Marketing Database Optimization Best Practices
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Trade Magazine Opt-in Lists Are Dead, Aren’t They?
Magazine Opt-in Lists have been a consistent source of “names” for B2B marketers for a long time. Logic was that is a person subscribed to a VoIP magazine then she must be a qualified buyer or some sort of an influencer. Also if she has opted in to received the magazine then she knowingly has opted in to receive messages from number of other businesses that she may not even know of. Guess what, both these assumptions were wrong all these years and they will be (more) wrong going into the future. Like everything there are some exceptions but the truth is the a large number of people subscribe to trade magazine for FREE by simply filling out a form and barely read them. If you charged $1 for the subscription, a majority of them may not even fill out the forms. Secondly, the opt in in much magazine subscription forms is not evident at all to the end user. So even if we assume that a particular user wanted to seriously subscribe to a trade magazine, we cannot be sure at all that she is ready to receive messages from other business hawking their products and services.
More importantly, in today’s world of permission marketing, its just a waste of time to use someone else’s opt-in list to send your messages. Magazine subscriber lists are a good source of cheap bulk list of names but you must carefully determine if they can deliver any value to you whatsoever even if they just cost a few hundred dollars. For B2B marketing magazine lists are dead because:
- The subscribers may not be your specific decision makers or buyers
- The subscribers may have already moved on from the companies they worked at when they subscribed to the magazine
- The subscribers tolerate 3rd party emails being sent to them only because they get the magazine for free and not because they want to be marketed to
Opt-in lists are critical but they can be only valuable when you build them internally via your own websites. Ardath Albee has a good post on how you can do this. Also I believe traditional trade magazine subscription lists will be replaced by the new generation online trade communities like ITSecurity.com or Times of Virtualization.
November 14th, 2009 at 3:06 am
It is very interesting indeed
regards
ashley beos
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October 1st, 2010 at 9:56 pm
I used to be simply browsing for related weblog posts for my project analysis and I happened to find yours. Thanks for the helpful data!
November 28th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
This is totally true. In my line of work, I have to consider some other vendors for telecom products and services. Although this is a minor concern of ours, I have in the past signed up for some free trade publications. I do browse through them sometimes, but it’s rare that I look into anything advertised there. Sometimes I do get calls from companies who have our info from the opt-in list, but I’ve already started the opting out process because 95% of the time I have no need for what they’re selling.