Certified Leads

[JasonG681]

How do you acquire a book of business or a database of certified leads?

[Abigail_S]

@ACTIVATE @MelanieDiehl Can either of you jump in on this to help?

[ACTIVATE]

Hi Jason, great question! There are many companies offering lists for sale, and most of them are not at all good quality or current, so I would be very careful to qualify the source... Whenever I need to gather contact data for sales purposes for other businesses, I use Reference USA which is free through your library and can be accessed online from anywhere.

The next question to ask is, what is the intent with the contact info/list of contacts? If you are going to cold market to them manually (manual emails, phone calls, etc) that's one thing (and not fun if you ask me, from experience). But if your intent is to market to them using Constant Contact or a marketing platform that is not something you want to do. Not only does the FCC have guidelines about bulk marketing being permission-based, most trustworthy platforms like Constant Contact are not prepared to handle cold non-permission-based lists as it violates the rules and best practices. In the end, not bulk marketing to strangers works out for the best in results as well - cold marketing to strangers from a purchased list without any reference point generally gets very poor results in the first place. Permission based marketing is the way to go. This means folks are opting into your email list, your marketing database, and a relationship can be built with them. This is done through outreach, events, networking, business groups, social media, and crucially, your website. Your website should be set up to have embedded forms in strategic places as well as popups and engaging interactive forms that offer great value in exchange for their email. This way your database is comprised of members who know they are on your list and enjoy it! Your results with this approach will be night and day.