Leads, leads, leads!

There are a number of places that will sell business leads from data they’ve compiled, crawled or crowd-sourced. How great is that? Anyone can buy a list of targeted business information to use to further their business goals! Awesome! Great! Step right up and get your lead here!
But how accurate is that information really?
One of the bigger companies, which allows for public searches, is Zoominfo. I did some lookups recently just to see what their data is like. My conclusion? If the data they have on me is any indication of the overall accuracy of their data, companies are way better off just setting light to a pile of money in their parking lot instead of giving it to Zoominfo.
Let’s look at the data they have on me. When you go to their homepage and enter my name in, you get about 2 dozen profiles. Looking through them, there are a number that describe me.
Laura Atkins; MCRS rep. Fair enough, I do mention MCRS on a few of my webpages and was recently on their board of directors. What I can’t figure out is why they think the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society is run out the Chesterfield County Business Development office. The MCRS is neither a business nor is it located in the state of Virginia. It’s not even located in the same time zone as Virginia. Strike 1 for Zoominfo.
Laura T. Atkins; Founding Partner. This one is the reference that is most clearly me. Zoominfo claims this information was “community contributed.” OK, so someone uploaded their address book and my name and contact info was in it. But they have my company listed as simply “Word.” Sure, Zoominfo went and scraped a bunch of info off our website, but that isn’t reflected in the actual listing. Strike 2 for Zoominfo.
Laura Atkins; Spamtacular. This one is one of my favorites. I’m listed as associated with Spamtacular. Spamtacular is a blog run by my former co-worker Mickey Chandler. Mickey’s currently working for a major ESP, but he blogs about email, spam and delivery under the Spamtacular.com domain. And, in fact, the “association” is that he lists me as part of the Spamtacular blogroll. But Zoominfo claims they have an email address and phone number for me associated with Spamtacular. According to Mickey, Zoominfo have repeatedly attempted to mail laura at spamtacular. It’s not just my email address they’ve pulled out of nether orifices, though. The Spamtacular corporate information is, if anything, more inaccurate than the MCRS data. Spamtacular is not and has never been registered anywhere near the state of California.  Strike 3 for Zoominfo.
But wait! Just because they’ve struck out doesn’t mean they’re going to stop swinging or walk off the field.
Laura Atkins; Context Magazine. I did an interview with Context Magazine back in 2002, and Zoominfo claims they have a phone number for me. I suspect this is not my phone number, but, rather, is the main number for Context Magazine.
There are a couple of other, less interesting profiles for me: Spamcon Foundation, Deliverability.com. All are demonstrably me, but with no real contact information it’s not going to help anyone get in touch with me.
I have to admit, I’m actually surprised at just how totally inaccurate the data about me is. I’m not that hard to find. Zoominfo has 6 listings I can clearly identify as me. In those 6 listings:

  • Not a single listing gets my contact information correct.
  • Not a single listing gets my employer correct.
  • Three of the listings identify me as working for different companies.
  • I’ve never worked for any of those companies.
  • One of the “companies” is a non-profit I volunteer with.
  • One of the companies is a blog written by a colleague.
  • One of those companies is a now defunct magazine that published an interview with me.

But the failure in data collection is not just in the area of collecting personal data. Their corporate information is even worse. Zoominfo has linked me with four companies. In those 4 listings:

  • Zoominfo incorrectly identifies The Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society as headquartered in Virginia.
  • Zoominfo incorrectly identifies Spamtacular as located in California.
  • Zoominfo identifies Context Magazine as a viable company.
  • Zoominfo identifies me as the “founding partner” of a company called Word.

Total strikeout for Zoominfo.
 
 

Related Posts

Email Change of Address

How many readers have ever submitted an email change of address form? How many readers even know where to go to submit an email change of address form?
And I’m not talking about going to a particular retailer and saying “change my email address” I’m talking about using one of the companies that offer email change of address as a service. Where do they get their names and email addresses? I sure don’t know.
How many readers have actually purchased an email change of address service for one of your mailing lists? Do you know where the addresses came from?
I’m wondering how many people buy email change of address services, but have zero clue how to sign up for them. I mean, I know, you can go to FreshAddress or Experian and get ECOA services. But I don’t know how to tell either of them that I want to be included in their ECOA services.
So how do consumers get to be on a change of address list? And how opt-in is their participation?
One reason I ask is that a number of my clients have stumbled into serious delivery problems recently. Investigation generally points back to the ECOA service they used. So I’m wondering how actively and knowingly consumers are using ECOA services.
 

Read More

Costs and accounting for email

The decision by Cheetahmail to stop allowing customers to use email append caused a very long discussion on some of the marketing lists.  One of the criticisms had to do with what a dumb “business decision” Cheetah was making.
I disagree. Appending, and other non-permission based sending cause a lot of costs to trickle down on the ESP. Many of the large ESPs have teams of 8 or 10 people working to manage delivery, deal with blocks and keep the mail flowing. In fact, I once had a client say “We want to be as clean as ExactTarget” only to choke when I told them how many people are on the compliance and delivery team at ET.
That’s not even looking at the cost of a SBL listing. One company estimated the cost of a slightly less than 24 hour block at over $1,000,000 in lost opportunity costs and in actual staff costs to deal with the listing. I know of one Fortune 20 company who had to re-engineer their entire customer and prospect databases due to a blocklist. And, yeah, that one was actually due to an append. They did an append and the append not only added a “new” address to a record where the person had previously opted out, but that person worked at a major spam filtering company. They experienced a whole world of very expensive pain.
Many ESPs are actually making a sound business decision by refusing to deal with non-permission mail, whether it be a purchased list or an appended list. The sender does not have permission to send to the addresses. That causes all sorts of delivery problems, which costs the ESPs lots of money and staff time to deal with. Most marketers won’t actually pay for the resources they use when appending or buying lists. Then they blame the ESP when their mail ends up in the bulk folder or is blocked outright.
I don’t think many marketers fully integrate the cost of dealing with a poor list into their decisions. My tweet from earlier today “If you have to “ignore all the costs associated with complaints” to find a positive ROI on opt-out mail, is there really a positive ROI? is a paraphrase of one of the things I heard.
ESPs can’t avoid those costs, they’re stuck with them. Lowering those costs by requiring senders to only send to recipients who have given permission is a smart business decision. Marketers don’t pay those costs, but if they even acknowledged them I suspect that there would be a whole lot less sloppy email marketing.

Read More

MAAWG and email appending

In today’s Magill Report Ken says:

The only surprise in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group’s statement last week condemning email appending was that it didn’t publish one sooner.
However, MAAWG’s implication that email appending can’t be accomplished without spamming is nonsense.

Read More