10 Key Metrics for Evaluating and Optimizing B2B
If you aim to scale up your sales and marketing, you may have noticed several contact data solutions online. Examples include ZoomInfo, UpLead, and Apollo. These contact data solutions provide features that range from web scraping to data enrichment. The choices are mind-boggling, and you may find it hard to decide which is best for you.
What Are Contact Data Solutions?
Third-party contact data solutions help a business gain complete B2B contact information. The third-party solutions offer several features such as:
Access to Large Contact Database: Extensive options for contact information to aid in the discovery of potential leads.
Lead Generation and Lead Scoring: Tools to identify and prioritize leads based on the chances of conversion.
Real-time verification of the data is performed to ensure real-time accuracy of the contact information. Data Enrichment: More information about your contact lists is added to enrich the data. List Cleaning and De-Duplication: The contact lists are cleaned of all the irrelevant and duplicate contacts.
Custom Data Solutions: This includes bespoke email lists, data scrapping, or appends. API Integrations: We help with integrating the contact data directly into your marketing automation systems.
With these facilities within reach, you will have to see what will work better for your needs. This infographic article brings forth ten key metrics to help you decide on and further analyze the performance of B2B contact data solutions. If your chosen solution does not comply with these key performance indicators, perhaps it is time to look elsewhere.
1. Frequency of Update
How often your data provider refreshes its database is important. If a provider's updates are less often than every 90 days, you run the risk of getting stale datasets. B2B contact data decays at a rate of about 25% annually. Go for the providers offering monthly or real-time updates to make sure the data you are buying is up-to-date and relevant.
2. Deliverability Rate or Bounce Rate
The deliverability rate is about the share of emails that reach recipients' inboxes. The opposite would mean a bounce rate, indicating how many of them do not reach their destination. If you are choosing data providers, request this information in advance. A high deliverability rate typically exceeds 95%, while a bounce rate should be below 3%. High bouncers mean poor quality of data and will reflect negatively on the overall performance of your campaign.
3. Match Rate
The match rate defines the number of data matched to the Ideal Customer Profile. A high match rate in your data means that a provider does a good job of meeting your particular criteria and targeting objectives. You should reach a minimum of 85-90% for the contacts within your list to likely be good fits for your offerings.
4. Open Rate
The open rate refers to the percentage of delivered emails opened by recipients. This is a good barometer to gauge whether your contact data matches your ICP. If your email isn't reaching the right target, that open rate will be affected. A good open rate falls between 15-30% or higher, depending on the industry and campaign type.
5. Opt-Out or Unsubscribe Rate
The opt-out or unsubscribe rate involves the number of recipients who, after receiving your emails, take action to not be sent anymore. Too much is a warning of a mismatch in target group and data quality, or too low relevance of content. An opt-out rate of over 0.5% is dangerous. This could perhaps mean the inaction of contact data or email content with your audience.
6. Spam Rate
the percent of recipients who mark your emails as spam. A high spam rate severely impacts your sender's reputation and reduces your email deliverability. The threshold of acceptance for spam rate is 0.1%. Anything more may indicate big problems in either data or relevance of email content.
7. List Churn Rate
The list churn rate refers to the rate at which subscribers opt out of your email list. Some kind of churn is expected, but if your churn rate is particularly in the early part of any campaign may suggest something was wrong with the quality of data or the content of the email itself. The acceptable annual churn rate normally ranges from 5 to 7%, though it can be based on the type and size of your organization.
8. Cost-per-Lead vs. ROI
You have to weigh this cost-per-lead with the ROI. Cost-per-lead is what you pay for a lead, while the latter represents the profitability coming out of the generated leads. Set up goals on ROI and indicate this to your data partner so that their price is justified based on your revenue coming from the generated leads.
9. Compliance
Data compliance is at the heart of successful and ethical marketing. Let your data provider pay due diligence to global and regional data privacy acts, including the GDPR. Compliances make sure that a legally sound basis exists for sourcing your data and protects you from legal risks upon which others might pounce.
10. Opt-In Verification
Opt-in verification is one of the major keys to compliance and relevance. Be sure that your data provider provides 100% opt-in-verified emails, which are those that have ensured a recipient has opted in to receive messages. This ensures that your contact list is valid, opening much stronger avenues to get in touch with them.
Conclusion
In that vein, selecting the right contact data solution involves considering some metrics to decide whether this product will or will not serve your business well. Consider the frequency of updating, deliverability and hard bounce rates, match rates, and compliance to make an informed decision that will benefit sales and marketing efforts. Keeping this in mind will be productive for cleaning a contact database, and these are going to be more effective when pulling results from the campaigns.
