On average, emails sent as part of a digital marketing campaign have an open rate of only 21%. Four out of five emails sent will be deleted or marked as spam before being opened. It’s safe to say, no new business is coming from those “not this time” clients. At the end of 2019, MailChimp compiled results from billions of emails sent by their platform and reported the 21% open rate, but even worse, a 2.62% click rate. For every 100 emails sent, 97 failed to result in a single click to your website.
Some steps can be taken to improve the success of your email marketing campaigns. The first is to maintain a list of emails you acquire through interactions with potential clients. Your list will grow, but very slowly. Another step is to ensure that any email list you are using is of the highest quality. It needs to be new data, verified when possible.
Business emails are available through a variety of sources. Most will be built by companies specializing in the collection and distribution of data sets. When acquiring and using data from any source, you will need to do your due diligence to verify the data or know that your supplier has already done so.
8 Business Email Sources
Data Axle
Data Axle is in the business of gathering and selling data. Data Axle is also known as Infogroup, among other names, all listed on their website. Data Axle reports having business data for more than 16 million verified businesses in the U.S. and Canada. With over 450 attributes, you will have no difficulty identifying business emails to support your email marketing efforts.
The Data Axle’s database includes data from Fortune 500 companies to small shops and self-employed freelancers. To select business emails with the highest probability of success, you can utilize their many data points in the search process.
Datarade
Datarade is more of a data broker than a creator or builder of databases. They have partnerships with many data suppliers and identify the best sources to meet your needs. When running a search for “business emails,” Datarade provided a long list of potential sources to supply this data.
The search’s top search result claimed, “100% Custom Human Verified Data.” The data source was Cloudlead. Clicking the link took me to the Cloudlead website, providing me the option to further pursue these data.
The Data Planet
https://www.thedataplanet.com/
Among other data sets, The Data Planet just released a 2020 version of their Yellow Pages Database. This data set includes business email addresses. Since Yellow Pages databases have business location information (i.e., zip code, state, country, longitude, latitude), this information, attached to an email address, can lend to more targeted delivery and possibly higher open rates.
Mailinglists
MailingLists has been in the business of collecting and distributing data sets for over 25 years. They specialize in demographic and psychographic data. This includes new business leads, email lists, data appends, and more. They provide data acquired by Dun and Bradstreet, a well-established source for business ratings and analytics. Mailinglists connection to Dun and Bradstreet lends credibility and quality to their products.
Gilbert Data
Gilbert Data claims to be the best B2B email list provider. They aren’t the only source claiming to be the best, but they explicitly zeroed in on the B2B email list market. You can get emails based on a job title, an executives-only list, industry-specific, or users of targeted technologies. Other supplies can also do this, but listing an “HR Executives Email List” as one of their available B2B data sets provides a sense of reliability and quality.
B2B email lists provided by Gilbert Data are guaranteed to be 100% verified with “extremely” high response rates. Following the averages, your digital marketing campaign will have a 2.62% click rate. Just doubling that would seem like a high response rate. Double it again, and that could be considered extreme.
Book Your Data
Book Your Data works a little differently than other data sources. You create your list by interactively setting your search criteria. You can see how many records were found by your search and refine it to increase or decrease the count. With this method, you can fine-tune your target group and tailor the list size to fit your budget. Book Your Data charges by the number of records found by your search. The price per email will be higher than other list suppliers, but the list’s contents will match your specific search criteria.
Knowing who your campaign targets will allow you to adjust your messaging to be more personal and relevant. You should achieve much higher open and click rates, but regardless, each click-through is more likely to result in a new client.
DatabaseUSA
DatabaseUSA is a good representative of most other data sources. They report having very sizeable amounts of data with many different data points, all “95% accurate and triple-verified.”
One item stands out from the other sources explored in this article – they claim to have over 200 million cell phone numbers “(restrictions apply).” This one item could be of great importance to your digital marketing campaign. Marketing text messages have a 98% open rate. That’s right. Nearly every text-message received is opened. This puts the 20% open rate of emails to shame.
This article covers business email data, but the text message open rate is something every digital marketer needs to know. There are strict regulations for distributing cell phone numbers. Still, when acquiring a business email list for your campaign, if you can also get a cell phone number, your success rate will skyrocket.
Leads Blue
Leads Blue is last on this list, not because the others are better sources. It is last because of the method used to sell their data. They list tiles of data sets as if they are product listings on the Amazon site. They provide steep discounts and even have a shopping cart on their website. This is an unusual way to market high-quality business data sets, but you never know until you have verified the data yourself.
Summary
When shopping for a business email data set for your next digital marketing campaign, your focus should be on quality. The goal is to increase the open and click-through rate of your email campaign. If you have acquired a quality data set, your email recipients will be a better match for the message you are delivering.
We have the data to present highly-personalized and focused messages to a very defined audience in our digital world. With reliable data from a reputable source, your email marketing campaign will be a success.