Marketing Database Optimization Best Practices
ReadyContacts is a marketing database optimization company. ReadyContacts solutions help you build & maintain a highly accurate and relevant marketing database that delivers significantly improved campaign response rates for sales & marketing. ReadyContacts is the only player in the market with proprietary software solutions to build unparalleled accuracy and completeness in marketing databases.
I Love Jigsaw. I Hate Jigsaw.
Jigsaw is a clear innovative in the B2B business contact lists space. All outbound B2B marketing is completely dependent on the quality of the list and Jigsaw came up with an innovative idea that made it possible to buy contacts at a small price, buy lots of them on demand and with a fair bit of accuracy in terms of contact data update.
Having said that, there are clearly two separate camps. Some who clearly hate Jigsaw and some who clearly love it. Here are some reasons why one might not like Jigsaw:
- Jigsaw makes it possible for any person to find your business contact information and put it up on Jigsaw without your permission for all of the Jigsaw users and buyers to use it.
- TechCrunch has a whole slew of privacy related complaints that you can read about here.
- The quality sucks for a range of different verticals including government and manufacturing, which we have tried ourselves and have seen less than 30% accuracy.
- The core model allows a user to upload a contact and get a contact or equivalent points in exchange, which is cool but their TOS allows the company to then sell that contact to any number of customers without giving back anything to the end user who added the contact in the first place.
If you ask any sales person though, they love Jigsaw for a number of valid reasons:
- Jigsaw is the easiest way to get a whole bunch of contacts for any campaign in the shortest period of time with a certain level of accuracy.
- Its better than a lot of other so-called contact databases which are just not as deep-rooted or updated.
- The benefit of getting the contact email address and direct phone number is invaluable to say the least.
- Jigsaw is a great way for someone to quickly get a few names in the target organization at their key accounts to quickly get to their decision makers than having to struggle with door keepers who just won’t let them in.
I am sure there are more pros and cons and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well. I am split right now. I love their model to address this very large and fragmented market opportunity of business contact lists, but I think their model needs to evolve to address some of the downsides. I hope someone there is listening.
January 6th, 2009 at 8:03 am
[...] I Love Jigsaw. I Hate Jigsaw. | ReadyContacts Role-based B2B Contacts [...]
January 6th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
I agree. I'm split on how I feel about Jigsaw as well. It's like a necessary evil.
January 7th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Purchasing opt-in lists to me is a necessary evil in some situations, but this seems more evil than necessary. Even leaving aside the list quality issues, it seems unethical on a fundamental level to be able to purchase lists that “participants” have no right of refusal.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Jigsaw is the best available resource for business contact information period. There are third party “list-validation” services in the market, and I have written reports from them stating that overall review shows mid 80% accuracy with a list of 1600 names. In addition, if you do buy this data and find bad info, you can note that in the database and get your money back or get another lead. Anyone else doing that.
It is never going to be able to make a 100% perfect list, especially in this environment of layoffs of over 500,000 in November alone. As far as ethics, everyone that hands out a business card gave that information to the public domain as far as I am concerned. After 20+ years in sales, I have never had someone hand me their card and say, keep it private. Never. Come on.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Miles, your points are valid, but Jigsaw is barely 50% accurate and I have seen enough examples of this. Its not about the money but about the time that is wasted. Again, like I said Jigsaw has done something truly amazing but they have yet to perfect the model and there is a lot of bad quality that is not a good use of sales team's time.
There are company like ReadyContacts, Reachforce, Catapult Profiling and others that will guarantee your 100% accuracy of contacts and most importantly deliver role-based contacts that are way more relevant than just titles.
I think all sorts of sources of leads like Hoovers, Jigsaw, ReadyContacts, Catapult, InfoUSA and others are valid but each of them have their own pros and cons. I think its all about quality and not quantity though – getting 5000 names is less effective than 500 role-based decision makers. Every organization must decide what is more valuable for them: quality, accuracy, price and role-based identification.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Exactly. I think the model is innovative but its like selling contacts that are uploaded by someone on a bulk basis .. may be from the company's internal directory. How else can you get Security Guard kind of contacts. These are all added in bulk and may not be valid for B2B marketers.
I am looking forward to Jigsaw evolving their model to address some these problems. I am sure / hope they do.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
I would also try NetProspex.com. They are sort of like Jigsaw but I have had much lower email bounces from their data.
February 6th, 2009 at 4:47 am
I would also try NetProspex.com. They are sort of like Jigsaw but I have had much lower email bounces from their data.