Where can I find
a good list?

This is a recurring question in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, and with good reason; with all things being equal, the quality of the list is the number one success factor of any direct marketing program. Finding a good list is not an easy task, but first you need to know what is considered a “good” list and to familiarize yourself with the world of lists so you can ask the right questions.

Before you start looking for a list

Timing is everything and all too often leads fall out of the sales funnel due to issues with budget or timing. While you cannot predict when those leads will be ready to buy, you can maintain top of mind awareness by providing them meaningful content on a regular basis.

Just like the farmer who needs to water each seed every week, never missing a week, your communication strategy needs regularity and consistency. That is often easier said than done when you have limited marketing resources or when your marketing department is already juggling with multiple high priority projects.

Affordable turnkey lead nurturing programs

Every company has good and bad clients, and a good list is first and foremost one that helps you discover more good clients. It is therefore a good idea to start by defining your ideal customer profile.

In a perfect world, you should know your client’s lifetime value, which is the profit a loyal customer will generate for your organization during his or her lifetime. The ideal client is of course the one that has the highest value. The truth is very few organizations know the lifetime value of their customers and they often have their own definition of an ideal customer. For some organizations, the ideal customer is any customer who has a profit margin higher than 50%; for others, it may be a client that has a lower profit margin but is more loyal. Regardless of what your definition is, the whole idea is to analyze your ideal customers to identify some of their common characteristics in order to look for prospects that present those very characteristics.1

First, you should identify their demographic characteristics. In the B2B world, this means the revenue levels, number of employees, industry if possible by industry code, company creation date, etc. Second, identify their geographic characteristics such as country, province or state, city, etc. Lastly, you should focus on their behavioral characteristics. This is more difficult but also much more interesting. For example, if your organization offers CRM solutions, you may have noticed that your best customers are clients who have their own call centre. Depending on the number of characteristics you have, you may decide to rate each of them based on their relative importance.

You should have a much better idea of the type of list you are looking for simply by collecting this type of information. Now the question is, can you find a list that meets all those selection criteria?

Types of lists

You can typically find on the market two types of lists: the compiled lists, including the mega databases, and the response lists.
Compiled lists, as their name indicates, result from the compilation of several files such as directories or different databases. They can give you a good idea of the size of your market. In Canada, examples of such lists include Profile Canada, Scott’s Masterfile, or Who’s Who.

Response lists include the names and contact information of people who previously responded to an offer. In Quebec, you may find the list of subscribers to Les Affaires or Direction Informatique. Since those people have already responded to a previous offer, these types of list tend to provide better response rates than the profiled lists.

You can easily rent or buy phone and address lists, but it is a different story for email lists because of the anti-spam regulation. See Legal Considerations.

Legal considerations

You have to be extra careful when you are dealing with email lists because the law varies greatly from one country to another or even from one state to another. For example, in 2003 the United States Congress passed the anti-spam law, ironically called the CAN-SPAN Act, which basically requires senders to provide an opt-out mechanism, so that the recipient can unsubscribe from any future commercial messagesa. The Californian law, on the other hand, is much more restrictive and requires subscribers to opt-in before sending even the first communicationb.

In Canada, the Government introduced the Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECPA) in April 2009. If this law comes into effect, then commercial emails can only be sent to a recipient who has consented to receiving them (expressed or implied), and the message must comply with certain rules such as clearly identifying the sender’s name and physical postal address, and providing an unsubscribe mechanismc. This proposed legislation would also treat unsolicited text messages (“cell phone spam”)d and possibly even commercial messages sent over social networks like LinkedIn. It is therefore extremely important to ask any email-list vendor how its email list was compiled, to make sure you will comply with the law as you use the list.

List owners and other intermediaries

If you know precisely what you are looking for, you can contact a publication or industry association directly and request to buy or rent their subscriber or member lists. You should know, however, that when you rent a list, you do not own it. This list is lent to you – usually for a one-time use – and it is only once someone has responded to your communication that his or her name becomes yours. It is important to take this restriction seriously because most list owners include dummy names in their list, just to ensure you are complying with their contract terms. What's more, when you rent a list, especially an email list, the communication may actually be sent on your behalf, meaning that you will never actually see the list. Beware, also, that most list owners will require a copy of your email, letter or telemarketing script before sending you their list.

