Questions You Need to Ask Before Purchasing Email Lists

Questions You Need to Ask Before Purchasing Email Lists

17 May by Colleen Petitt · Leave a Comment

List purchasing historically has a bad name in the industry. This is because many marketers will blast emails, regardless of how relevant it is to their entire list. If you’re a B2B marketer who sells office supplies, you want to find the right title/contact who is responsible for purchasing office supplies in that office. This is increasingly difficult due to the fact that there are different roles and structures within different size organizations.
There are a lot of people in the industry that use different practices to acquire lists. However, using the wrong vendor, or acquiring the wrong name can have a long term impact on your overall reputation so we highly recommend you proceed with caution.
When you purchase a list, you need to approach it with the following items in mind:
Questions to ask yourself:

1. Who am I targeting?
2. What are my objectives? List Growth, foot in the door or purchase?
3. How many names do I need to not only acquire, but convert?
4. Or, how many names do I need to meet my chosen objective to make this worth my while?

Questions to ask your vendor:

1. How often do you refresh your list?
2. How do you verify contacts / titles?
3. How did you acquire the names you are selling?
4. Are they opted-in? By what method?
5. How often are your names sold?
6. What is the typical delivery, open, and click rate?
7. Are you consistently removing bounces, opt-outs, spam complaints?
8. Do you cleanse your own data against known spam traps, bad domains, etc.?

Acquiring your names is just the beginning. Once you have the email addresses, you need to use a product like Aprimo to not only execute your tactics, but develop strategies and messaging to ensure you’re talking to the right person with the right message, through the right forum, and garner more intelligent potential out of your list purchase.
The market is moving away from batch and blast to intelligent, targeted, segmented, Digital Marketing. Aprimo, for example, will allow you to include your lead source as a data point to track engagement and response over time. You can also use this data to customize and refine the message you are sending to this new audience base.
You can and should subsequently use this information to ENGAGE better with your data / target markets and segment your data faster and more accurately. You should carefully mail to your purchased list and frequently monitor response metrics to ensure that this list doesn’t ultimately damage the reputation of your domain /IP address if you’re using the same domain/IP to send email to your engaged customers.
You should use your data to LEAD your marketing function/campaign with more confidence … delivering campaigns that PERFORM better in terms of results.  Always think in terms of any customer communication strategy on how to ENGAGE – LEAD – PERFORM.