I recently had two failures on a set of email campaigns that we ran for our B2B audience. As usual the first input I got from he sales team and their managers was “not a single response”. I was tied up in some other activities before I could analyse the issues. So last week I sat down with my team and asked them to come on Zoom so that I could see exactly what’s going on.

Whenever you talk about campaign failures – the first place that I like to check is the database (Also called the audience or in abrader term the market) in case of B2B prospects.

So if you try to sell carpet cleaning, you should be sure that the audience you are talking to has deployed carpets in their homes. Otherwise you can do the best advertising, messaging, offers but you won’t get an enquiry.

in my understanding when you have to do a post mortem of an advertising or email campaign failure, first start with the database because more than 50% of the times, that is the primary cause.

To come back to my story, I started going account by account for one campaign and realised that we were sending mails to the said designations of people, but the size of the companies was way higher than what I had mentioned in the Ideal Customer Profile. Somewhere there was a mis-communication between the manager and the database resource and we had this issue.

In the second case, the broad industry, revenue etc. were all matching. We didn’t have the break down of the sub industries. Before starting the campaigns, I had asked the research guy to give a sub-industry breakup also so that we are sure of the audience to whom we are sending. Since sales guys have their own time pressures, they decided to overrule me and the campaigns were sent out. Again “not a single response”. So during this session I decided to go to each company in the database and I asked the sales guy to show me the company details on Linkedin. Soon it was apparent that the sub-industries in which our service is not applicable were predominant in the database.

Whenever you want to analyse the failure of a campaign start with the Market/database first – you may not need to go any further after that.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!