Ricoh USA, Inc. is one of the largest document management and solutions company in the United States. As their industry has shifted dramatically over the past several years, Ricoh has continued to adapt in this evolving marketplace. One of the reasons they continue to succeed is that they understand their customer really well. They know their key industries and the critical firmographics within those industries by product, geography, and size of company. They understand their markets and personas down to the smallest common denominator.
Many companies boast that they are able to achieve this level of market profiling, but only few can consistently deliver on this statement. This level of operational and marketing intelligence is achieved through technology, accurate data, and a team that knows how to leverage both for segmentation and campaign success. They have a lean team of “data gurus” that know how to work their data magic to gain meaningful business insights by utilizing the data from both technologies. Currently, Ricoh utilizes Eloqua to manage their marketing data.
The Challenge
Ricoh was not always the poster-child for data segmentation success. Up until a few years ago Ricoh was challenged with several data integrity issues:
- 60-70% of their accounts did not have contacts associated with them
- Many accounts were duplicate records with different account IDs
- There was no data integration between their CRM, marketing automation platforms, or other disparate systems
- They lacked confidence in the accuracy of their data
- Spam traps were a concern
These significant data challenges were directly impacting Ricoh’s ability to accurately analyze their data and identify their best marketing opportunities. The most significant pain point was incomplete information. Without some of the fundamentals such as industry, function, location, and revenue their market segmentation efforts were inadequate at best. In the instances where firmographic data was available, the lack of contacts associated with these key accounts made target marketing virtually impossible.
The Solution
Ricoh knew they had to attack their data problems head on. They turned to Dun & Bradstreet, the leader in B2B data with over hundreds of millions of business records in their global Data Cloud. D&B Optimizer for Marketing, a secure, marketing solution that optimizes your data, enabled Ricoh to address their immediate challenges and more.
With access to the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud, Ricoh was able to assess, cleanse, and enrich their data to improve its accuracy and completeness. This process included appending the universal Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S® Number to all of their records, which allowed them to align data intelligence across their technology systems. The D-U-N-S Number also provided Ricoh with the ability to sync their marketing prospect contact data to their CRM when it became sales qualified – further enabling their lead scoring model in Eloqua.
Ricoh also took advantage of D&B Optimizer’s real-time form enrichment connector for Eloqua, allowing them to seamlessly enrich their web forms with deep firmographic and demographic information, while simultaneously shortening their online forms and increasing form completion rates. With clean, complete and actionable data, Ricoh can now segment and profile their target markets with confidence while customizing messaging and targeting high-value contacts with ease.
The Results
Boosting Efficiency 50%, Capturing Insights
The data team at Ricoh continues to take data completeness and accuracy very seriously. Without these attributes, it is impossible to support the demand generation team at the level they require to meet their campaign goals.
Erin Faust is a Data Strategist at Ricoh. A self-professed “data geek,” Erin has lived through the early days of inaccurate and unreliable data and has perfected a scalable process that delivers high performing campaign lists and results every time.
Ricoh takes an agile approach to their market segmentation and analysis practices. The team is structured by key industries (e.g. healthcare, legal, and higher education) and composed of a cross-functional group. They use their pool of data to answer the following questions: What product do we want to promote to this industry? Who are the decision makers? What departments, functions, and titles are relevant? What is the size of the company? How many of their team members do we have in our database already?
Bringing on D&B Optimizer, powered by the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud, gave Erin the answers to these questions so she could get to work.
D&B Optimizer continues to enable Erin to manage all aspects of her data needs. As an experienced Eloqua user, Erin pulls a list from Eloqua that matches the criteria provided by the go-to-market team. The next step is critical; Erin runs the target list through D&B Optimizer’s cleanse and enrich process to identify and correct gaps in data completion and potentially erroneous, or inaccurate, data records. This step allows Erin to move forward with complete data that will drive campaign success while decreasing threat risks and undeliverability levels.
Another critical strategy for the Ricoh marketing team is Account-Based Marketing (ABM). Identifying the companies and relevant contacts Ricoh wanted to engage with became much easier once the master data foundation was laid with the addition of the D-U-N-S Number into their Eloqua and CRM instances. Erin uses the linkage capabilities from the D-U-N-S Number to identify additional companies and contacts within the corporate family tree of their target accounts to expand her target audience. This effort would not have been possible without the D-U-N-S linkage capabilities. In many instances there are gaps in the number of available marketing contacts in Eloqua and the number needed to meet the requirements of the campaign. Through D&B Optimizer’s Target module, Erin self-sources net new contacts that match the criteria determined by the go-to-market team, delivering accurate and actionable contact lists with high email deliverability levels.
Erin has proven to the go-to-market and demand generation teams that going the extra mile to deliver a clean and complete marketing list is worth the effort. Generally, Erin has found that about 25% of the original demand generation list processed through D&B Optimizer is flagged with inaccurate and incomplete information. The good news is that she’s seen rates improve from 5% upwards to 86% on average. For Ricoh, appending SIC, employee count, demographic information, and updated phone numbers has had the largest impact. Correcting this data before it hits the campaign has allowed for consistently better conversion rates – in some cases upwards of 10%. In addition to achieving campaign success, Erin has implemented a data quality benchmarking process that has positive benefits while keeping these critical vertical segments relevant. With the market segmentations defined, Erin runs benchmarks minimally twice a year utilizing D&B Optimizer and documents the results with stakeholders. This activity allows for gaps to be closed for ABM efforts, along with contact coverage, allowing the data to remain current. This positively impacts both marketing campaign performance and cost efficiency.