Whether for retention, cross-sell or acquisition use, marketing’s appetite for email shows no signs of abating, and b2b is no exception. High usage means the risk of list fatigue and data owners are employing both on- and offline collection channels to increase the volume of b2b emails on the market. How are they doing?

Limited supply

“Email continues to grow,” says Mary Miller, Global Director of Marketing at Mardev DM2. “The majority of b2b marketers still expect to increase their email budget and we are growing the number of emails we hold to keep up with demand.”

Different varieties of email address are for sale in the UK market. At the bottom are the general enquiry addresses (info@) copied from a website with no further verification. At the top are double-opt-in named addresses (ron.jones@...) that will hopefully go straight to a senior decisionmaker’s inbox. In between there are various combinations of email address plus collection and verification methods that greatly affect the results that a list may deliver.

“Personal emails for decisionmakers are very important,” says Steve Cook, Leader of D&B UK’s Sales & Marketing Solutions. “It’s the individual, not the organisation that buys. The sales process in b2b is far more personal than in b2c, and the decisionmaking unit is changing all the time.”

Finding those extra emails to satisfy demand while keeping up response and a good proportion of named addresses is the challenge. Mardev doesn’t collect email addresses directly, taking them from parent company Reed’s publishing operation as well as from various partners, so it’s about encouraging the company’s partners to deliver more verified email addresses.

How emails are collected is very relevant, potentially indicating the seniority and value of the contact (do marketing directors really hand over the their contacts to a online-only data collector with only the vague hope of winning an iPod to attract them?) as well as how likely a list is to be legally compliant for marketing use.

D&B’s approach to email collection is split between its own efforts and those of its partners. The company continually collects and refreshes the details of the top 100,000 UK companies through teleresearch, while pulling in other data from a mixture of partner national files and niche email lists. According to Cook, this results in over one million personal emails on D&B’s main file.

At Corpdata, “65% of our file has email,” according to technical director Dave Smith. “We’re one of the few that do release email addresses to clients and there’s a strong demand for both rental and tagging.”

In detail, this means that of the 583,984 contact names of decision makers the company has available, 65% (377,086) have an email address. Of the 377,086, 40% (151,341) have named email addresses and the remaining 60% (225,745) have generic addresses.

The company only uses teleresearch to collect its data, with an average record age of 94 days across its UK file. Teleresearch is also the method used at Market Location, where business development director Nick Washbourne notes the company spends around, “£1.75 million annually”, on refreshing the database.

All email data is collected over the phone and then verified on a double opt-in basis. A deal with BT to gather directory enquiry information helps with those research costs, as does synchronising client teleresearch with Market Location’s own ongoing verification.

“We want to align our client’s marketing strategies to our call centres,” explains Washbourne. “We prioritise clients’ calls and feed the changes through to them.”

Though double opt-in remains best practice, b2b email contacts are not covered by the strict legislation that governs consumers’ personal email addresses, unless the organisation concerned is a partnership or sole trader. In practice, this means that many emails are still collected by companies “scraping” the web for contacts.

Scraping simply means copying email addresses from contact pages, discussion forums and other website pages rather than using teleresearch or other survey techniques. Most data owners will then verify that those emails exist by “pinging” them, while some will go as far as sending an email to the address and offering the recipient the chance to opt-out.

“Email collected via web spiders tends to get high bounces if not validated and verified, but it has its place,” notes Emma Sanders, head of data planning at Information Arts.

The use of social media and bespoke websites to collect contact data – and so build a prospect database – is growing fast amongst both data owners and companies, with marketing service providers (MSPs) helping their clients populate those empty email fields on their database. For instance, b2b gurus Information Arts has developed a acquisition database-building service and gathers data for clients via specialist websites designed to attract specific people like IT managers.

“We collect emails from the web using microsites but it’s for clients, not for us to resell,” explains Sanders. “It tends to be where data is not available commercially. Bespoke teleresearch also works well. It’s not cheap, but when you are upfront with people you get a surprisingly good return.”

