4 Ways to Leverage Classification and Correction of Business Titles

In a typical direct email marketing campaign, each business prospect would be targeted with one of the typical titles printed on the actual offer that (hopefully) reaches their desk. As B2B marketers strive to improve personalization and avoid having their solicitations discarded as ‘junk mail’, the goal is increasingly to correct awkward and unprofessional misspelled titles with their true, ‘beautified’ titles. In any typical example, this would be ‘Vice President of Direct Marketing’.

The next logical step after linking a wide range of different raw titles to a single standardized title is to categorize each decision maker by their department, discipline and position-level. Using a smart key on the mail file for each resulting segment allows mailers to easily analyze response by title (Vice President of Direct Marketing), department (Direct Marketing), discipline (Marketing) or position-level (Vice President) once the campaign is complete. Equipped with this information, marketers can gain insight into which offers and price points may be of interest to each type of decision maker and improve their “up front” name selection. These are the four ways to leverage classification and correction of business titles:

• Replace poorly formatted raw titles on mail files with the correct “beautified” titles.
• Use a smart key strategy to facilitate back end response analysis by title for greater insight into best responders
• Incorporate standardized titles, departments, disciplines and position-levels back into your marketing database to improve targeting and analysis.
• Increase penetration into better performing segments when renting outside lists.

Few service companies specialize in the special needs of B2B marketers but there are tools available from a select few that can enable this more sophisticated strategy. With the disciplined use of title classification and correction systems, marketers achieve higher returns on their campaigns through both improved targeting and better quality presentation at a lower total cost. The end result is a higher return on investment and faster growth of the customer database.