Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

Direct mail is a great technology marketing demand generation tactic. Unfortunately, not every one has a solid house list and so we often find ourselves purchasing or renting mailing lists.

There is no lack of choices when it comes to selecting a list source and by no means have we tried them all. Still, I’m beginning to wonder if anyone does a good job of providing all of the following:

• Accurate and up-to-date information. This one is pretty obvious. People change jobs fairly frequently and a list that’s a year old can give you a lot of returned mail.
• People with titles we actually requested and none that we didn’t request. For example, we recently purchased a list for one of our clients who wanted CEOs, Presidents, owners and partners. That’s it. The list that we received contained about 40% non-relevant titles including marketing manager, CFO, and IT manager.
• Businesses in the industries we requested and none outside of that. Sometimes the businesses we get are so not what we asked for, we can’t figure out how they got on the list. The last time we purchased a list for our own marketing efforts, we requested businesses in the software and information technology industries. We got these, but we also got embroidery and imprinting firms as well as one hour photo shops.

B2B recently published the top list managers and brokers in its 2008 Marketers Resource Guide. I see both sources that supplied us with the frustrating examples above on that list.

What about the others? Does anybody know of a truly good list broker for technology marketing?

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