One of the oldest and most tried methods to reach out to a target audience has traditionally been the purchase of prospect names and titles from list suppliers.
These databases of names are used to build massive mailing lists for the various direct marketing pieces some enterprises continue to produce and rely on for marketing their services. The only change over the decades with this strategy is that these lists are increasingly in digital format and used to stage email campaigns rather than direct mail. Just as realtors often claim that “location, location, location” is the most important consideration in buying real estate that will hold its value, so too, traditional marketers often state that “the list, the list, the list” is the end-all solution for a successful marketing campaign.
As long as list brokers have survived, it is worth considering a couple points about their services. First, even reputable brokers are essentially selling you the ammunition you need to be just one of an endless parade of spammers, nothing more. And when the dust clears and you measure out your results, chances are you have paid rates per lead way above what online marketers would ever consider acceptable.
s there a better way of doing direct marketing, one that doesn’t rely on rapidly aging, ineffective, and expensive lists? Of course – and increasingly online marketers are discovering that permission-based access to real and current prospects in the market for what you are selling deliver better value in terms of both dollars spent and good will won in the market.
Conventional lists obtained from list suppliers are inherently static in nature. Whether they are acquired to support snail mail campaigns or online campaigns where your firm is the sender (spammer) and the “purchased” names are the receivers, the reality is many of those names may have been qualified at a certain point in time. But it doesn’t mean they are qualified now.
Many lists are compiled from records of actual sales transactions. You’ve seen the disclaimers yourself — buy something on Amazon and be told after registering that your name may be used by Amazon or other business partners for solicitation. Or sometimes lists are gathered from secondary databases where the title and the buying role are the only prerequisite to qualifying the name as your potential buyer.
What you know then is that there is some credential that supposedly qualifies them for your email efforts. But in many cases, even that point is suspect since the firms selling the names are not gaining them directly, but repurchasing or scraping them up from secondary or tertiary sources. And what you don’t know, of course, is whether these same names are currently and actively engaged in researching and eventually buying your solution or service.
This is the great divider between what you get with a purchased list versus what you get by investing in a lead-generation campaign through an online provider with its own audience, built up through trust and hard work. Sites like MSDynamicsWorld.com spend a lot of time and editorial resources in developing editorial content that continually attracts active prospects, and they do it real-time. What you are guaranteed is that the readers’ interest in your business area or solution is “current”.
Recent research MSDW conducted on the search habits of Dynamics ERP and CRM users shows the high degree of reliance they have on IT association and publisher websites, forums, and blogs, and that they go to these sites that publish objective, third party content to stay on top of recent trends and to hear from ISV sponsors like you. From interviews with survey participants, we learned that they trust this environment and the content on it even more than they trust your own corporate website environment because your site by its very nature has to be biased in a way editorial sites strive not to be.
It’s easy to conclude that investing in a digital environment where the emails are promoted to engaged and interested readers/members/prospects looking for trustworthy content should result in a far better ROI than relying on your own databases or acquired lists that may be reflective of your prospects’ older and historical actions rather than their immediate needs.
Isn’t it time to make your marketing lists more productive? That can only happen if the names on that list are from the here-and-now.
