Do You Sell Email Lists? Overdeliver and Amaze Your Clients with EMMQuery

Selling email lists is fraught with difficulty. First, there are the legal implications of CAN-SPAM and more recently, GDPR.

Then, there’s the difficulty of serving the market efficiently.

Most companies that sell email lists don’t build their own: they’re middlemen, acquiring lists from multiple sources and curating them, then selling the results to their customers.

The quality of the lists they initially acquire can be questionable: the typical email list degrades relatively quickly, about 22.5% yearly. And there is a persistent problem, admittedly more prevalent among consumer than business signups, of users volunteering ‘spam’ or junk personal email addresses that they solely use for signing up to services and groups.

The finished product that’s retailed to clients is sometimes not as good as it could be, and the entire industry’s reputation suffers when bought email lists are ineffective and filled with dead email addresses, generic corporate phone numbers and out-of-date role and other records.

EMMQuery is your way of stepping out ahead of the pack, easily and quickly.

Why EMMQuery?

Most of the time, businesses hand over a fee to a list company in return for a bare-bones spreadsheet. They get names (often incomplete), email addresses (often defunct) and — well, usually, that’s all they get.

Buyers know the stats: if they’re careful and lucky they can count on getting 15% opens, 1.5% CTR on a bought list.

Even before the brutal mathematics of cold email campaigns kick in, there’s a 20% failure rate on that list, sometimes much more.

Clients know that, so expectations are low.

Imagine, though, if you could deliver to each client a list with verified details, rich client data. A list that went beyond names and emails, to facilitate cold email best practices like deep personalization right off the list. And a clear ranking system so they understood from the off what quality they could expect from each entry.

That’s enables EMMQuery’s clients to massively overdeliver compared to their competitors.

EMMQuery lets users search its database of 55 million executives at US businesses, using parameters like:

• Role and area of responsibility
• Geographic location
• Quality and quantity
• Technographics
• Company industry and size

New lists can be rapidly assembled and filtered by quality. There’s a lot more detail on how all this works in this blog post, or here’s a brief overview: 

But let’s look at how those features can help you overdeliver for your clients.

Pre-verified and graded contact details

It’s controlled here in the search page:

This allows you to build lists that fit client needs. Clients planning a pure cold calling campaign probably want AAA, BBB and CCC - direct dial numbers, but potentially non-working email addresses. Clients aiming more at email or at a multi-contact strategy might want AAA and AA. The important thing here is that it’s possible to rapidly create a list that contains only genuinely usable, verified email addresses.

Searchable and customizable: build a list that fits your client

Search EMMQuery’s database using massively customizable searches. Target exactly the leads that your clients want, and deliver them targeted lists that don’t contain any non-working contacts or inaccurate details. Best of all, give them a list that matches their criteria closely.

Let’s say your client does Wordpress development specifically for manufacturing business. They’re interested in a lead list of manufacturing businesses in their geographic area, New York, with revenue ranging between $10m to $50m, who run their blogs on Wordpress.

That sounds like something you’d have to ascertain some other way. In fact, we can select for those things right in the EMMQuery interface. Company details — revenue and industry:

And below them, Technologies:

We’ve selected Wordpress, but there’s a pretty big range:

For Location, I’ve just selected New York City, but there’s the option to refine the search by state, ZIP code and county too.

Finally, I’ve deselected ‘phone is present,’ so records without phone numbers are displayed, but filtered out SOHO email addresses like Yahoo and Gmail emails.

That search returns 523 records, but more importantly: it returns zero defunct records, and zero records the client isn’t interested in.

Easily address different client verticals

Different clients want to focus on different leads. They need lists that are specifically tailored to their client base. But most lead list sellers don’t excel at that. Typically, lists are generic.

EMMQuery lets you build tailored lists, direct from the main database, using search parameters.

You don’t have to download a .CSV file with a million cells in it and then clean it yourself: just select the reports you want and download those. Here, I’ve selected real estate businesses and specified a revenue range as well:

Without any other parameters, there are over a hundred thousand results, all across the country.

But they all fit the vertical that our imaginary client is interested in. EMMQuery users can build a list for a client in any vertical in just a few mouse clicks.

Achieve high margins

When you construct your own lists for sale, the margins are often low. Clients regard the product as low quality and aren’t willing to pay high prices, and organizations that build the initial email lists that you work with typically don’t take much care over them. They know their lists will sell anyway.

As a result, you’re left doing a lot of the work for relatively little financial return: margins are low, volume high, and it’s tough to build truly remunerative, long-term business relationships with clients when they see you as a line item.

By contrast, EMMQuery lets you achieve high margins by both cutting your costs, and increasing the utility you can offer to your clients.

Creating lists isn’t time-consuming, and neither is tailoring them to specific client needs. Once you’re familiar with a simple control system, it’s fast and easy. And downloading lists is done with a click.

I’ve built a very restricted list — just four records, for illustrative purposes.

Selecting ‘download’ and confirming:

Gets me a .zip file that I unpack to see this .CSV file:

There’s no space to show it here, but those are the first five columns of a 31-column sheet that includes:

• LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter URLs
• Company website
• Date founded
• Employee range
• Revenue

That lets you drive up margins by offering more value to your clients, but with less effort on your end. Instead of a few names and email addresses, often wrong, you’re giving them verified contact details and the data they need to personalize their messaging successfully, meaning they can expect CTR and open rates significantly above the industry average.

Conclusion

EMMQuery lets you outperform the competition with higher margins and less work. Deliver lists that match your clients’ needs, easily and quickly, and know that they’ll contain no nonworking email addresses or inaccurate names.

You can build custom lists rapidly, with just a few clicks, and refine searches to ensure that every lead on the list is not only accurate, but relevant. When your clients are used to the usual lackluster effects of bought email lists with high bounce rates, how are they going to respond when you give them a list that’s already verified, doesn’t need cleaning, and contains only usable leads?

Try EMMquery today: