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Inbound leads is a huge asset to marketing organizations and with web2lead forms inbound leads are systematically routed to CRM application instantly. However, this can be a huge problem for your CRM database quality if you are getting hundreds of inbound leads daily and do not have the resources to qualify them right when they arrive. Overtime, data submitted from web forms is directly posted to your CRM database and before you know you have a big data quality problem staring at your. Most importantly, the value of inbound leads diminishes when there is no processing being done on the lead data before assuming it to be a valid lead.

The ideal way to process an inbound lead is to call the lead within minutes of receiving it. However, this is not practical and sometimes not even needed (think of free software downloads driven leads). But one credible check B2B marketers can do on all inbound leads before routing them to the CRM database is verify the email addresses entered by the user.

• Define rules to cleanse out leads that use @yahoo and such other free email addresses, as that is a signal of spammy lead in B2B
• Verify the email addresses on a batch or realtime basis using a service like Emailified which we can integrate with your inbound lead management process
• Send a welcome email to the user, ensure the email is delivered and track the interaction of the user with the email to understand their level of interest.
• You can use all records with valid email addresses but you can also tag them based on email opens, click throughs and website visits to add context to the engagement of the inbound leads

All this upfront work can really help you maximize the potential of opportunities from inbound leads without being burdened with their quality issues. So all in all, verifying email addresses of inbound leads is a great way to start working on your inbound leads.

Email appends have become an indispensable tool for marketers and especially B2B email appending can be a boon as its tough to grow a list of B2B subscribers organically. Having said that, the difference between correct and questionable use of email appending lies in the way appeneded emails are used.

If the outbound message you send to your recently email appended list of contacts is a message with an opt-out link, then you are clearly making a decision to subscribe the user to your messages based on them not taking the time to read and opt-out. Its quiet likely that they may not be interested and you just assume they are, just because they did not un-subscribe. The reality is that they didn’t get the time to unsubscribe or did not read your opt-out message to act on it or several other such reasons.

Instead if you use email appending services to help you reach a user base to showcase how you can be of value to them and right at the top ask for their persmission to opt-in to your messages then, you have their attention and you have their permission. This is both an ethical way to leverag email append and also a more effective way to build a list of subscribers who care and pay attention to your message.

Reactivating your dormant or inactive subscribers is an important issue on the minds of marketers. One critical aspect to consider when you look at your inactive is that the email subscribers you think are inactive may actually NOT be inactive at all. Here are the 3 reasons why:

1. Your subscribers may be opening the emails but and reading it everyday regularly but they may have images turned off on their email client or may be using a text based email client, due to which you just don’t have tracking of their opens. Without images, it is not possible track email opens.
2. Your subscribers may be reading your emails and perhaps calling your toll free numbers and doing business with you but in the email list they show no activity.
3. They may be loyal followers of your emails and reading them as much as they can, but they may not have had the time to respond to any of your call to action requests.

So its important to understand your inactives before treating them that way, and you could perhaps come up with an email appending or email verification project and a lead nurturing campaign that is focused on the inactives to be able to segregate them.

This is one of the most common questions that comes up in most marketing organizations once they start email marketing or lead nurturing programs. The problem is: this is a wrong question to think of an answer for.

When you think of “how often” without any other criterion you are basically thinking of how often should I bombard my message to my list which is fundamentally a big problem. Your prospects don’t like to receive generic messages every 3 weeks from anyone and even if they don’t unsubscribe you can be sure that they have tuned out your messages and your response rate reflects that.

You have you view email marketing and more specifically lead nurturing campaigns as tools to build real world-like conversations with your prospects. In a real world, a conversation is always personalized based on how it started and how it evolved and its important to do just that with your marketing automation campaigns using tools like Nurture, Eloqua and others. Track what you send to your prospects and send the next email based on what the customer response was so that it is personalized to their reaction to your first email rather than a generic disconnected one.

The time you launch your email marketing campaigns can be a big factor in determining the response rate to your campaigns and hence the leads you may be able to generate.

