I imagine I have some readers that think these posts on messaging are too philosophical and not actionable enough. Why not discuss the particulars of lead generation, 1:1 email marketing, subject line testing and so on?
The problem with diving into the detail is not that it’s not important. It is. But from and order of operations standpoint, B2B marketers must have their messaging down cold before any of marketing campaign or technology is relevant. It doesn’t matter how many emails you send, or what your open rate is if your message is confused.
However, just to satisfy the need to deep dive and get technical, let’s talk about sex, or rather gender. Regardless of your gender, if you’re a B2B marketer and not considering it, you are missing a key element in messaging.
While 90% of marketers may acknowledge that gender is important, I find only 10 percent of 1:1 marketing campaigns or databases have any data on gender. Of course they know Linda is a woman’s name and Michael is a man’s name, and can see this in their data. But they’ve failed to go the final step and add the gender to the database.
The reason for this is that most data is imported and doesn’t contain gender information. Going back through a database with tens of thousands of names and trying to determine gender looks daunting. But it’s not. Here’s a simple deep dive technique to add gender to your database.
Step 1: Go to the US census bureau’s database of female names and download it into an Excel worksheet. In a column next to the name add a column called gender. Mark all names in this column “female.”
Step 2: Go to the same database and download male names. Create the column and mark these names “male.”
Step 3: Eliminate gender neutral names like Pat, Chris and Lee. Do this by setting up VLOOKUP in Excel and comparing male to female and female to male. You’re going to find and interesting thing. There are more male names in the female list than female names in the male list. It looks like men name their female children after themselves more often than you would think. You may have to eyeball a number of names, but you will wind up eliminating the top 100 gender confused names.
Step 4: Create a master male and female name and gender list by combining the resulting male and female lists above.
Step 5: Make sure you have a gender field in your Sales Force Automation or CRM.
Step 6: Now export your Contacts list from your system along with the ID number.
Step 7: Run a VLOOKUP on your contacts list with your master name/gender list and return gender to your contacts. You’ll hit about 90%.
Step 8: Re-import your contact names along with gender into your SFA or CRM system.
The final step is to start thinking about how to use gender in your messaging. I’ll give an example in my next post: Men are from Mars.
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Driving Sales Through Customer Focused Marketing
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)
lee.stocking@gmail.com