The Power Of Reply Email Mining

It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention, and this is certainly the case for LeadGnome.

You see, a few years ago I transitioned from product marketing to leading entire marketing teams. While revenue was on my mind as a product marketing professional, I focused on customer and market needs. The lead funnel was one step removed. However, this all changed with my first head of marketing position – the lead funnel was now front and center. My team and I were on the hook to deliver high-quality leads to the sales team. We used inbound, outbound, and nurturing methods, and all of these techniques had an email component.

My team had recently purchased a targeted list of contacts for an outbound campaign. I wanted to see how good the list was, so I began combing through the campaign response emails for bounces. I figured if the bounce rate was high, I’d ask the list vendor for additional contacts or a discount. However, as I scrolled through the response emails, I noticed something that immediately stopped me from counting bounces. I discovered gold buried in that mountain of emails – specifically I found leads in the body of out-of-office emails. Now, this may not be news to you veteran email marketers, but remember I was a rookie.

Wanting to make the most of my budget, I asked a marketing associate to plow through the out-of-office emails and mine the leads. His progress was slow and error prone as he performed the following process:

• Open each email
• Read the email searching for other contacts
• Record this information (hand type or cut ‘n paste) into a spreadsheet
• Import that information into our CRM system, Salesforce

Clearly, this was not going to scale. I figured there must be an automated email reply mining solution out there, so I searched the web. To my amazement, no solution existed.

This experience was the inspiration for LeadGnome.