Cheap Lists Deliver Rich Results! “No, No”, you say…

“Cheap Lists DON’T deliver Rich Results, they deliver Cheap Results”. If you have read the Sandra Boynton book (see image above) to your child, then you know what I am relating this to. If not (which most likely means you are yet to step into parenthood), then you will. 

I find it funny when I talk to marketing managers who are looking for high quality contact lists for < $1 per contact. High quality and cheap price never go along, have never gone along and will not go along in the future. This is more true about business contact lists than many other things and here’s why: 

• Business contact lists that are sold at < $1 per contact are worse than last year’s conference lists as they are generated from databases which may or may not have been refreshed for months or even a year. Its not the database’s problem though as its impossible to refresh large contact databases with accurate and current information even once or twice a year. They know it and you should too. If you are buying a contact for <$1, then please make sure you don’t spend any time or energy on the campaign as that effort (which would cost you a lot more) will just not be worth the results you can expect from such a list. 
• Cheap contact lists lack the accuracy and completeness that is critical for your email and direct mail campaigns. You won’t get the specific mailing addresses for the contacts but just the company HQ address. Similarly, most such lists won’t have email addresses or may have some that are programmatically appended and have suffer from high bounce rates. Sending a direct mail to such a list will result in huge losses and dismal response rates. 
• Low priced business contact lists can never be made of specific role-based decision makers that are responsible for an area that your product or service addresses. If you get 10 contacts but don’t get that specific one that is responsible for evaluating your kind of solution offerings, then you have just bought something that will waste a lot of your sales and marketing team’s time. 
• There is no competitive advantage in buying cheap broad business contact lists. Even if we assume they deliver some value, you can be sure that the vendor is selling the same exact list to all your competitors as well. In fact this is a fact with many niche business contact lists where list vendors sell the same data to all companies effectively wiping out any advantage that a marketing team can build by reaching certain decision makers prior to their competitors. 

Business contact lists are the primary drivers of campaign effectiveness and it is critical to get the right list with the right decision makers to start with. Its never easy to do this but if you can get the right process in place or work with the right vendor for your marketing database requirements, then it becomes a competitive advantage that is not replicable. Quality is more critical than quantity in B2B marketing & lead generation and cheap lists pollute your database with bad data that infects your campaigns and lowers productivity. What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear your experiences. 

Related posts:

• Highly Tailored Business Contact Lists for Highly Specific Decision Makers
• B2B Direct Marketing Lists: Right Place & Right Person
• 3 Things To Do Before You Upload Trade Show Lists To Your CRM
• B2B Marketing Lists With A Twist – The New 2009 Flavor
• Why Are Custom B2B Business Contact Lists Ideal For Your Telemarketing Campaign?