List Buying Made Not-So-Easy

MarketingSherpa published a great little list buying guide on the same day that B2B reports a growing share for direct marketing. What neither tell you is that List Brokers   are down a quart on customer service, responsiveness and expertise especially if you're a smallish buyer.

Effective list buying isn't easy to start with. There are no uniform methods for list compilation, search or storage. Getting an apples-to-apples comparison is tough. Every broker (think: Walter Karl, DM2, infoUSA, Worldata and others) does every component task differently. Sending the same e-mail message to 3 or 4 lists requires repeating the same effort 3 or 4 times to do what ought to be a simple and transferable thing. But it hardly ever is.

Consolidation of corporate ownership has not led to consolidation of lists. It's not uncommon for you to have to deal with two brokers at the same company to buy postal and e-mail lists from the same source. And combining theses lists or adding additional filtering data to make your campaign smarter brings you into an entirely new arena of complexity and confusion.

Many of the people you'll deal with, unless you are a huge mailer with a dedicated rep, are clueless. They have no feel for the lists, even less intuition to help you target a campaign or evaluate choices and they are at the bottom rung in their organizational food chains so they will confound you with last minute issues, problems and details that often they don't even know about or can't explain.

And did I mention that they never call you back or take 36 hours to reply to e-mails?

Imagine being able to ignore or stall eager buyers with cash in hand without any consequence to your business? List brokering must be a a goldmine in this renaissance of direct marketing. But list buying is more challenging and difficult than it has to be.

Comments

[Mike Welling]

Ah, the murky world of list buying and brokering. Talk about an information product waiting to be sold! Heck, I'd be your first customer for "how to get a list broker and never get ripped off again." Whoever sells that will make a fortune!