B2B Spam – No End in Sight

By Chris Golec

If you’re like me, you are probably getting
annoyed by the growing quantity of meaningless emails that make their way thru
your Outlook filters and into the Inbox.    I believe most of the senders of these
communications have good intensions, but I am not quite sure why I was included
in their “target” list.  I suspect they fell  victim to the challenges of buying a quality email list:

1. A high quality email list is difficult to find. There are 10,000+ list
   owners, brokers, agents, etc. to choose from.   All claim better quality and
   more records than the other, making it difficult to really know who is better.
   
2. Minimum purchases. List owners force
   businesses to buy – actually rent – at least 5,000 names.   The more filters you want,
   the higher the cost.   The more names you buy, the lower cost.   This leads to less focused, higher volume campaigns to the wrong target audience.
   
3. Lack of visibility. The data sample of 10-20
   records sent to you by the list provider is seldom representative of the
   actual 5,000+ contacts you rent.   Of course, you cannot see the names or
   titles, because the list is rented.
   
4. Improper categorization of
   job titles. Figuring out which level and department a job title falls into is difficult to automate.   Some list companies get it right, but many are all over the map pushing some titles into multiple departments and multiple levels.   Why Office Manager makes its way on to every list I have rented for clients is beyond me.
   

I have found some useful
tools to help search and filter thru the thousands of lists (see NextMark), but it is the rental
policies, minimum purchase requirements, and poor filtering that literally
forces businesses to send their message to the wrong audience.     A few solutions have
emerged like Spoke and Jigsaw which allow people to buy
or sell individual contacts from their Outlook Addressbooks, but the model appears to have serious privacy and data currency issues.

I’m
not sure how companies can avoid sending ‘unintentional spam’, but the
current economics of email marketing – and the policies of the list industry in general
- are not about to change behavior.

Any suggestions or comments?  What have you done to  improve your results with list rentals and/or purchases?