We know that buying B2B data to grow your business isn’t easy. More times than not, B2B data is old, inaccurate and duplicative, all of which leads to wasted ad spend and lackluster results.
That’s why we want to help B2B marketers understand some of the key questions they should be asking potential data providers to better understand data quality and ease of use.
1. Do you buy or license your B2B data from other providers and aggregate it?
Most B2B marketers have no idea how incestuous the B2B data community really is. When data providers aggregate other companies’ data, they typically have no control over its quality, know when the records were last validated or even have truth sets of data they can use for validation. There is also often a lag since these data providers must aggregate data from other companies.
This delay is extremely important for the quality of the data set. B2B data typically attenuates by 2-3% every month, meaning that its accuracy declines monthly as people change jobs. That extra lag can add up to 10% or 20% of a data file being incorrect by the time it’s purchased by a marketer.
NetWise is different. We are a data originator, not an aggregator, which means that we go straight to the source to collect the data we use to build our data sets. Our weekly data flows are immediately tested for quality before they are fed into our systems, and the entire file is refreshed quarterly.
2. How flexible are your data delivery mechanisms?
How hard is it to get the data to the right people for the right touch points? Many data providers have APIs or platforms that require a lot of work once the data is exported. For example, marketers may find it time-consuming to pull the higher quality or decision-committee records that they need for their specific use cases.
Here at NetWise, we understand how important it is for you to easily manage and segment the data to suit your needs. That’s why we’ve streamlined our tools to specifically give marketers flexibility in how they create their desired audiences in our platform. For example, they can easily suppress data from their own CRM system or exclude information about rival companies from their data exports.
3. How do you validate your emails?
Most B2B data providers are either not validating the emails they use in their data files or they check identity using SMTP handshakes or mail exchanger server handshakes. This is an issue with Microsoft Outlook and other current DNS configurations for mail exchange servers and won’t deliver effective results. This leads to a high bounce rate in most people’s files or a small number of B2B emails that marketers can effectively target.
NetWise uses a multi-pronged approach to validate emails. We corroborate emails using email service provider data and authenticated traffic associated with millions of different websites and their user bases. We also leverage mobile and device ID signal data so that we can see which B2B emails are actually being used for specific mobile use cases. The bottom line: We have the ability to validate and provide extreme clarity into the quality of a B2B email and vouch for its deliverability.
The more B2B marketers understand data, the more effective their campaigns will be. Don’t be shy about poking around the offerings from a potential or existing data provider. Those with the best data will be all too happy to share their processes and efforts to provide the highest quality.
Want to get in touch to ask NetWise these questions? No problem.
Start here. (Or just try the onsite chat.)
