Lead List Purchase: Is it worth it?

[Anonymous]

Hi, everyone! My company is thinking of purchasing a lead list for professionals in the retail industry to expand our database. My questions to y'all are:

1. It sounds like with pretty much all lead lists, it's a bad idea to just add them to your Marketo database and start sending away because of bad data and spam traps, so it's a better idea to use another email delivery service to try to get people on this list to opt in. Has anyone found success with this?
2. If this is the only way to get your purchased leads into your Marketo database, is it even worth it?
3. Does anyone have a recommendation for a vendor? We're specifically looking for a list for retail.

Thanks, guys!

Marcie

[Anonymous]

Marcie,

That seems to be the best practice that everyone recommends. I find that Jigsaw (owned by Salesforce) is a more reputable source for lists. I would send the cold lists via external provider like Constant Contact, then only add the respondents into Marketo.

I know, I know...it is bad to buy lists but sometimes it's a necessary evil to expand your database. Just be mindful of your bounces and unsubscribes.

[Anonymous]

I just don't think it works.. From what I've seen, the ROI on purchased lists is so low. I see much more success having others send me email to their database, than me purchasing theirs.

But I'm with ben, if you do purchase, send out the first email with a cheap service, like mail chimp, so you don't wreck your Marketo reputation. Then if they convert on your form, they'll be auto-entered into Marketo.

[Anonymous]

So there are services out there where you can send an email to someone else's database? Is that similar to renting lists?

[Anonymous]

So what I see is that when you work with a 3rd party. If you produce a Marketo email, then provide the HTML to them. They will send it to their database, the members click through to your landing page and once they fill out the form you gain them to your database. There are lots of different vendors for this type of process, but my suggestion is to target industry thought-leaders with great databases themselves. 

My company works in the facilities management sphere, so we do partnerships with IFMA, the American FM research organisation. So when we partner with them and they send out our emails to their database, we find we get much more qualified hot leads than using something like GooglePPC or any sort of cold list purchase.

Hope that helps!