Do More With a Smaller Marketing Budget by Identifying and Concentrating on Higher-Value Prospects
ATLANTA (February 17, 2009) – In our current economy, many companies are struggling with shrinking marketing budgets and fewer resources for working sales opportunities. Dan McDade, president of prospect development firm PointClear, LLC, emphasizes that now more than ever, being able to find and target the best customer prospects—instead of simply all prospects—makes sense.
“Some leads are inherently more promising than others and in a down economy, it’s important to concentrate limited sales and marketing resources on the leads with the most potential while reducing the time spent on weak leads,” he said. “By applying segmentation techniques to your target list, it’s possible to identify and focus on higher-value prospects while actually decreasing marketing costs.”
In contrast, many companies rely solely on cleanup programs to prepare their in-house customer and prospect databases for marketing activities. And while traditional cleanup programs do replace dirty or absent data with fresh, correct data, they fail to add the segmentation or prioritization needed to identify top prospects.
“A traditional database marketing program targets all the cleaned names in the database, when only a fraction of those names actually warrants investment,” explained McDade. “This leads to an ineffective use of sales time and wasted marketing dollars.”
Based on McDade’s experience, using proper list segmentation to identify and focus on higher-value names can improve campaign performance by as much as 50 percent while cutting costs by up to 35 percent.
At its simplest level, segmentation breaks down large universes of names into smaller groups based on common demographics or like characteristics. Once these like groups are identified, companies can then test specific segments to determine their value prior to rolling out a sales and marketing campaign. In doing so, it becomes possible to deploy dollars and resources against only those segments that are known or predicted to generate the best return.
PointClear’s advanced relational segmentation techniques can be applied to in-house customer and prospect databases, as well as to purchased lists, to achieve a higher number of more profitable sales at a lower cost.
According to McDade: “Determining the value of names you direct market to in advance can help marketers to better balance return against investment and make decisions on funding and deployment for future campaigns. In the current economy, such market intelligence is critical.”
Headquartered in Norcross, Ga., PointClear, the prospect development firm, provides solutions that fill client forecasts, not just their pipelines. PointClear's expert sales and marketing professionals provide clients with forecastable sales opportunities, actionable market intelligence and effective market coverage. For more information about PointClear's products and services, go to http://www.pointclear.com.
