On average, emails sent as part of a digital marketing
campaign have an open rate of only 21%. Four out of five emails sent will be
deleted or marked as spam before being opened. It’s safe to say, no new
business is coming from those “not this time” clients. At the end of 2019, MailChimp
compiled results from billions of emails sent by their platform and reported
the 21% open rate, but even worse, a 2.62% click rate. For every 100 emails
sent, 97 failed to result in a single click to your website.
Some steps can be taken to improve the success of your email
marketing campaigns. The first is to maintain a list of emails you
acquire through interactions with potential clients. Your list will grow, but
very slowly. Another step is to ensure that any email list you are using is of
the highest quality. It needs to be new data, verified when possible.
Business emails are available through a variety of sources.
Most will be built by companies specializing in the collection and distribution
of data sets. When acquiring and using data from any source, you will need to
do your due diligence to verify the data or know that your supplier has already
done so.
8 Business Email Sources
Data Axle
https://www.data-axle.com/
Data Axle is in the business of gathering and selling data.
Data Axle is also known as Infogroup, among other names, all listed on their
website. Data Axle reports having business data for more than 16 million
verified businesses in the U.S. and Canada. With over 450 attributes, you will
have no difficulty identifying business emails to support your email marketing
efforts.
The Data Axle’s database includes data from Fortune 500
companies to small shops and self-employed freelancers. To select business
emails with the highest probability of success, you can utilize their many data
points in the search process.
Datarade
https://datarade.ai/
Datarade is more of a data broker than a creator or builder
of databases. They have partnerships with many data suppliers and identify the
best sources to meet your needs. When running a search for “business emails,”
Datarade provided a long list of potential sources to supply this data.
The search’s top search result claimed, “100% Custom Human
Verified Data.” The data source was Cloudlead. Clicking the link took me to the
Cloudlead website, providing me the option to further pursue these data.
The Data Planet
https://www.thedataplanet.com/
Among other data sets, The Data Planet just released a 2020 version of their Yellow Pages Database. This data set includes business email addresses. Since Yellow Pages databases have business location information (i.e., zip code, state, country, longitude, latitude), this information, attached to an email address, can lend to more targeted delivery and possibly higher open rates.
Mailinglists
https://mailinglist.com/
MailingLists has been in the business of collecting and
distributing data sets for over 25 years. They specialize in demographic and
psychographic data. This includes new business leads, email lists, data
appends, and more. They provide data acquired by Dun and Bradstreet, a
well-established source for business ratings and analytics. Mailinglists
connection to Dun and Bradstreet lends credibility and quality to their
products.
Gilbert Data
https://gilbertdb.com/
Gilbert Data claims to be the best B2B email list provider.
They aren’t the only source claiming to be the best, but they explicitly zeroed
in on the B2B email list market. You can get emails based on a job title, an
executives-only list, industry-specific, or users of targeted technologies.
Other supplies can also do this, but listing an “HR Executives Email List” as
one of their available B2B data sets provides a sense of reliability and quality.
B2B email lists provided by Gilbert Data are guaranteed to
be 100% verified with “extremely” high response rates. Following the averages,
your digital marketing campaign will have a 2.62% click rate. Just doubling
that would seem like a high response rate. Double it again, and that could
be considered extreme.
Book Your Data
https://www.bookyourdata.com/
Book Your Data works a little differently than other data
sources. You create your list by interactively setting your search criteria.
You can see how many records were found by your search and refine it to increase
or decrease the count. With this method, you can fine-tune your target group
and tailor the list size to fit your budget. Book Your Data charges by the
number of records found by your search. The price per email will be higher than
other list suppliers, but the list’s contents will match your specific search
criteria.
Knowing who your campaign targets will allow you to adjust
your messaging to be more personal and relevant. You should achieve much higher
open and click rates, but regardless, each click-through is more likely to
result in a new client.
DatabaseUSA
https://databaseusa.com/
DatabaseUSA is a good representative of most other data
sources. They report having very sizeable amounts of data with many different
data points, all “95% accurate and triple-verified.”
One item stands out from the other sources explored in this
article – they claim to have over 200 million cell phone numbers “(restrictions
apply).” This one item could be of great importance to your digital marketing
campaign. Marketing text messages have a 98% open rate. That’s right. Nearly
every text-message received is opened. This puts the 20% open rate of emails to
shame.
This article covers business email data, but the text
message open rate is something every digital marketer needs to know. There are
strict regulations for distributing cell phone numbers. Still, when acquiring a
business email list for your campaign, if you can also get a cell phone number,
your success rate will skyrocket.
Leads Blue
https://leadsblue.com/
Leads Blue is last on this list, not because the others are
better sources. It is last because of the method used to sell their data. They
list tiles of data sets as if they are product listings on the Amazon site.
They provide steep discounts and even have a shopping cart on their website.
This is an unusual way to market high-quality business data sets, but you never
know until you have verified the data yourself.
Summary
When shopping for a business email data set for your next
digital marketing campaign, your focus should be on quality. The goal is to
increase the open and click-through rate of your email campaign. If you have
acquired a quality data set, your email recipients will be a better match for
the message you are delivering.
We have the data to present highly-personalized and focused
messages to a very defined audience in our digital world. With reliable data
from a reputable source, your email marketing campaign will be a success.
