Every marketer, to some degree, is concerned with 1) developing and executing lead gen strategies, and 2) determining and improving their effectiveness.

The task isn’t easy.

First, not every channel works for every business. Paid search (PPC), for example, is incredibly saturated and has gotten increasingly more expensive over time.

The same can be said for paid ads on the plethora of social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

What is a marketer to do?

I’d like to share 2 ways that can help make your lead generation efforts more fruitful.

These tips work particularly well with email marketing and (gasp!) direct mail. Hold on, bear with me.

While email may lack the sexiness of newer channels like chatbots, it’s tried & true and enormously effective — due to its low cost and incredible rapidity with which it can be implemented and scaled.

On the flipside, you’ll also want to tap into unsaturated channels.

Do what others aren’t doing, and thus isolate your messaging from the constant noise bombarding your prospects on a daily basis.

Ironically, email is as noisy as it is effective. Direct mail is not.

Direct mail is probably considered even less glamorous than email. But in the B2B world, it’s a great means to stand out from the crowd.

Everyone employs digital ads and email marketing, but it’s much less common to actually get something physically on your desk.

Unlike email, however, direct mail costs can quickly get out of hand if you’re not careful, and it can be incredibly time consuming.

So now let’s get into the tips for improving these channels.

Tip #1: Make data a key focus of your lead gen strategies

For both email marketing and direct mail to work, you need the right contacts within the right accounts.

Bounces get you nowhere, and you definitely don’t want to ship a package to someone who has long since left your target company.

SifData monitors job changes among contacts in Salesforce and surfaces that intel within the CRM.

They’re especially adept at tracking people’s job changes on LinkedIn – which is superbly helpful since a databases become stale alarmingly fast.

At Printfection, email marketing is our #1 outbound channel. And SifData helped us improve the accuracy of our data by 25-30%, thereby making an important revenue-generating channel even better.

As a swag management platform that helps tech companies create, manage, and distribute their branded merchandise, we’re usually after marketers.

SifData helped us confirm if someone were at the right company and also that they were still in the right marketing role we were targeting.

An even more powerful use case – tracking former customers

SifData allows you to track the job changes of your customers.

Former customers (assuming they were happy with your product/service) are among the best leads.

Our win rate with former customers is at least 5x that of colder leads.

And your customer champions are very likely to switch jobs at some point.

If you can track those movements, you can be readily armed with an email welcoming them to their new role and attempt to sell them again.

The same story goes for direct mail.

Knowing where someone works will make your physical outreach at least 20-40% more productive since getting the package to the right place is half the battle.

Tip # 2 – Make your direct mail and email lead gen strategies better with swag

To make email and direct mail stronger lead gen strategies, you need to spice them up and do something others aren’t.

Enter the concept of ‘swag marketing.’

Swag marketing is the process of using branded merchandise (hoodies, drinkware, gadgets, whatever you want) to drive leads, reward customers, or engage employees.

New Relic used a swag offer in the form of free t-shirt to users who signed up for a free trial — and increased their MQLs by 30% as a result.

Printfection customer and on-demand massage app provider Zeel uses swag to upsell their existing clients and encourage 10-15% more signups.

If you’ve ever tried sending swag gifts to prospects or customers, though, you know how time consuming it is.

A swag platform like Printfection cuts down the effort from hours to minutes.

We make it easy to do this over email because we can create a Giveaway link which takes your recipient to a landing page, which you brand, where you can giveaway whatever items you want.

The rapidly growing fitness bike and live-streaming company, Peloton, uses this strategy to reward customers.

Combining job change data with a unique approach

We can mash our two lead gen strategies (job change data and swag marketing) together in some powerful use cases.

Engaging cold and/or key accounts

Let’s say your rep has an account where an opportunity has stagnated. First, use SifData to see if any key contacts have left.

If so, you’ll know right away you need to find some new ones.

Once you do, if you can’t get in touch with them, try sending a swag offer in exchange for a meeting.

You could try a coffee mug, tumbler, notebook, or something that relates to your specific brand. I give you 4 clever company swag ideas here.

We tried a ‘have a meeting over coffee’ kit recently: we sent a high quality camper mug with a branded Starbucks card asking for a chat over coffee.

We targeted 23 key accounts – and booked 1 opportunity and have a few other calls lined up.

Given we spent just over $1,000 on the kits, including shipping costs, and factoring in our average deal size, our expected ROI is already over 300%.

But to stress again, success here relies tremendously upon having accurate contact data and a thoughtful approach to your swag selection.

Reconnecting with former customers

Once SifData identifies your champion has moved on, hit them up with an email.

No response?

Here’s where sending swag comes into play.

I recommend sending a medium-to-high value item — what that means from a specific monetary range depends on your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and the Lifetime Value (LTV) of your deals.

You also need to consider the volume of swag items you’ll be sending.

The more customers you have, the higher likelihood of job changes, which means you’d want a greater budget assigned to this campaign strategy.

For us, our volume is very reasonable at perhaps a few changes per month. I generally send an item that’s in the $10-30 range.

Bluetooth speakers headphones, wireless charging pads, and other useful items work really well here.

In your package, include a note reminding them that you valued them as a customer and would love to partner with them again.

Start supercharging your lead gen strategies

With better job data and a new way to spice up channels like email marketing and direct mail, you’ll make your lead gen strategies go that much further.

Click here to learn more about SifData.

To get more info on Printfection, contact us or grab a demo.

This guest post was written by Ryan Campion, Head of Marketing at Printfection