Marketing Automation Tool Spring Cleaning

Here’s a few good tips on how to save time, money, and probably your deliverability score for your marketing automation system.  Now’s a great time to give your database a quick review to see if simple improvements can be made that go a long way.  We recommend doing this at least yearly, and doing it in concert with your vendor contract renewal can be even more important!  Items you want to manage closely to clean out of your Eloqua contact table include:

• Global hard bounced
• Global unsubscribes
• Inactives
• Old Users/logins
• Use your CWM (contact washing machine) app to clean data

Benefits you’ll reap from this process include potential savings on your Oracle contract; they generally will charge by the number of contacts and this is a great way to save money!  Keeping ‘dead’ records around will surely throw off your audience segment numbers unless your team remembers to manually exclude them from segments on your canvas.  Consistently emailing folks who don’t respond will lead to opt outs.  Suggestion is to either create a separate ‘win back’ nurture for these or move them out.  Your marketing program managers will thank you for making their campaign reports looks so much more accurate when they see a boost in response rates.  Finally, mailing again and again to folks that bounce or do not respond can adversely affect your whole installs deliverablity and sender score.

Tips:

Eloqua ‘remembers’ these contacts so if they happen to re-enter they will be auto loaded with their previous status.  You can even block them from your CRM syncs.

We recommend creating a segment for these and downloading any key data (name/address/etc) and saving offline prior to purging in the event you may need to ever reference in the future.

For inactives, you can create a segment to find those who’ve been in the database more than a year but have never responded to anything.  Play with the criteria and see what works best for you depending on what type of channels you use for outbound marketing.

The CWM probably deserves its own post, which we will tackle soon.  But the basics is to create programs to clean or standardize bad data!

For more info or assistance with creating and executing a database cleansing strategy contact us at https://bautomated.com/contact/