Sales Prospecting Lists: Rent VS. Purchase
Since marketing budgets are limited these days, many customers ask if renting a list would be a better alternative than buying a list.
When faced with the option of renting vs. buying an email marketing list there really no contest; Buy!
Buy!
Buy!
In and era of shrinking marketing budgets, the lower price tag of a rental can appear to be a reasonable avenue to deliver your value proposition to a
target audience.
However, the problem, quite simply, is that you do not own the names, the tactical data, or most importantly, the assurance that it's someone you're interested in reaching.
The result generally is between 1-2% response rates.
That means, a rented list of 1,000 names should deliver 10 responses, and little guarantee that any to all of those 10 have defined need for your product.
Furthermore, you are left without any insight as to the disposition and validity of the remaining 990 people.
There are some providers that cannot even validate how many emails were sent or delivered.
Something else to consider, is how many companies may have 'spammed' this list to begin with. It is much more difficult to differentiate your message when several other companies may have contacted the identical contacts with similar propositions.
Most list rental companies also require you to purchase a minimum of 5,000 and sometimes up to 10,000 names. That certainly doesn't make it any easier to keep costs down, and more than likely, a large percentage of that 10,000 probably doesn't fall into your target profile to begin with.
With all of that said, here is three good reasons to purchase a sales prospecting list:
1) You own the name.
As a result, you know exactly who you are targeting and you can choose to contact them through your preferred method and tools.
2) With the better vendors you can buy as many names as you need for your purposes.
That could be several thousands of names, to a select few, to one single name.
The quality of the contact and the message to be delivered drives your purchase decision, not an arbitrary number of subscribers on a price sheet.
3) The real cost is lower than the initial price tags.
These lists represent the marketplace you want to reach, educate, and nurture.
You will surely have several messages to deliver over time.
Each iteration through will make the overall cost of the list drop dramatically.
If additional budget becomes available, you will be able to expand that universe, rather than starting from scratch.