1. Best Practices in List Building &
Deliverability

2. Chat or Q/A
#AOWEB

3. Today’s Presenters
Don Wynns Jeff Linton
Director, Business Product Marketing
Development Manager
@jeffreylinton

4. Building Quality Email Lists

5. About ZoomInfo
▶ ZoomInfo is the largest B2B information directory, with over 50
million employee records across 5 million companies
▶ Patented web-crawling tools along with a community of
thousands of contributors are how ZoomInfo complies their data
▶ Contact profiles are updated every 90 days
▶ Their mission is to map the business landscape in near real-
time, moving towards updating all profiles every 30 days
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6. Challenges of Data Decay on Email Marketing Initiatives
72% of business people
change one or more
key elements on their
business card each year
What does this mean for you? Your prospect contact data is
likely decaying faster than you are able to update it.
REPORT: Sales & Marketing
Institute: B2B DATA DECAY, HOW
BAD IS IT AND WHAT TO DO!

7. Data Decay
Don’t End Up in a Roadside Ditch
▶ Incomplete company info
• How can you segment?
▶ Incomplete contact data –
• How can you personalize?
▶ Dupes with inconsistent info –
• 1 “John Doe” or 2?
▶ Data fields with nonsense data (ex:
“TBA”, “TBD”, “TBC”, etc)
• Don’t write yourself an IOU

8. Costly Campaign Impact
▶ Quality over Quantity
▶ Many companies emphasize the number of contacts they have
rather than the quality of their contacts. That doesn’t correlate to
success in the B2B market. Opt in and Permission Passed plus
intelligently segmented data is the key to campaign performance.
▶ Low Response & Conversion Rates
▶ Sending out “batch and blast” email campaigns usually bring dismal
returns in terms of responses, thus result in fewer conversions
A recent DemandGen study revealed that
50% of respondents reported having less
than 3% responses to campaigns
REPORT: Assessing the Impact of Dirty Data – A Demand Gen Report

9. The Challenge
Missing Pieces to the Email Marketing Puzzle
• Industry:
– Are you reaching an audience with your inbound and email marketing
consistent with your existing buyers?
• Company Information:
– You can’t score a lead without reliable “firmographic” data! Is the
prospect company consistent with your existing buyers in terms of
size, location, revenue…?
• Titles – No title, no performance:
– Personalized offers resonate
– Marketing to outdated or incorrect titles is expensive
– What is the (negative) impact on your brand from messaging to
incompatible job functions?
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10. Maximize Your Deliverability Rate
• Successful, multi-channel marketing organizations commit to
ongoing data management and cleansing initiatives – Data
Hygiene Strategy
• The inherent decay of B2B data makes an annual “spring data
cleaning” insufficient. Rust never sleeps, and neither does
data degradation.
• Marketers and their performance are being measured more
closely than ever - ensure your metrics of choice are based on
real opportunities.
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11. Data Cleanse Options
▶ Validate Email Addresses
▶ Find, remove and replace bad email addresses and spam traps with
a live online test
▶ Replace invalid email addresses with updated contacts
▶ Avoid being labeled a “spammer” by reducing your bounce rate
▶ Append and Clean Your Database
▶ Fill in the blanks with fresh and accurate contact data
▶ Transform a list of companies or accounts into an actionable list of
targeted contacts
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12. What YOU Can Do
• Find a service oriented data provider that offers a suite of
solutions inclusive of data provisioning and an ongoing
commitment to data hygiene
• Buyer Beware – the data provider ecosystem is filled with false
promises and inflated metrics!
– Test before you buy - ask these questions:
• Is your data provider reputable?
• Do they have a track record of success and references?
• Do they have a commitment to privacy regulations?
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13. How to maximize email
deliverability for greater campaign
success

14. Your email delivery results improve
when you send only
email that is wanted and expected,
and purge old, inactive contacts.

15. List Management
Expectation Address Books
Mail to people who want Confirm Encourage recipients to
and expect your email. or double-confirm add you to their address
Contacts who opt in are subscribers who opt in books; make it easy for
your best prospects them to do so
Opt Out
Privacy Policy Make it easy and obvious Honor
Have a clear privacy policy for contacts to opt out “unsubscribe” requests
for subscribers (beyond CAN-SPAM immediately
requirements)
Optimal Time Targeted Subscription Lists
Determine an optimal Develop online forms that encourage
mailing time and people to indicate their interests; use
frequency, and stick to it, this data to create targeted
for consistency subscription lists

16. List Cleaning and Maintenance
• Clean your lists on a regular basis
• Understand the engagement cycles of your
sales process
• Identify the point where recipient engagement
drops; segment disengaged subscribers by
useful criteria, such as whether they ever made a
purchase
• Re-engage inactive contacts with messaging and
offers targeted to their specific segment
• Purge inactive, unengaged contacts when
necessary

17. Stages in spam filtering
Stage Should this email be accepted?
ONE IP address reputation, blacklists,
botnets
Deferral (to get more info, or
because the receiver is overloaded)
Where should this email be delivered?
Stage Inbox or junk folder?
TWO Content evaluation
Stage How should this email be displayed?
THREE With images? With annotation?

18. Passing Spam Filters
• Send to people who want and expect your email
• Use a consistent “From” address
• Make sure your company name and contact info is obvious
• Clear, strong subject line + compelling, concise content
• Make sure links point to valid domains
• Have a high ratio of text to images; avoid image-only email
• Minimize or avoid Flash and JavaScript
• Make the opt-out process easy and obvious
• Comply with all CAN-SPAM requirements
• Use email authentication

19. Passing Content Filters
• Write a subject line that body copy fulfills
• Short, compelling emails are more deliverable
• Don’t use “Dear” as a salutation
• Don’t use “click here” or “click below” to offer links to people
• Avoid “spammy” words and phrases: “free”, “bonus”,
“amazing”, “buy direct”, “bargain”, “no investment”, and so on
• Use ALT text for your images
• Using all caps is a SPAM CHARACTERISTIC
• Use exclamation points sparingly, and don’t use
several in a row!!!!

20. Develop your own success
According to the DMA’s most recent (2010)
Response Rate Trend Report , the average
email to a house list generated:
• 19.47 percent open rate and 6.64 percent
click-through rate
• 1.73 percent conversion rate
• Bounce-back rate of 3.72 percent and
an unsubscribe rate of 0.77 percent.

21. Tracking and Reporting
Develop and use your own benchmarks
• Know your average delivery, bounce, and engagement rates
• Look for anomalies
The more targeted and personalized your
email is, the higher your rates will be
• In B2B, clickthrough rates of 10%–20% are considered good
Consistently low rates suggest that your email is
uninteresting, or your list is bad
• Higher “delete” rates affect your reputation and delivery

22. Sending Email
Clean your lists before sending
Allow enough time
Send small batches first
Preview and test emails
Test and benchmark your own mailing schedule
Include a plain text version

23. Top 10 Delivery Best Practices

24. Top Ten Delivery Best Practices
10. Build your lists carefully
9. Test. Preview your email on major email clients and mobile
devices
8. Maintain your lists assiduously; purge and re-engage
7. Don't overload an email with images
6. Send content that subscribers care about
5. Use a consistent "From" header address
4. Develop consistent campaigns
3. Use clean and correct HTML formatting
2. Track your results and monitor performance by list source
1. Abide by all CAN-SPAM rules and guidance

25. Need Help?
Sign up for a demo
go.zoominfo.com/ZoomInfoDemo-ActOnWebinar
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www.actonsoftware.com