One thing we have a lot of at Every Market Media is B2B contact data. And by our record count, there are 3,884,721 C-Suite executives actively employed in the United...
Over the last ten years, there’s been much more of a focus on privacy in Europe.
In the U.S., CAN-SPAM was the line in the sand and everyone got through that legislation. But in Europe, there are some really draconian measures that have come out.
A lot of companies have corporate data policies driven more out of fear than necessity. These are just some of the current differences in privacy and data handling between the U.S. and the UK.
In this article, Every Market Media CEO Rick Holmes summarizes his recent interview with Karie Burt, VP International at MeritDirect, who explained that difference and others on the Corporate Data Show.
Rick:
A UK client of ours purchased something recently. We produced a file of a few thousands records and either share-filed it or emailed it to them. Either way, there was no password for pickup and it wasn’t a locked sheet or anything. That’s pretty standard data delivery practice in the US. We got a little slap on the hand and basically heard, “What horrendous security practices are these?”
Shine some light here. Help the audience understand how to avoid the proverbial faux pas.
Karie:
You’ve committed a cardinal sin there. I’ll come visit you in jail. Seriously, though, there’s been much more of a focus on privacy in Europe. A lot of companies have corporate data policies driven more out of fear than necessity.
That’s probably what you tapped into with your client: someone in Legal or Compliance said, “No pushing data around.”
It’s indicative of a bigger issue. To my mind there’s become a blurring of business and consumer data.
In the U.S., we sit down about to eat dinner and get a phone call asking us to support a charity. In the UK, there’s a movement to have people opt in receiving some of those communications.
To be honest, for you, me and the listeners, it’s frustrating. We’re trying to help our clients to sell products and services. We’re trying to send good offers, not junk. You have to be protective of good data, because it’s a minefield, and not even a clear one.
The GDPR, which is a European piece of legislation, was drafted before Brexit. And now that the UK have opted out of Europe, it’s going to be interesting to see what will happen.
It’s created a vacuum, and within the vacuum there can be an opportunity. If you look at Europe, you’ve got certain countries that take privacy very seriously (e.g., Germany, Austria). The UK is more akin to its U.S. cousin, where we have a more reasonable approach. But make no mistake: there will be legislation coming down the pike.
“To my mind there’s become a blurring of business and consumer data.” – Karie Burt
One of my objectives working with colleagues at MeritDirect is to help U.S. marketers navigate those troubled waters. Part of my job is to be mindful of what’s happening. I feel that as responsible marketers, we’re on the right side of the law, but we have to be careful about the way data is collected and used. We have a lot less to fear than some companies that are trying to fleece our grandmothers out of their savings. I’m all for legislation against that end of the market. But I don’t want any of your listeners to be scared.
When I was in the UK recently, I met with a lot of people in the B2B marketing space who know I’ve lived in the U.S. for almost 20 years. The T-word came up: people have a genuine interest in president-elect Trump.
Whatever your politics, people are interested to see what his stance will be on privacy. At the end of the day, he’s very much pro-business, so for all of us as marketers, he may be thinking OK, I don’t like big government, I’m not interested in reining in commercial opportunities. So it could be interesting.
I’m all for best practices, but I’m also a businessperson and I’m for helping companies grow.
I’m hoping any changes in legislation will have input from businesspeople.
How to Buy an International B2B Database
In recent months, EMM has been talking to a lot of clients who are starting to build products around international B2B marketing data. What we have found from these conversations is that the most common challenge faced by these clients is finding a consistent, quality data supply.
This left us wondering, why is it any more difficult than garnering US business contacts?
EMM has had the opportunity, over the last twenty-four months, to acquire international email lists in 226 countries from over 100 supply partners. After acquiring nearly a billion raw records, assembling, standardizing, formatting and making this data countable for US marketers, here are some of the reasons we’ve discovered for why it’s so hard to buy quality international marketing email data and how to make the process easier.
1. Non-uniform Characters and Formatting
About the only variation to this rule is email address, which is generally somewhat standardized in format and uses the same character set worldwide. It is the only standard that carries country to country within an international email list. Name, job title, company name, phones and just about every other marketing attribute are subject to errant characters, mis-converted 8-bit characters and hugely different entry formats for almost all variables on the file.
2. Widely Variant in-country Legislation and Culture for Email Marketing
While the US is generally very tolerant of advertising email and web-based advertising, some cultures and indeed some foreign laws frown on commercial email marketing even when it’s limited to contacts at business email address. In other cultures, the practice is found “tacky” and even acquiring data in these markets is a challenge. We’ve found this to be a huge challenge in international email list building in South America specifically and our database counts reflect that. Our CEO, Rick Holmes, has put together a detailed guide to international country legislation which can be downloaded here.
3. Language Nuance
A prospect in Germany completes a sign-up through a short web form to sign up for a webinar. They complete the form and when entering city “Muenchen” is entered. The American marketer selling software to this executive is looking for contacts in “Munich”. Which spelling is given priority? This top-level problem pervades setup for the entire international email database, country to country.
4. No Universal Firmagraphic Standard
Here in the US and even in Canada and the UK the “SIC” system are the agreed standard for cataloging industry. Popular reference files are available in countries where business credit is centralized have applied the SIC system in a two-digit fashion for most countries but this is far from a given and requires a marketer to have access to a huge worldwide complex reference database. Even then because these sets almost always lack email, there’s no clear link back to the reference set. Matching to US data fetches information on the enterprise business but is woefully inadequate for SMB’s. Taxonomy interpretation from company name is spotty at best when including several major languages.
So now the question of how to buy an International B2B database. It's simple, talk to EMM!
We have made it easier for marketers to reach their international targets. We have appended 6 new fields, cleaned up our existing data, and matched our companies, countries and levels. These changes helped us to better round out our international offerings.
We are proud to say that out of the over 27 million international B2B Email records we have over 8.5 million international records that contain full business card values (Note: these values have increased and were updated on 7/25/2019).
Feel free to contact us to learn more about our International database, receive a quote, or a FREE count.
Conclusion
Check out the full episode with Karie. And if you want to get in touch with Karie, you can reach her at kburt@meritdirect.com.
This post is based on a podcast interview with Karie Burt from MeritDirect. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Corporate Data Show.
