You’ve heard all the “buzz” about how profitable email marketing has become in today’s business environment. You need people to email. You want to get a list of sales leads quickly and cheaply too. This mindset of desperation can actually work against you.
Common Email List Resources
- Purchased: You provide the list owner with criteria (such as business owners of companies under 50 employees in a certain city). The provider assembles the list you requested and sends it to you for you to use from your own database.
- Rented: Again, you get access to the list through a list provider. This time, you can’t actually see the email addresses of the recipients. Instead, you work with the list owner to send out your email.
- Opt-In List (digital): Your contacts have voluntarily given their contact information to you online. Usually they give you this contact information in exchange for something valuable such as an eBook, report, automatic notification of new blog posts.
- Opt-In List (in person): A common way to get contact information in person is at a trade show. Some companies (like restaurants and retail stores) are successful with in-store promotions to gather opt-in data.
While the list providers claim in the situations listed in 1&2 above that their lists are totally “opt-in” lists, it is far from the opt-in situations listed in 3&4. When list owners who sell or rent lists say the contacts opted in, they are saying that the people opted into another person’s offer. That is quite different than people who have opted into your offer.
Keeping Data Clean
Any time you purchase or rent a list the new data can present a danger to your database. If the company is reputable, you still have the risk of old, obsolete contact information, spam traps and other risks. Disreputable companies may have scraped the email addresses from unsuspecting contacts from websites.
Spam filtering companies set up “honey pots”. These are special planted email addresses. When someone harvests these email addresses and use them, the sender is identified as a spammer. They also monitor hard bounce notices that become a spam trap to report the sender as a spammer.
Use a data quality provider to scan any list you choose to purchase or rent. Remember, these contacts do not yet know your company and your open rate may be low even with validated contact data
When it comes to your own opt-in data, be careful about how the information comes into your database.
- Set standards for data entry
- Monitor staff input quality
- Validate contact entered by sales leads
While the quick and easy ways of getting data may sound good in the first place, recognize the risks and manage your expectations. In the long run, the gold standard for data quality is contact information gotten from people who recognize your company and have “raised their hand” to receive emails from you.
Maintaining a clean database is critical to your company email marketing campaigns and other initiatives. Protect the data every step of the way.