Excerpt taken from IDC CMO Advisory Survey
Customer Data Acquisition: The Keys to Effective List Management

List quality is defined primarily in terms of performance. Most marketers evaluate performance of their lists based on one or two metrics. These metrics are largely focused on marketing – MQL’s and email delivery (bounce, opt outs, etc.)

It is recommended that companies use a well-rounded set of metrics designed to standardize all their customer data acquisition and data enrichment activities.

These should include measures from marketing, sales/pipeline, even services and support data on up-selling and cost to support. Eventually metrics such as net promoter scores and account profitability measures might also be considered relevant. While these are longer term, they can be used to rate list providers and usage patterns over time.

Most marketers use marketing performance based metrics to rate list quality. The number of MQL’s is the primary measure and hard bounces are the second most popular. Very few marketers go beyond marketing, they do not look at the sales pipeline or other sales related activities such as the number of opportunities generated.

It is recommended that list quality metrics include sales pipeline performance. Not all marketing departments drive leads to direct sales and many have challenges related to channel distribution models that are limiting. However as data structures become standardized across systems, it should be easier to create the closed loop feedback needed to continually improve customer records and marketing activities.

Metrics are marketing focused and so is the team that manages list acquisition. This tends to perpetuate the inefficiencies that plague siloed approaches to the customer creation process. Marketing, sales, service, support, finance, etc. have all typically budgeted, sourced, specified and implemented systems and data according to their own functional requirements. As a result, there are customizations, unique data definitions and workflow dependencies that are incompatible, making it difficult for anyone to have a holistic view of the process.

It is recommended that list acquisition teams at the very least include advisors from sales and channel management to facilitate standard compliance. The day to day mechanics of sourcing, vendor management, negotiating, data cleansing, etc. can be left to small marketing group. But this must be done in the context of a larger policy that is designed to create a seamless customer creation process.

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