Grieben vs The List Rental

I think back to college and my direct marketing class and one of the first things they taught us is that a list rental or purchase can be a fast and cheap way to build a mailing list on short notice. In practice however, the general consensus is that the purchased list is the quickest way to waste a truckload of budget.

It makes sense though, I mean think a bout it if you were a vendor, in general you get paid by the name and are motivated to include more names not less which is a recipe for garbage data. Anyone who has been responsible for a Customer database also knows how quickly that data can become stale. A list rental makes things even more complicated because it has a limited use period attached to it.

Sometimes however that quick and cheap aspect can be too attractive to turn down. About a year ago one of the Marketing Coordinators I was supporting found such a list rental that would work great for their needs and jumped at the chance.

We had a number of challenges when this list showed up at our door. To start it was huge, I mean really huge. So big we had an issue just loading it. Our existing corporate policies dictated that before anything entered our CRM(which was required for mass marketing to the list) it had to be run through our de-dupe solution. The existing solution could process limited numbers of records per batch which meant that we would effectively render it inaccessible for two weeks based on the size of the list we had rented. That effectively put a stop to the upload of this list, at least that was until Eloqua was implemented.

Eloqua allowed us to batch upload this enormous list and quickly de-dupe it. It also however allowed us to handle the issue of managing the list rental extremely easily. Below I’m going to outline how.

The main issue is that you need to on a timely basis filter your rental list into at least 3 basic sub groups. First, pre existing contacts in your system, second are new and responsive contacts, and third unresponsive contacts. For this I used Eloqua’s program manager to create a automated program that sent a series of emails to the list to identify and attempt to engage contacts by promoting a library of content.

Its important to not here that the main objective of this program was to identify new contacts and get a response to qualify them for continued marketing before the rental period expired so this program could have become allot more complicated but in this case it was a get in get the response get out situation.

Below is a sample of the workflow I set up to handle the list. I didn't include screenshots because, anyone who has used Eloqua knows getting a complete picture of your program visible on one screen is near impossible, and anyone who hasn't used it probably wouldn't know what they were looking at. If you would like to see a diagram feel free to email me and ill put something together in Visio as an example for you.

Step 1. Was a starting holding step that fed the first decision rule.

Step 2. Was a decision rule to identify existing contacts and new contacts. The criteria I used was the creation date(today or before) of the contact to split this group into existing and net-new contacts.

Step 3. was another holding step for the two resulting groups of existing and net new contacts. From this point onward the program was almost identical but split into 3 parallel branches.

Step 4. This step triggered an identical email batch send. This email drove the recipient to a specific piece of on-demand collateral a white paper or recorded webinar.

Step 5. This step in the program was a decision rule that waited 2 weeks and evaluated each contacts activity. In both groups if the contact had a hard bounce or unsubscribed they were added to our opt out list and moved to the final step of the program where they were held.

Step 5A. If they were in the existing group and submitted the download form, they were removed from this program and added to our Global Lead Scoring program.

Step 5B. If there were a member of the net new group they could one of two things happened, either they opened the email or they didn’t. If the email opened the were moved to a third parallel program. If they submitted a form the were bounced to the Lead Scoring program. If they opened but did not submit they were moved to the next email promoting content and another two weeks and another activity evaluation.

If they didn't open the email they were also sent another batch email promoting another piece of content and another two weeks and another activity evaluation.

This continued until contacts in the list opted out, submitted a form, or time on the rental almost ran out. At the end of this period we were left with 2 groups a group of contacts who have never opened an email and a group that opened emails but never submitted a form. These two groups are the contacts we had no previous interactions with, or we were not able to generate interest with and because of the rental agreement had to now remove from our system.

Using the Eloqua program builder we were able to build a program that de-duped a large list, identified contracts with interest, and cleaned both list data and existing contact data by initiating a form submit. and because it was all automated we were able to set and forget the program until it came time to remove the non responsive contacts from the system