In my marketing career, the most consistent frustration I’ve heard voiced by business-to-business marketers is: “I purchased a mailing list, but it turned out to be worthless!” Whether with direct mail, email, or telemarketing campaigns, the complaint is the same.
There are only two possible solutions to the problem of poor-quality business-to-business lists.
First, ignore it. So what if 25 percent of the contacts on the list are no-shows? Just send more emails and enough will get through to enough interested people that someone will buy. Thus, we arrive at the typical industry expectations of 0.5 to 1.0 percent response rates.
But what about the 99 percent who were not interested? Or even the 60 percent who deleted the email without reading it? From their point-of-view, they’ve just been spammed … by you! At best you’ve irritated them, at worst they’ll file a complaint and your ISP will shut you down.
There is a second option. Instead of using “mass” emails, think small. Instead of emailing 10,000 possible prospects, try 1,000 highly targeted ones.
With such a small email list you have to think differently. Forget “double opt-in”; think in terms of direct opt-in. Forget about faceless prospects; think in terms of personalized contact.
True, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but look at the results you can get: Recently, a company I’m familiar with did two email campaigns -- the first to 177 recipients who had been telephoned and who had granted permission to send an email; the second to 10,000 recipients who had not been called, but who had previously given permission to receive information on a similar service.
The results? The exact same number of purchases from each campaign! But with a significant cost differential.
If you decide a small, highly-targeted email list is the way to go, what is the best way to do it?
First, narrow your list significantly by asking yourself, “Who is my ideal customer?” For example, rather than targeting “dental practitioners in California,” your ideal customer may be only those dental offices with 5-10 employees, specializing in services to juveniles. You can use any of a multiple number of list services to obtain a more precise list like this, but the one I like best is D&B’s Zapdata.com.
You may find yourself in the spot where the exact list you need is not available from traditional sources. In that case, it’s best to create your own. For example, I recently worked with a company seeking to reach retailers of a particular office product who advertise via the Internet. After determining all available lists were too broad, a junior research assistant was asked to surf the web and gather company names and contact information. The resulting list was exactly the people who would use their service … and the cost was only $0.34 per contact.
Second, you must call the contact and request their email address and permission to send them your information. Yes, that means personal contact the old-fashioned way … by telephone. But while you are taking the trouble to call, you also can gather other important information to pre-qualify them. For example, you may only want to contact dental offices that use a particular type of equipment or procedure, and then you may only need to contact the office manager in that office. This will help narrow your email list even further to just your potential buyers.
Third, in order to get the highest response, you will need to send your emails out as soon as possible after the call has been made, typically within 24 hours. You should also customize each email with a greeting using the recipient’s name so they know it’s not spam.
Is this type of smaller, targeted email campaign really effective? You decide: In the completed campaigns mentioned above (177 vs. 10,000), the smaller one had double the open rate and four times the click-through rate as the larger one. And both generated the same number of sales.
Think small … it works!
Richard Blythe is Principal of Blythe Associates (http://www.blythe-associates.com) in Bridgeport, Conn. Blythe Associates specializes in finding new prospects and qualified leads for business-to-business sales.
