What Mergers Mean for B2B Email Marketing and Database Cleaning

  

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We've talked about the havoc layoffs can wreck on  your B2B Marketing Database, the 27,000 instantly bad contacts if you market to HP for example, but what about mergers? It's easy to see how layoffs translate into bad contacts, if your contact doesn't work for the company anymore you're wasting your time trying to email them with a new offer, but mergers can be murkier.

Mergers are often looked at in terms of their financial implications, from company growth to anticipated higher returns for shareholders, but they take a huge toll on the staff of both companies as well. Typically, mergers are accompanied by layoffs. Some mergers leave huge numbers of unemployed in their wake, while others  have more modest cuts. If you do business with a company undergoing a merger, you may get lucky and find that your contacts have made the cut and still have their jobs.

But even if your contacts do weather the layoffs as their company transitions, there are likely going to be other changes that can affect your marketing database's health. Restructuring is bound to happen when companies merge, and that means your contacts roles might change. What once were prime contacts for you to market to could now be useless if their role has significantly changes, but even if their role is the same you could still have problems reaching them. Email addresses, phone number, titles, and even physical addresses are all subject to change in the wake of a merger.

When companies you market to go through a merger, you end up with a lot of questions:

• Do my contacts still work for the company?
• Are my contacts roles the same?
• Are the contact details I have still valid?

The only way to answer these questions is to actively engage in cleansing and appending your database. Regular maintenance is a must to keep your staff stocked with the most up-to-date contact information.

If you're looking for insight into how you can effectively cleanse and append your database our whitepaper, "Data Cleaning for Improved Marketing Effectiveness," is a good place to start. This free download will walk you through the process of cleansing and appending a database.