Then there are the US b2b databases that solicit data from anonymous contributors rather than using teleresearch. US data owner Jigsaw (sold to salesforce.com last year for $142 million) is the highest profile data sales operation to employ this “crowdsourcing” data collection model. Members upload b2b contact data in exchange for points, which can then be “spent” to download other records, or records can simply be paid for as normal. Members can also gain points by correcting errors or updating records when they revisit the site.

Jigsaw’s US data is used by many UK service providers planning US campaigns for their clients. For example, D&B subsidiary Hoovers resells Jigsaw data via its ConnectMail service. Though the company has no conventional list sales operation in the UK, a count on their database reveals 659,130 UK contacts listed.

Jigsaw does sell UK b2b data via its website and also via salesforce.com: it’s possible to download UK b2b records individually or as a list, though there appears to be a 10,000 record limit on online list sales.

Fellow crowdsourcing data provider Netprospex makes much of its Clenestep verification procedures which it claims is “a combination of proprietary technology and live phone verification”, but its site only offers American and Canadian data.

LinkedIn is another well-known online operation where it’s possible to pursue individual b2b contacts, but offers no list purchase options. Other players in the online-only sourcing game include ZoomInfo which uses a mixture of web scrapers, member submissions and links to affiliate data owners like Intelius to build its database. A query on its site for all UK records returned a result of “over 1m records available”.

Insatiable demand in the b2b email market is no surprise when email is still largely seen as a cheap blast medium. Email volumes are at an all-time high, and some companies may be going too far with opt-out rates reportedly increasing due to over-contact.

“We have frequency controls built into our system,” notes Mardev’s Miller. “We’re very careful about rental frequency to maintain responsiveness and freshness.”

Part of the trouble is that email works far better in some b2b sectors than others, yet many companies continue to hammer out blanket campaigns and accept poor results simply because the delivery medium is so cheap. To improve matters, Corpdata works with its subsidiary Credible Data to provide live email updates, often on a daily basis, while Credible also consults on building in-house collection strategies for clients.

“We’re trying to get people to behave ethically and build their own lists, otherwise we’ll see widespread data fatigue,” says Smith, who says that Corpdata has stopped email broadcasting for clients. “We predict the downturn of email as an acquisition medium. People are getting pretty jaundiced with it, though it does depend what you are selling and who to.”

As well as high demand for solus lists, Sanders points to the fact that popular email lists are matched and tagged to many other national b2b databases, so the risk of list burnout is high. “A popular email file like emailmovers has around 700,000 records but covering the b2b market would need at least four times that volume,” she says. “The difficult of collecting a sufficient volume of compliant emails means that most email lists are overused.”

One way to get more from email and also to spread the load somewhat is to employ multiple channels. Steve Kemish, director at b2b specialist agency Cyance, says, “Email doesn’t get the results it used to. Multiple contacts to one individual are essential and you need a contact programme where you give the recipient something of perceived value to get data back from them.”

All vendors say a good number of clients ask for lists with multichannel contacts, intending to use the telephone number and mailing address alongside the email, but many of them will only ever use one channel in a campaign. It’s impossible for the vendor to know.

One reason for this is that many b2b marketers simply don’t have the resources to plan and support multichannel work operationally. “It requires some clever organisation which tends to favour larger companies,” says Washbourne.

This means that while most know that multichannel campaigns deliver better results, case study examples are thin on the ground. One great piece of multichannel campaigning work comes from Sodexo Prestige, working with Cyance (see panel).

In another example, client PHS takes a feed of change data from Market Location’s call centre and uses it to drive its mailing programme, which is then followed up with email.

“The biggest impact comes from using recently-researched records,” explains Washbourne. “Their response rate has gone from 2.5% to 4.2% over the past year.”

Buyer beware

Whether sourced online or off, those buying email data just have to remember that caveat emptor applies in spades and to follow the standard guidelines: how was the list collected? Is it legally compliant? What’s the average recency? What’s the policy on refunding bounced addresses? And top of the list: request a free sample and test it carefully before putting your order in.

“Email is very volatile data,” concludes D&B’s Cook. “We test ours on at least a quarterly basis. If you are investing in a large email file, test a sample and make sure you are happy before you buy. If the seller is not prepared to give you a sample, then they don’t have any confidence in their data.”