In many cases, this has created a dysfunctional relationship between a business and its list, which is a shame because email has the potential to be an incredibly powerful sales medium. Of course, the silver lining is that if you can nail your emails, you will stand head and shoulders above your competition and create a far stronger bond between your brand and your prospects.

These three hacks will completely change how you approach your email marketing:

1. Data is everything

In order to establish a strong bond between you and your list, you first need to understand who it is you’re sending out emails to. It sounds laughably obvious, but so many businesses underestimate this crucial first step and rush into writing emails, unaware that they could well turn off their customers for good.

You will need to learn How to Analyze Email Marketing Data in order to create the right message for your audience. To provide a basic example, while humor will work wonders with some lists, it may be inappropriate for yours. The better you understand the people receiving your emails, the easier it will be to write powerful emails that generate sales every single time.

2. You shouldn’t worry about un-subscriptions

Having said this, you shouldn’t worry too much about people unsubscribing from your list. While no one wants to turn off vast swathes of potential buyers, as long as you’ve done your due diligence and are writing emails that the majority of your list will respond positively to, you shouldn’t worry about the few who don’t enjoy it and turn their backs on you. You can’t please everyone, and nor should you, for this only leads to bland, middle of the road emails that no one wants to read over their morning cereal or after a hard day at work.

You should approach your list like you would approach anyone in the ‘real world.’ Be fun, polite, value-giving, and unperturbed by the odd person who doesn’t like you.

3. Write as if you’re talking to a friend

This is a big one. You want to forget that you’re writing for a brand and all the commercial boxes you have to tick, and just remember that you’re talking to another human being. While of course, it’s important to remember what you’re selling and your brand voice, this should not come at the cost of engaging content. No one wants to read dry, corporate speak. It defeats the entire purpose of you sending emails in the first place.

Confide in your list, engage with them and yes, speak to them as if they were a valued friend. You’ll be amazed how quickly your writing loosens up and becomes easier to read, and how doing so can impact your conversions and sales.

What is bad data?

The sales and marketing efforts at any company are mostly based on the data they have in their CRM. If a company has a list of 50,000 names, most of its outreach efforts – emails, cold calls, event invitations, etc., would be based around those people. Bad data means that the data in the CRM is either consistent, redundant, incorrect, or incomplete which ultimately takes a toll on the effectiveness of the outreach efforts.

So if you have 50,000 emails in your CRM but say 5% of them are redundant, 6% incorrect, 10% outdated, and 15% incomplete, your sales and marketing campaigns are running at only 64% efficiency.

To make matters worse, data isn’t eternal- people switch jobs, job titles change, companies upsize/downside, and more. By some estimates, data in your CRM decay at around 70% every year. To continue with our earlier example, if you are running at 64% efficiency at this moment, it would be reduced to a mere 20% in a year!

With that out of the way, the next question is – how exactly bad data hurts B2B companies? The answer is pretty simple – loss of productivity. As explained earlier, if a sales and marketing campaign runs at just 60% efficiency, that means 40%  of the efforts yield no result which is a huge leakage of productivity and by extension, revenues. It is estimated that the average company loses around 12% of its revenue due to bad data.

What’s next?

While the obvious answer to this problem is to clean data, the process is more complicated than it may initially seem. On the surface, you can assess the sources of data, audit the existing data in your CRM, and try to fill the missing gaps. The deeper problem, as mentioned before, is that of data decay. Even if you take extensive measures to ensure 100% accuracy of your database, it would start decaying from the very next moment. While you can theoretically, assign time and resources to periodically cleanse and update your data, the cost it would incur is simply disproportional.

The only practical solution is to outsource the whole process- instead of collecting data and then be bogged down with its maintenance, its far more efficient to simply subscribe to a reliable data platform like SalesIntel who would provide all the data you need and would be responsible for its upkeep for a fraction of cost that you would have to spend otherwise handling the process yourself.