Buying B2B Data Is The Worst Mistake You Could Make
For any B2B firm to grow, it is necessary to focus on reaching out to new clients. It is for this very reason that B2B businesses collect and store relevant data about their clients. However, most B2B companies cannot invest enormous amounts of time and money in this process. They need to concentrate on achieving core business goals as opposed to spending their time collecting data. In such a scenario, buying data in bulk amounts may seem like the most natural way out for any B2B business. Bulk data can be of any type including an email list, prospective client lists, client or company contact details, and so on.
There is no shortage of companies selling such data and records to growing as well as established companies. Moreover, when a B2B business opts to buy bulk data from such vendors, they are under the impression that business reach to prospects will improve significantly. However, in reality, this couldn’t have been any further away from the truth.
Using bulk data to support your daily business-reach efforts does more harm than benefit. In this article, let’s try and understand precisely what bulk data entails, the problems associated with it, and the alternatives to using
The Problems Associated With Bulk Data
The Overall Quality of Data
Data quality is an essential aspect to consider while buying data to support B2B marketing efforts. While many data vendors will make tall claims about how their data is the perfect match for your requirement, this is not true. Some of the most common irrelevancies observed in bulk data include –
- Incomplete Information – The email lists and data are highly susceptible to missing vital details, contact information or merely having incomplete records. Consequently, if you base your marketing campaigns on such data, the result is going to be far from desirable.
- The Decay Process – Old and outdated data is a by-product of inadequate maintenance and overall hygiene habits. Moreover, with bulk data lists, efforts to get in contact with prospects based on outdated or incorrect contact information will yield you no results.
- Being Marked as Spam – The e-mail IDs you get supplied with are most probably obtained by the vendor via the internet using illegal means. Additionally, using such kind of data brings you under the radar of the CAN-SPAM Act, ultimately leading you to get heavily penalized.
The idea of having easy access to a wealth of buyer information is enticing enough for many companies to opt for bulk data. However, keep in mind that the three scenarios mentioned above are authentic and very probable outcomes of this decision. After all, you wouldn’t want to obliterate your B2B business’ reputation in the long run, would you?
Jeopardizing Your B2B Business’s Reputation
No one likes to receive unsolicited emails. Seriously, nobody does. Of course, this holds true especially when the receiver hasn’t even subscribed to the content you are shoving down their throat. Moreover, bulk data is usually full of unintended recipients’ email addresses.
Let’s face it; email campaigns are the best way to attract and acquire new clients. This is the reason why the B2B industry relies heavily upon this marketing technique. Email marketing certainly brings in a significant number of clients for the organization. However, unless these people show interest in your services and offerings, they won’t help generate any revenue.
How to Find the Most Interested People
Purchased data and e-mail lists include contact details of all kinds of people. This means that someone who is highly interested in your B2B business, as well as someone who has no interest in what you’re offering, maybe on the list. A more significant chunk of contacts and records included in such lists will be collected randomly from the internet. Additionally, there are no steps taken to ensure that these people are the right prospects for your B2B business.
Imagine what happens when the uninterested of the lot receives your B2B marketing emails and promotions. Most probably, they are just going to delete it at first. But when they start receiving these emails incessantly, they have very little reason not to mark you as SPAM.
Being marked as SPAM affects your business in two ways. The unintended recipients on your list will view you and your B2B business as frauds. Secondly, owing to the bulk SPAM flagging of your emails, service providers will begin to see you in a less-than-favorable light. Once your emails cross the SPAM threshold of the service provider, they will take stringent action against your email campaigns. You may also face legal penalties as proposed by the notorious CAN-SPAM act. They may even permanently close your email account for which you may have paid a hefty amount. Basically, there is a lot to lose and very little to gain.
You Can’t Be The First!
Data suppliers often cater to multiple organizations within the same B2B industry. They usually pre-sort and finalize the list and data for ready availability. This holds true for all sorts of industries. So, when you opt for bulk B2B data from a data supplier like this, you’re most likely to end up with data that your competition has already used.
This poses a significant threat to your B2B business’s reputation. When your unintended contacts receive your marketing communication, the way your organization is viewed will change. Eventually, word will spread about how you’re attempting to grow revenue through purchased data solutions. This, in turn, affects the ROI you likely assume through newly acquired lead data. Apart from this, your marketing team might end up wasting resources in contacting prospects who are already your competitor’s customers. If these contacts are already satisfied with the services provided by the other companies, they are surely going to filter out your marketing campaign efforts to stay undistracted.
