See how a financial firm generates a tenfold increase in prospect audience (for free)

#DataHQIDEAS

Sometimes the best ideas come from real companies running trials in search of new ways of doing things.

This is a short story about a financial services firm who were conducting tests to find new lead generation techniques.

They’re a smart team and understand that the best route for B2B new customer acquisition is to...

• combine great content
• with well-profiled prospects
• through a defined journey

Only when the awareness, trust and interest builds over time, do you get the enquiries you want.

They used this framework as their foundation and went off looking for new techniques and technologies to build quality into each of these stages.

For this blog, I’m focusing on two elements of their trial…

They experimented with a new way to profile their prospect audience

Most of us use criteria like sector, size and geography to build our target audience. Instead, they decided to explore propensity modelling to see whether it would make a difference and to find out if it would be too cost prohibitive for the ROI.

Propensity modelling starts with the goal of selecting individuals that look just like your current best performing customers. So, it is based on current evidenced trading trends, rather than persona research or good old fashioned gut feel.

It works on a scoring system based on how much each record resembles your customer data and uses a greater number of data variables to assess each record.

The two methods were trialled side by side for 6 months. Using propensity modelling this financial services company proved that they could:

a) Increase the number of people available to contact

b) Improve the rate of conversion (by 200%)

Then they discovered “Always-On, Always Perfecting” technology

This new technology is a game changer for B2B marketers. It exists within lead nurturing and email marketing platforms.

This firm started by putting a test volume of 17,000 profiled prospects into the platform.

Each time there was an engagement, the technology models it against the back end database and pulls lookalike prospects into the journey - AT NO EXTRA COST!

So the initial 17k prospects increased to 33.5k - and the additional 16.5k prospects are better targeted and more responsive as the technology learns.

Once they were sure that the enquiries and customers acquired were of the right quality, they ramped up the volumes until they had 167k profiled prospects in the journey.

After 8 months their trial results looked like this:

Click rate - 2.14%
Open rate - 22%;
Enquiries - 238;
Average deal value - £30,000;
Enquiry value - £7.1m

These two new ideas have become part of their standard marketing portfolio now.

Storetec has also shared their experience of the “Always-On, Always-Perfecting” technology. It’s a 3 minute read here:

This "always-on" prospecting tool stabilised our lead flow

Mark Robinson
Data Director
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