Zombieland – A Guide to Waking the Dead

When it comes to establishing a successful marketing automation strategy, you have to know how to gain the most from the records you already have. Your lead data has the power to drive campaign initiatives, budgeting and resource allocation, personalization efforts, message relevancy and can directly impact retention and growth.

The Challenge

In the most recent virtual discussion, we unveiled that the unfortunate reality is that as your database matures, undesirable idle leads begin to accumulate resulting in a graveyard of inactive leads, ultimately provoking:

• Skewed and obsolete data
• Damaged sender reputation
• Increased subscription costs due to meeting database limits
• Decreased campaign engagement and performance
• Inaccurate segmentation
• Irrelevant personalization and messaging
• System processing inefficiencies
• Misaligned marketing and sales efforts

The Play

Choosing a Global Software Development Partner to Accelerate Your Digital Strategy

To be successful and outpace the competition, you need a software development partner that excels in exactly the type of digital projects you are now faced with accelerating, and in the most cost effective and optimized way possible.

Get the Guide

In the previous blog post, To Delete or Not to Delete, Kenzie Caldwell outlines how to maintain a lean and optimized database that is actionable and supports your marketing automation efforts by deleting these inactive leads. Before making the decision to delete inactive records, however, it is vital (no pun intended) to determine if these leads are in fact dead and should be buried, or if they are simply zombies in need of a little extra attention and have the propensity to still be valuable to your brand.

That extra dose of attention comes in the form of a “Wake-the-Dead” email series intended to resurrect inactive leads by driving engagement while reducing churn rates, reviving your email lists, and identifying records that are ready to re-enter the sales funnel and be nurtured to a conversion.

The Top Four Considerations

Below is a summary from the virtual discussion of the top four considerations when strategizing your Wake-the-Dead initiatives:

1. Inactivity does not mean the same thing for everyone. In general, criteria should be targeted leads that have no traceable activity (marketing and sales engagement) for a defined period of time. Inactivity thresholds should be catered to your business model as well as your buyer journey.
2. The key to any engagement effort is layered personalization. The inactive audience should not be considered a homogeneous group but rather a series of sub-segments categorized by various inactivity timing thresholds and inactive record types to ensure you delivering relevant engagement opportunities.
3. Wake-the-Dead messaging is intended to jolt your audience back to life so use language and tones that deviate from your standard messaging.
4. Leads are constantly lurching into Zombieland. For this reason, proactive Wake-the-Dead initiatives should become a part of your ongoing marketing strategy and efforts.

To ensure you are maximizing the potential of every lead in your database, watch the full Zombieland – A Guide to Waking the Dead recording and contact us now if you are ready to awaken your database.