Discussions
Learnings from Gathering Title Data from our Contacts with an Eloqua Campaign
We recently decided to use a ‘title drive’ to gather and update job titles for our contacts in order to better understand where they fit in our industry ecosystem. In doing this we would have cleaner data updated directly by the contacts themselves. With better job title data, we can more effectively target our audience with engaging and timely content tailored to their specific role. We decided to run our initial ‘title drive’ through an email marketing campaign with landing pages, prepopulated forms, and email autoresponders. We also added an A/B test to determine the most favorable subject line to get contacts to open.
Subject Line of email: We’re on a Title Search!
Landing page:
Subject Line of email: What’s Your Current Job Title? Action Requested
Landing page:
We sent it to two groups:1) the engaged, and 2) the dormant – those contacts who had not opened an email in three months. Our A/B testing included a Dormant A, Dormant B subject line test and an Engaged A, Engaged B subject line test. The target user path was to click the update/confirm title box which took the contact to a pre-populated landing page
This allowed us to not only gather their title, but allows us to confirm their email address. When they hit submit, we drove them to a thank you page:
The final part of the desired user path was for the user to receive an autoresponder email with their new title in it, just as a confirmation.
Email Body:
The other user path was the ‘no thanks’ path. We have been using this successfully to exclude people from remails and to preempt people from thinking they have to unsubscribe. It was very effective and we added a space for people to tell us why they won’t share their title with us. We also had a second ‘no thanks’ if they did not want to do either.
The Results:
The winner of the A/B test for both of our audiences was B: What’s Your Current Job Title? Action Requested. Our dormants converted at 3% (we were expecting 2%) and our engaged converted at 10% (we were expecting 6%), exceeding our expectations. We also got several thousand titles updated in our Eloqua database with correct title information, which was a huge win for us. And finally, we had less than 1% say ‘no thanks’, some of whom gave us free form comments as to why. All in all, it was hugely insightful and successful.
Lessons Learned:
No Thanks Path:
Some people said they would not provide their correct title information because they thought we already had it from another source. Other people said they thought we were phishing so even though our campaigns were branded they were concerned about protecting their data (but they still felt comfortable enough offering this feedback.).
The shared mailbox:
We did not examine our list for group mailboxes, which wound up being an ah-ha moment for us. In one instance, the members from a group mailbox got caught in a cycle where one person in the group updated their title and the autoresponder sent thank you responses to everyone in the group. This unnerved other recipients who thought the emails were spam/phishing. We were able to ‘fix’ this inline easily by updating the autoresponder to send one time instead of multiple times. It wasn’t a big deal for us since it was an internal campaign, but it’s something to keep in mind if you are doing an external customer campaign.
Timing: At the end of the calendar year and beginning of the new year many people get promoted or change jobs so we strategically planned our campaign to align with this time. It is helpful to catch people when they are excited about their new titles and are updating their linked in profile, email signature, etc. We will run another campaign of this kind as the results of our first one exceeded expectations.
Comments
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Nicely done, Janet. The visuals really help. Did you end up building on the "Title" profiling with another round after all? Any concern about "wearout" and going too far?
Thanks for sharing this approach.
