Despite what everyone would like, outbound marketing continues to take the lion’s share of most organisations marketing budget. Television, display and print are expensive -but necessary- channels so direct email messages continue to return the most ‘bang for your buck’. In the olden days, marketers would broadcast their offers via ‘land mail’ and hope that 2% of the audience would convert. Today we have the opportunity to tailor our messages on the fly and segment our target groups accordingly. In an ideal world, prospects would read all the messages that they received and store your brand’s message in their brain until they were ready to make a purchase. Unfortunately all of us receive hundreds of marketing ‘nudges’ every day and we simply filter them out of our organic hard drives like irritating background noise. To get around this problem the industry lusts after opt-in email lists. People’s contact information that have expressed an explicit interest in your product or service. Sounds good? Unfortunately not as most ‘leads’ are gathered in a fundamentally underhand way. We have all seen the little tick box that says “un-tick if you don’t want to be contacted by carefully screened offers etc…” and you know in your heart that once your info is out there it will be sold to whomever comes up with the cash! This is totally counterproductive and weakens what is in theory a robust model. There is nothing inherently wrong with buying a list of leads of people who are INTERESTED in what you have to offer, the trick is making sure that they are genuinely interested and opted in… So, here are some points to bear in mind when purchasing email leads. 1. Are you certain of the source that has been used to gather these leads? If a vendor is vague about where they have come from then steer well clear. 2. How many organisations have these leads? Fundamentally it’s not a problem if the same lead gets messages from multiple companies as long as it’s an area of ‘expressed’ interest. 3. Cost. If the leads are cheap then they are probably low grade. Remember “you buy cheap, you buy twice”. Any Fred in the shed can add a margin and sell you old data. 4. Consider working with your lead generation folks to build an exclusive offer and feed, then all the leads will be yours and yours alone. 5. Push for a relevant, honest welcome email (click here to validate and receive our offer/ newsletter/ discount) that way you can gather double opt-in leads that will give you a far greater ROI Have we dispelled the myth yet? Maybe. You want to get your message out there and you are prepared to pay for lists of interested potential customers. Just make sure that they are really interested! If you have to dig a little deeper or pay a little more for the right opt-in leads then so be it, your ROI will speak volumes.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 08:57:38 +0000
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