You may think that all these conditions are too restrictive, but they also help you gauge the quality of a list. In fact, this is how you know the list owner cares about the future of his or her list, and wants to avoid what is called “list fatigue,” a phenomenon that typically occurs when the list is overused and no longer produces the expected response rate. As a result, the list value diminishes greatly. Generally speaking, you should beware of list owners who are willing to send you their lists without inquiring how you intend to use them. It only shows they do not really care about the quality of their list.

Since all list owners do not have the necessary infrastructure to manage their list business, many of them prefer to contract it out to list brokers, such as Cornerstone, so you may only buy or rent certain lists if you go through them.

That said, there are many advantages to dealing with a list broker. First of all, they know how lists work. After all, it’s their business. They can recommend the best lists to meet your needs. They will also provide you with datasheets that help you compare costs, terms and conditions; and since they already have a relationship with the list owner, they will negotiate with the list owner on your behalf. This can save you an enormous amount of time if you intend to buy many lists. Moreover, many list brokers now offer the same services as a service bureau, such as address validation and automatic address correction, list merging and deduplication services, etc., which can significantly reduce your mailing costs.

Another way to find lists is by contacting a direct marketing agency. They often buy or rent lists on behalf of their clients, so they usually know which lists can give you an acceptable response rate. It is an interesting option because most organizations cannot afford to test as many lists as agencies. Moreover, an agency will try to find out how the list search fits with your overall marketing strategy. For example, some clients want to find lists to enrich their internal database, others hope to generate some immediate sales. If the marketing agency knows your target market fairly well, it should be able to suggest some list names that would meet your needs.2

Other ways to find lists

Luckily buying or renting a list is not the only way to find one. It all depends on the size of your marketing campaign. If your mailing size exceeds 30,000 impressions Canada-wide, chances are you will need at least four or five lists, so working with a list broker or marketing agency will probably make your life much easier. If, however, you have a highly targeted marketing campaign, you may not have enough names to buy a list because the minimum order for most list owners is usually 5,000 names.

You can then explore other possibilities such as co-marketing, which is particularly interesting if you have an agreement with a business partner who has the same target market as you but offers complementary products/services.

You could also explore your options with social media, in particular with LinkedIn or Twitter. While you may not obtain a list per say, you may be able to communicate your message to a more qualified audience, at a much lower cost. This option is particularly interesting if your ideal customer profile identified that your ideal prospects are members of a professional or industry association.

Last but not least, if you think that people who look alike think alike, your best chance of finding good prospects may be to systematically ask referrals from your good clients. While you will probably obtain much fewer names than with a traditional direct marketing program, the sales conversion rate of a referral is much higher, so the net sales that come out of it may actually be more, and at a much lower cost.

Evaluating the list performance

In order to determine whether a list is good or not, you need to establish key performance metrics that go beyond the simple response rate and compare your results with a control group. As you do so, you may realize that even with a low response rate, simply communicating your message to a test group has a positive effect on sales. But the only way to measure it for certain is by comparing the revenue from your test and control groups.3

Conclusion

After all these considerations you may come to the conclusion that the best way to find a list is to build your own strategic database. In the long run, it is probably the best solution because your database is unique, and can even become a formidable competitive advantage. But you will also realize that it takes more than a good list to find more good clients. It requires a communication strategy based on a thorough understanding of what motivates and interests your prospects and clients. That said, you have probably noticed that the organizations who relentlessly invest the necessary efforts in developing their own strategic database rarely wonder where to find a good list.

1. Jantsch, John. (2006) Duct Tape Marketing, pp 3-8, Nelson Business.

2. Viva, Pierre and Hosti Sébastien for Actimail Group, “Élaborer un plan fichiers efficace”, octobre 2007.

3. Hughes, Arthur M. (2006) Strategic Database Marketing, page 44, McGraw-Hill.