You spend a lot of time and energy in creating your email campaigns, but if they are launched at the wrong time, then it can sabotage the campaign ROI entirely.

Here I am sharing some of the most important factors to consider in determining the time to launch your email marketing campaigns:

• Day of week: The best days to send email marketing campaigns are Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Mondays are not good because after a weekend more B2B inboxes are inundated and your prospects may very easily miss your email. Fridays are tough too as everyone is busy wrapping up the week and may not have the time to read your pitch. Saturdays and Sundays are usually not the best as most business people don’t work weekends.
• Time of day: This is a tough one as it does matter a lot but its also difficult to determine the most optimal time due to timezones and the fact that emails may go out over a period of a few minutes to an hour depending on the size of your list. Having said that, mornings, just after lunch time and towards end of the day are the best times to target as those are the times when people are not in meetings and most likely catching up on email specifically. Its tough to generalize this one and hence you should consider this but also look at your own statistics from past campaigns to see if there are particular time slots when you see the most opens. If you do, I’d recommend going after that.
• Time of year: Summers are almost always slow with a lot of people taking time off. Other such time periods include long weekends, Thanks Giving and Christmas & New Years week. Its tough to find people at work during these times of the year and hence its recommended to avoid these for launching your email campaigns.
• Caution #1: Give importance to looking at your past statistics more than the above more generalized points. For example, if your audience is startup founders you might actually see a higher response rate on weekends when they are comparatively free and may review your message closely.
• Caution #2: Your email doesn’t go out the moment you hit send. Most email providers send out large email campaigns over a few mins to a few hours depending on quality of service level and so on. So the time you decide is not when the email is delivered. You must take this into consideration.
• Caution #3: Don’t stick to just one schedule. Its important to experiment different days/times and see the results and compare with past results to determine what performs better.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well. Please share in the comments below and I will be sure to update the post with any suggestions.

Of course, don’t forget the quality of your email list is always a big factor and you should verify email addresses often to ensure you are reaching your prospects. Click here for a Free Trial of Emailified for your email append or verificaiton needs.

We have just launched Emailified and I wanted to kick-off this blog by explaining the core idea, our focus on quality and why Emailified will become your primary email append and email verification solution.

Email is the most effective and the most widely used channel of communication in B2B marketing and continues to solidify its position with the evolution of complex marketing automation, lead nurturing and such other solutions. With this, email address has become the the most critical element of contact information and its one thing marketers are looking for when they buy, build or rent contact databases. But missing and bounced email addresses is also the biggest problem for marketers today caused due to several reasons including:

• Lists sourced from conferences, magazines and other channels rarely come with contact email addresses
• Lists acquired for partners also lack email addresses in many cases
• Email addresses are un-verifiable over a period of time as the data gets old and adversely affects campaign effectiveness
• Lists from subscription databases don’t always come with email addresses

So there is a constant need for email address acquisition / append and email address verification for marketers as its one data element that drives the effectiveness of bulk of their marketing campaigns. Emailified is the answer to this missing emails problem.

With Emailified, marketers can simply submit lists with company names, firstname and lastnames and it delivers the list with email addresses added for all contacts along with their verification statuses. You pay ONLY for the verified email addresses and not for the bad ones, which is actually also valuable data as you can potentially purge that data from your CRM databases as those contacts may not longer be existing at those companies.

Most importantly, Emailified is fundamentally different from automated email append solutions which suffer from quality problems, have poor match rates and are not entirely reliable. Here’s how Emailified is different:

• Emailified does not depend on automated database match process for appending email addresses.
• Emailified is built on our proprietary software solution for generating and verifying email addresses for contacts based on publicly available information.
• Emailified has a strong human element to its solution where all the data is eye balled by a email research team to identify and correct problem areas.
• Emailified delivers a high email append through put and its not limited for a master database to match records against.

Lastly, we believe in our solution’s merit and have built a Free Trial Program to help you test our solution and then leverage it for all your email requirements, once you are satisfied with the results. We are looking to build long term relationships with our customers and partners based on satisfaction and value we deliver. Click here to contact us or follow us on twitter @emailified.