There are four items you need to consider in making the right decision around list sourcing…
First, do you already have a purposable list in-house? What I mean by that is have you built or acquired a list that is profilable and segmentable for this specific purpose and, if so, is sufficiently large enough to drive a sizeable audience to your event. A customer list, or an acquired list you’ve used before with success (subject, obviously, to not having fatigued it) may provide higher response rates than a fresh list of matching prospects, but these are often ones who’ve already heard your story.
So where do you find new “eyeballs” to see what you have to offer?
Well, I mentioned several previously like Hoover’s, Dun & Bradstreet, ZoomInformation, ABI and InfoUSA. And of course, there is Jigsaw, Spoke, Lead411, and many others, including industry-specific databases for trade shows and publications. All have comparative advantages and disadvantages. Your first 3 concerns, however, have less to do with those particulars than they do with how accurate, how re-usable and what methodology.
Accuracy in list acquisition is always a challenge. WHile companies like ABI and InfoUSA are quite reputable, we’ve all had more negative than positive experiences when going outside for a list. Why? I would assert that list brokers can never know your prospective audience, your profiled prospect as well as you can. But, more importantly, you simply don’t get to see the data before you buy it, so you can’t “lay on” that extra layer of human intelligence that helps discern the little nuances like differences in titles between industries, etc. And, typically, you don’t get to see an brokered email list anyway, unlike a mailing list. Typically, the companies will take your content and do the mailing for you. Again, you have little opportunity to make the list more precise and accurate for your specific purposes.
Then, there’s the databases you can subscribe to, like Hoover’s and Dun & Bradstreet, but which don’t supply email addresses at all… And there’s the trade show and publication databases, where typically you are limited to one-time use, if you can get the emails directly.
Of course, some of the new databases available, such as Jigsaw and Spoke, allow you to not only do your own searches, but also to access accuracy yourself based on h0ow recently a record has been updated. you can also acquire email addresses and use them on an unlimited basis. the cost, however, can be as much as $1 a contact, and now you must manage the list for recency, frequency, fatigue and accuracy yourself. YOu bought it, you own it. BUt is that necessarily what you want?
One advantage list brokers and databases offer are their defined methodologies for maintaining recency, frequency, and accuracy. Clearly, most organizations (other than the largest) don’t have internal resources to invoke and sustain a list methodology for the long term.