be smarter about your list purchases

As a list broker/data provider, I have sold my share of email lists over the years. It amazes me these days how many clients want to just buy the cheap solution (IE: email address and minimal data). Politicians are notorious for this. This kills me every time I get asked for it, because in an attempt to save money, the client is spending foolishly.

Here is an example of what I am talking about...

I recently had a political candidate call me for a fundraising list. He wanted to raise money on the Internet so he asked for a quote on a list of email addresses for all of the donor prospects in his district. All he wanted was email address, name and town. He said he wanted the list to "start working it for donations."

A mentality like this is frustrating because I knew the client was setting himself up for failure. With the sophistication of spam filters and the evolving reading habits of people these days, the old method of sending out as many emails as possible and hoping for a small return rate is over.

In the case of the Congressional candidate, he was going to send out a massive amount of email and receive back little more than a slew of unsubscribes. The list he tried to save money on would basically be rendered useless after 2-3 mailings and he may not even break even on the investment.

Knowing the almost certain outcome, I discussed with him my suggestions to meet his goals. I suggested purchasing an email list that was appended with ideological information and segmenting each email blast so that he targeted the message to the right audience.

He agreed to my solution, and although he spent a little more on his list, he made it up in almost immediately and enjoyed a great deal of fundraising success from the email blasts. He also won grassroots support from the emails, which is an additional perk that he never would have had with his original list idea.

The bottom line is: get as much info as you can on your audience no matter what your objective is. The increase in response to something that is targeted to a certain audience is well worth the initial investment.

The past few years have yielded countless new technological tools that make targeting information very easy. In future posts, I will explore some of these tools.