Turning Warm Data into Campaign Success: A Practical Guide
When clients approach us with “warm data” for follow-up, it’s always an exciting prospect. Let’s face it: no one enjoys cold calling. Warm data suggests pre-qualified leads, making campaigns more efficient and outcomes more promising. However, the reality of working with warm data is often more complex than it first appears.
In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at the complexities and challenges of warm data, providing you with a practical guide on how to turn your warm data into successful marketing campaigns.
The Expectations of Warm Data
When working with warm data, it’s natural to assume it will include all the essentials:
Phone numbers (after all, if someone is considered a warm lead, why wouldn’t they have shared their number?).
Individual email addresses (instead of generic addresses like “info@” or “sales@”).
A neatly organised spreadsheet with clearly labelled columns, providing a comprehensive view of each prospect.
The Reality of Warm Data
Unfortunately, these expectations rarely align with reality. Often, data arrives with significant gaps and inconsistencies. For example:
Missing or incomplete phone numbers, some lacking extension numbers, some without country codes.
Generic email addresses, making personal outreach difficult
Data sourced from multiple locations in varying formats, with duplicate or inconsistently named records (e.g., “ABC Engineering Limited,” “A.B.C. Engineering Ltd.,” and “ABC Eng Ltd” for the same company).
In one global campaign we managed, the client provided email addresses for all prospects and phone numbers for many, but there were no address details. This omission made it challenging to determine where each prospect was located and which language to use when reaching out.
The Challenges of Data Wrangling
These issues lead to what we call data wrangling. This involves cleaning, consolidating, and organising data to create a single, cohesive view of each prospect. The process includes:
Deduplication: ensuring one record exists for each organisation and individual.
Appending missing details: adding essential information, such as phone numbers or addresses.
Standardisation: unifying data formats from multiple sources.
While we’re more than capable of handling this process, data wrangling takes time and resources. It’s essential to account for this effort when planning a project to ensure realistic timeframes, resource allocation, and cost estimates.
Scoring prospects as “warm”
Another critical element is understanding why a contact is classified as “warm.” Some organisations use marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot for scoring prospects, where points are assigned based on interactions such as website visits or email engagement. Leads are categorised as warm when they reach a predetermined score level.
The challenge with this type of data is that the contacts don’t necessarily feel warm. Whilst they have definitely interacted, and are almost certainly aware that interactions with websites and emails are tracked, contacts often don’t feel like they have initiated any sort of dialogue. And so, despite the various digital interactions which have taken place, contacts often perceive the follow-up to be “cold calling”. This results in low engagement levels and low conversion rates and can be damaging to brand reputation, if the campaign is too tenacious.
Trigger event follow-ups
Some of the most successful campaigns are based on following up data that’s been categorised as warm following what we call a ‘trigger event’, where the contact proactively engaged. That action is the trigger for the follow-up. Examples include:
Webinar attendance – reach out after the webinar to offer a copy of the presentation or a recording of the webinar, and to ask if the delegate has any follow-up questions.
Webinar non-attendance – outreach to individuals who registered but didn’t attend the webinar to offer a recording of the event or even a call with the speaker.
Content downloads – contact to ask if the resource addressed all the contact’s questions and offering an opportunity to speak with a subject expert.
Event participation – reach out to those who attended an event or trade show (or better still, visited the stand) to check that all their questions were addressed and to offer literature, costs or a chat with a technical expert.
In these instances, the contact has initiated a substantial action which triggers a response. Provided follow-up is initiated promptly after the trigger event, it’s less likely to be perceived as cold. When deployed immediately after the trigger event these engagements are effectively the beginnings of a dialogue. In our experience, the conversion rates with this type of warm data are far better and there is negligible risk of reputational damage as the calls can be positioned as customer service calls rather than sales calls.
The Impact of Clean Data
High-quality data is the foundation of successful campaigns. Clean, well-organised data enables:
Personalised, relevant outreach – Improving engagement and conversion rates.
Efficient resource allocation – Ensuring time is spent on high-value leads.
Clear, actionable results – Delivering measurable campaign outcomes.
Ultimately, investing in data quality makes it possible to move prospects closer to becoming customers, driving better results.
Preparing Data for Campaign Success
When starting work on a campaign, the data needs to be made ready for follow up. To streamline the preparation process for our clients, we’ve developed a Data Quality Questionnaire. This tool helps us assess the state of the data and identify gaps that need attention before launching a campaign. It also means that we can give a much more accurate cost estimate and there are no nasty surprises.
Key questions include:
1. Have the contacts opted in? If so, what terms did they agree to?
2. What was the trigger activity, and how recent was it?
3. Are the records tagged to show their source?
4. Are phone numbers and email addresses complete and verified?
5. Is the data in a consistent format or does it require standardisation?
6. Has the data been deduplicated and checked against key customer or competitor lists?
7. If global, does the data allow for segmentation by location or language preference?
Conclusion
Clean, warm data holds immense potential, but its success depends on preparation. Providing accurate, complete data—and a clear understanding of the basis on which the data is categorised as warm—can ensure your campaigns achieve maximum impact.
If you’re ready to take the next step toward campaign success, talk to The Call Business at info@thecallbusiness.com. We’ll help you unlock the true potential of your warm data.