a good fit, they’re leaving. Recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that voluntary separations have spiked.
After a season of furloughs, layoffs and businesses permanently shutting their doors, employees are now leaving the workforce in droves by choice. Termed the “Great Resignation,” this exodus is shaking up businesses from the inside out. Teams are short-staffed, workflows are disrupted, and increased time and money is spent finding and hiring new employees.
What does the “Great Resignation” mean for your acquisition marketing? B2B buyers are being affected, too. This means your prospect database — the email addresses, phone numbers, names of buyers who’ve expressed interest in your solution — is suddenly a whole lot less accurate.
See More: Why Marketers Should Not Be Too Confident About Their Data Privacy
No matter how clever your content, strategic your timing, or meticulous your segmenting, if the data you’re drawing from is inaccurate, your results will be limited.
The Cost of Bad Data
Quality data is the foundation of strong digital marketing. But an Intentsify and Ascend2 study showed that actionable data is still a challenge for more than a quarter (27%) of B2B marketers.
Before you even think about your next acquisition campaign, it’s time to evaluate the quality of your prospect contact data and get a handle on it now while you can. If the contacts you’re targeting with your personalized messages, including display ads, email marketing and more, are no longer employed at the same company (or even employed at all), all the effort and resources you’ve spent are wasted. Your campaign performance will suffer, not to mention the morale of the hardworking employees you still have.
There’s also a risky cost to working with bad data. Too many bounced emails? You could damage your email send score and IP address reputation, leading to your emails ending up in spam for the correct contacts, too. Using bad data can be costly to your business, too — it comes with significant risks of landing on spam blacklists.
Digital Impact
Also, consider that email addresses are used to build digital profiles and match identity graphs. Mismatched data — attributing an individual contact to a company they no longer work with — can lower your identity graph match rates, thus lowering your campaign’s digital reach and exposure. With the Great Resignation, these mismatches are likely now at an all-time high.
Display ad delivery is also impacted by the changing market. Business emails are matched to an individual’s personal email to serve an ad. If the business email is no longer valid due to job changes, business closures or something else, then your campaign reach suffers.
And with work from home continuing to increase, campaigns using mobile IDs may also experience lower performance.
Resolutions to the Great Resignation
They say the first step is recognizing you have a problem, so take this moment to have a mini epiphany: your B2B prospect data is probably not as accurate as you think it is. Here are your options:
Fix what you have
Data cleansing is the process of removing, correcting and replacing inaccurate data. A data cleansing provider can automatically purge invalid or out-of-date data without eliminating high-value prospect records. In some cases, inaccurate records can be corrected or even have new data added for a fuller picture of the contact.
Find new prospects
With the knowledge you have about your current prospects and customers, such as the industry, location, and size of the business, as well as individual roles, job titles, age and gender, you can find new prospects that match those traits using a quality third-party data provider. Adding new, accurate contacts to target with your offers will give you a better chance for conversion (especially compared to targeting buyers that have quit). Of course, the keyword is a quality provider. Otherwise, you may end up in the same position you started — with bad data for contacts who have already left their jobs. A good standard is to look for a provider that guarantees 95% email validity for the first 30 days. Additionally, third-party data can come alongside the first-party data you already have to fill in the gaps with accurate contact data and give you a more complete picture of the prospect.
Target Buyers In-Market With Intent Data
One of the best ways to build your prospect list with relevant contacts is by utilizing intent data to find people currently searching for your solution. Your potential customers are already giving you signs they’re looking to buy; you just have to know how to spot them. Online activity such as search engine queries, repeat website visits and content downloads can indicate a prospect is in-market. When combined with high-quality contact data, this intent data makes it possible to reach and target those new prospects at the right time.
See More: Customer Privacy vs. Intimacy: Walking the Tightrope in a Safe Way
Use An Identity Graph Data For Greater Multi-Channel Impact
As you rebuild or build new prospect audiences in light of data decay from the Great Resignation, consider leveraging an identity graph to better tailor your outreach at a massive scale. An identity graph pulls together online and offline data sets from multiple sources while adhering to privacy regulations. Marketers can build an audience from multiple sources all in one place. Then the anonymized data is sent to the demand-side platform (DSP) of their choice to execute campaigns across devices and social and email accounts.
Within a data marketplace, look for data with a high identity graph match rate — the contact to contact match from the data provider to the graph. This indicates the percentage of users that an identity graph can find in a set of data for greater impact with omnichannel campaigns.
Keeping an accurate, reliable prospect database is a challenge even in the best circumstances. Data is constantly decaying due to normal reasons — people being promoted, moving, taking a new job. The past few years have already taken a toll on databases, and now with the increased number of people leaving the workplace, prospect data quality is suffering even more.
It’s time to get prospect data quality on your radar now because it’s not something that will fix itself.
How are you improving your prospect data quality in the wake of the Great Resignation? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