Lowest Possible Response Rates
Most of the records on a bulk database will be filled with outdated, incorrect, or irrelevant information. Consequently, this brings in a very low and ROI. The average open rate for e-mail campaigns is 20-25% when the targeted audience is highly interested and ready to buy. However, it drops significantly when the unintended recipients get targeted based on the use of purchased data.
When the open rates for your campaign are too small, there is little possibility of gaining any response from the audience. As a result, it all boils down to the ultimate fact that your campaigns and sales efforts are going to vanish in vain painfully.
Bad B2B Business Growth Tactic
B2B businesses rely heavily on online marketing and sales efforts in today’s internet-fuelled world. No doubt, these online marketing, and data acquisition tactics pay in the long term. However, if kept unchecked, they may also come back to harm your business.
Most B2B business analysts condemn every aspect of buying the data in bulk. It neither offers a stable ROI nor improved sales. It is also harmful to the brand’s public perception. Most of the B2B business bloggers and forums equally oppose the practice of buying B2B data.
The B2B Data You Need For Growth
All the five points I explained above are valid and hold true from the B2B perspective.
You can’t deny how necessary data is to B2B start-ups as well as established organizations. Otherwise, how else will you be able to contact your target audience and grow your business? Good quality data is an asset for B2B companies. But this B2B data must be sourced from a reliable vendor with a good reputation.
Investing in the right data vendor can pay off multi-fold in the long run. Furthermore, the right database for any B2B organization is one that has correct, relevant, complete information about people who are most likely to avail of your services. You require a highly detailed, meticulously researched, and adequately sorted list of contacts with information about all the factors you need to offer perfect solutions to people’s problems.
With the right data, driving your sales effort becomes a more efficient process. Your marketing team can create more realistic customer profiles and supply them with relevant and highly personalized marketing content. All the B2B data or the e-mail list is highly focused on procuring and sorting to match your business’s exact requirements. Not to mention, such heavily customized data boosts your sales and ultimately improves your ROI.
Why You Should Try Manual Data Mining for your B2B Data Requirements
The term Manual Data Mining stands for the data mined or researched, as and when required. It means that when your B2B firm is in need of prospective clients, the relevant B2B data gets examined manually (using various specialized tools to authenticate the data validity). The information that is unearthed in such a fashion is highly relevant, accurate, and customized for your specific industry.
Manual data mining has the added benefit of providing you with records and contacts that are fresh. The contacts and prospective clients included in such B2B databases are sorted on the basis of critical attributes such as industry, job title, and geographic location, etc.
Freshly mining and researching B2B data comes with the quality of being to the point. Let’s say you want specific job titles in a particular industry. Or perhaps the decision-makers of those companies are your focus this quarter. Either of these and more can be easily achieved using Manual Data Mining Service.
Like any other commodity, data gets old and outdated with the passage of time. This happens naturally as a result of job changes, relocations, promotions, hiring, firing, and so on. A recent study by Forrester assumes that data decays at a constant rate of about 6%-7% every month.
The same study reveals many scary aspects of B2B data that have been stored for longer durations to be utilized in the future. It also sheds light on the bulk B2B data being purchased by many B2B firms. As data vendors collect and store data to sell to various clients, the accumulated data gets old gradually. By the time it reaches you, it is already past its ‘best-before’ date. This discrepancy leads to failed online B2B sales efforts and poor response rates for e-mail marketing campaigns.
BizProspex– The only Manual B2B Data Mining/Cleaning firm
BizProspex is the only manual data mining and cleaning company that is based in the USA. Additionally, our organization excels in all kinds of data mining and cleaning services including all B2B data-related tasks. We are one of the only companies that make use of manual techniques to bring fresh, highly accurate, and fool-proof information. Moreover, we mine data that resonates with your specific B2B data requirements.
This accurate data is a proven asset to any marketing efforts your B2B organization undertakes. However, when it comes to reaching out to specific contacts and decision-makers, you’re in a better position with manually mined data. Ultimately, you’ll close more deals with a high-quality database with reduced efforts and resources. Better the data, the higher the chances of improving the overall ROI.
Try Manual Data Mining/Cleaning services offered by BizProspex to attain high conversion rates.
BizProspex offers you a 120% Money Back Guarantee. This means that if you are not satisfied with our work or the data proves to be irrelevant; we will gladly refund you the money along with an additional ‘20%’ for any inconvenience you may have faced. We also provide free samples of the B2B data you are looking for free of charge!
Visit BizProspex’s Quora Knowledge Base to know more about our data mining and research methods.
To know more about Manual Data Mining/Cleaning and our work ethics, please go through the links provided below.