The Great Office Supplies Caper

Email Marketing Strategy, Database Decay and How to Manage It

Written by Ian M. Elliott | 5/9/17 12:43 PM

Email contact databases degrade by an average of 22.5% every year.

It’s imperative to implement a strategy to make up for these lost contacts.

Why is there so much churn in your contact database?

  • Contacts’ email addresses change as they move from one company to another
    • About four-million Americans' are constantly in the process of changing jobs and changing jobs means obsoleting one email address and generating one new one.
  • Abandoning obsolete email addresses that are no longer required
    • On average email users have three or more email accounts and one or more of these may not be used frequently or regularly monitored. Eventually users close the unnecessary accounts.
  • Unqualified and disengaged leads opt out of your email communications
    • Depending on how you built your email contact database will determine how qualified your contacts are. However, even if they're qualified, they won't engage unless the content you distribute to them is relevant, interesting, and valuable.

How does this impact your marketing activities?

Your list is going to get smaller every year if you don’t generate enough new leads to make up for this loss. So, unless you're constantly refreshing your database with new leads, your marketing strategy will be based on a deteriorating asset.

What can you do about it?

Email marketing database decay is a fact of marketing life. Even if you improve your unsubscribe rates, you can’t stop people from changing their email addresses.

But, you can implement inbound and deploy strategies to compensate for decay and build your contact database over time ...

Companies implementing an inbound marketing strategy typically double their website visitor traffic and double their conversion rates from website visitors. In 2014, more than twice as many marketers cited inbound (45%) as their primary source of leads versus outbound (22%).

Couple this with the fact that inbound tactics like blogging and social media cost 62% less than other lead generation methods, and you can see why generating a consistent flow of inbound leads is the best way to overcome database decay and a pre-requisite to running successful marketing automation campaigns.

Adjust the data in any field colored green in the simulator model below and see how inbound marketing can help overcome database decay while simultaneously increasing inbound web traffic!

See how Digitol can help you expand your contact database.

An email strategy for office products resellers is a critical component of a business transformation strategy necessary to help improve the future for office supplies dealerships. Despite a mature industry that's starting to decline in terms of overall retail dollars spent, there remains an office products growth opportunity for which the door can be opened to when dealers lead with the value proposition of aftermarket office supplies. However, in order to take advantage of the opportunity, it's necessary to implement and effectively use an integrated information technology platform for handling big data and automation.

 

Don't let database decay destroy your marketing efforts. Digitol's turn-key solution for office products resellers provides all the tools you need to drive more traffic to your website, and then convert these visitors into new contacts.

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