The Maths of Data

Often when we are planning an email campaign for a client, one of the biggest questions we face is “how many records are needed to achieve the results expected?”

Whilst we are firmly of the opinion that you can never have too many contacts to engage with, there are practical limits, especially if you are purchasing records or gathering them by telephone research.  So here is our rule of thumb for email campaigns:

• Starting at the end and working backwards…
• Campaign outcome: Require 4 good leads per month
• Therefore need 20 interested contacts (1 in 5 can be classified as a lead)
• Need to call 200 contacts following up the email campaign (one in 10 being interested) so we need to generate 200 interested contacts with the email campaign
• Anything from 5% to 0.1% of contacts will engage with a good email campaign depending on the data used, message and market sector.

For well targeted, researched and opted in data you can achieve 1.5% engagement, for cold, purchased data, the figure is probably closer to 0.4%.  This means that if you want 4 good leads per month, you need:

For Good, warm contacts: 13,300 records and for cold but well targeted purchased data: 50,000 records.

The good news is that if you are willing to invest in your campaign and allow interest to build over a few months and be very rigorous with re-engaging the contacts that were “maybe”, you can reduce your data requirements by half, but this is still a lot of data to acquire, manage  and engage with…