Should you Rent or Buy Marketing Lists?

By Chris Golec

Quality and Credibility are Key

More and more companies are popping up that offer the opportunity to buy a marketing list versus the traditional rental model.    While there are many benefits to this option, the devil may be in the details.   We recommend customers carefully consider both options and then make the decision based on list quality, the provider’s ability to segment and target their data, and the overall credibility of the provider.

Problems with Rental

• Low quality or relevancy to target campaign – The rental model offers no way to know if your message is reaching the target audience since you never see the list.   If 50% the responses you receive from a campaign are solid prospects, you can safely assume that more than 50% the initial list was sent to the wrong audience.
• No visibility into email results – Most providers do not validate (via a third party) how many emails were sent or delivered.
• High rental minimums – Sending your message to 5,000 or 10,000 people (most provider’s minimums) absolutely makes no sense if your target audience is much smaller.   Not only is a waste of money, but it forces you to spam professionals with a message that is meaningless.
• Low response rates – A 1-2% response rate, or 98-99%+ lack of response rate, should be unacceptable.   A more targeted list with quality data should double or triple results and save your company countless hours of frustration on the back-end.
• No multi-channel campaigns – Renting is a one-time event.   If you are considering buying a list,  it is important to keep in mind that you may touch a prospect 6-10 times a year.   Taking a total cost approach is critical.

Email Buyers Beware

• Privacy issues – Many providers such as Jigsaw, Spoke, Netrospex harvest email addresses from their customer’s Microsoft Outlook contact folder, receive confidential customer data as a payment or credit, spider web sites, illegally redistribute data, or all of the above.   We highly recommend marketers avoid using a source that has questionable practices and hope that a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy will suffice.   The future liability is just not worth it.  See the following:
  • TechCrunch – “Jigsaw is
    the most evil company funded by well known and respected venture
    investors”
  • San Francisco Chronicle – “…a breeding ground for identity
    thieves and spammers”.
• Higher cost – The cost for buying high quality, legitimate opt-in lists may be 5-10X higher than rental lists.   You should, however, consider the ability to re-market and do multi-channel campaigns.   Since the providers knows you’ll see every record, they are also like to do a much better job filtering and refining the data.
• Low relevancy – Even higher quality providers do a poor job organizing their data to enable the filtering and segmentation required to hit 5%+ response rates.  We ran a campaign for a customer using data from a provider (public company) that claims to have the highest quality IT data available.    After demanding that we see the list, we found that only 25% of the titles matched the campaign’s target audience (IT Directors and higher).
• Quality – Few list providers verify their information and virtually none offer a money-back guarantee.   If your provider cannot make these claims (in writing), expect poor results and have a process in place to remove the bad data from your CRM system.    Melissa Data estimates the cost of a bad record to be $100.
• Getting ”Black-Listed” – Many email sellers fail to eliminate the info@, sales@, and ISP email addresses from their lists.  If you acquire a list with these addresses present, be sure to strip them out and remove the vendor from your preferred list.   Networks look for these obvious triggers to block senders (you) from all future electronic communications.

The Answer?

If you can identify a list provider that is willing and able to sell you only highly relevant, verified Opt-in email addresses and company information.  Without these minimum qualifications, however, you could be acquiring privacy issues and be subject to less than satisfactory response rates.

Please send us any B2B marketing list providers you recommend.