Purchasing email lists has been commonly associated with traditional lead generation. An email list gives you a list of people you don’t know and you contact them to build up a relationship of sorts before then trying to sell your product or service.
The purchasing of an email list is a fast (but expensive) way getting a list of potential customers who you can directly approach. After all, that is what direct marketing is all about, but many people associate email lists with spam and phishing emails. These types of email tend to cause a great deal of inconvenience to your potential customers.
The more socially accepted way of obtaining an email addresses (in the digital age) is to build your own email list. This method is widely preferred because you are encouraging your customers to join your mailing list by choice. When your customers choose to receive your emails, they will be more inclined to read your emails. That is all well and good, but will this strategy of building your email list work for all industries? Especially industries which are more catered towards to B2B businesses.
The email capturing system, via content marketing and social media, can work really well for B2C companies and to services which provide useful information for businesses. This is because these types of businesses tend to have more interactions with their customers online, so it is much easier those businesses to get their customers’ email addresses.
The above mentioned strategy is much harder for most B2B companies. Below is an example to explain why:
Let’s say; an up-and-coming logistic firm which provides transportation of goods services for different businesses. For this type of company, it will be difficult for them to consistently attract their target market online, that’s because it is not something people think about a great deal. For these types of companies, it would be beneficial for them to directly contact any perspective customers/client who would be interested in their services.
This where something like an email list would come handy, but, before purchasing your email list it important to know who your target audience is. So don’t just go out and buy a list of 10,000 contacts. Make sure that the list of companies that you buy represent your target market. You’ll be better off with a list of 200 to 300 contacts which represent your target market, because you will have a higher success rate.
Luckily for B2B companies, it is fairly easy to narrow down your target market based on the industry that you would like to work with. If you take a look at any new start-up which serves as a B2B business, most of their lead generation activities didn’t involve getting customers to sign up to their email list. They directly contacted their perspective clients and sold their services.
To conclude on deciding whether you should buy an email list or not, really depends on the nature of your business. If you are B2C business or an B2B service that provides and distributes useful information, then content marketing and email opt-in is the best way to gain emails.
For B2B companies where content marketing is not possible, then it would be a good idea to invest in an email list.