Beware Of Data Depot’s Email Databases
Data Depot is one of many online email database providers who seemingly provide quality data on a wide variety of business and consumer areas. What they DON’T tell you is they do little or nothing to maintain the accuracy of these databases. Specifically, they do little or nothing to purge out the dead email addresses in their list. So the actual number of currently existing email addresses in their lists is grossly exaggerated.
I have bought two email databases from them: their US real estate agent email database and their US restaurant email database. Approximately 50% of the real estate agent database was dead addresses of people who have either switched companies or (most likely) are no longer in the business.
Here is Data Depot’s flaky, lying refund policy:
Databases and e-mail marketing follow the same principle as software- once opened or downloaded, it is a final sale. Due to the nature of the data, all sales are final and non-refundable. By processing your order and submitting your contact information, you are entering into a binding purchase contract. This has been done to protect the integrity of our databases from fraudulent activities and those who are looking to steal our data. *Data is sold as is without warranties or guarantees.
…
*Counts may vary slightly as we are continually updating & cleansing our databases. Not all records have all searchable fields. If field is not available for those records a null or blank field will appear. Example we do not have fax numbers for all businesses. Business with no fax numbers would have null or blank space in spread sheet column. Mailing addresses, phone numbers and email addresses are constantly changing we do not claim that the list is 100% accurate or deliverable. When sending bulk emails some emails will be returned undeliverable.
What a bunch of crap: they ask me to “affirm that the name and the personal information provided on this form are true and correct” – too bad they do the same for their email databases.
About 80% of people who try their hand in the real estate business fail within the first two years and leave the business. So naturally a company like Data Depot must not only regularly update their real estate agent lists with new agents (they claim to do this monthly) but (MUCH more importantly) they must regularly purge their lists of dead email addresses for their databases to have significant value. Clearly, Data Depot is NOT doing this purging at all. In fact, none of the email databases I’ve bought from any source do any of this purging. Another US real estate agent email database I’ve seen out there has approximately 66% dead emails in it and costs $3000. What a crock!
It’s bad enough paying full price for a database that’s essentially 50% worthless and not getting any credit or refund. What’s worse is having a database that’s got that high a percentage of dead emails actually makes the database completely useless for most people. The reason is the biggest red flag for email providers that someone is using a non opt-in email list (IE a purchased list) is if the list has a high percentage of dead email addresses in it. The percentage varies from one email provider to another, but I think the threshold is about 10% for most email providers. In other words, if your list has more than 10% dead emails most email providers will begin blocking or spam filtering your emails.
Email Service Providers and the email marketing community in general have brainwashed most businesses into thinking that only opt-in, permission based email lists can be used in email marketing and that non permission based email lists are completely ineffective, unethical, immoral, etc. That’s simply not true. Businesses marketing their products and services specifically to a targeted audience is what real marketing always has been and always will be, regardless of how you acquired the contact info for that targeted audience. Yet the email providers have bought into this small minded “opt-in only” thinking of Email Service Providers and have basically outlawed purchased email lists by blocking emails to their clients if they find a given email sender has a high percentage of dead emails in their list.
Yesterday I started emailing Data Depot’s restaurant email list for the first time. The database has contact info for 804,304 restaurants. These are the stats so far (even with throttling and sending the campaign very gradually to improve deliverability):
Time Elapsed: 1 Day, 9 Hours
29416 emails sent
11643 emails successfully delivered (40%)
17773 emails failed (60%)
If the campaign continues at this rate that means there will be 482,582 dead emails (60% of 804,304) in this list. That’s a LOT of useless data.
If I had been using an email service provider such as Constant Contact or Mail Chimp to send this campaign to restaurants they would have very quickly seen I was using a purchased list and have terminated my account without a refund.
So the moral of the story? When building your email database, use more reliable sources of information than Data Depot. If you’re building a business email database there are usually many trade associations out there rife with information about their member businesses. Often they make this information freely available on their website including full contact info for each member. Extracting this data is often a snap. If they don’t provide this information to the public, they will often provide it in full if you join their association. You can also go directly to the websites of companies who employ the types of prospects you’re looking for. For instance, many mortgage companies provide the full contact info of all their agents on their website, sometimes for entire states/provinces or countries.
Another great way of targeting virtually any business or consumer prospect you want is online classifieds sites. You can get loads of emails of virtually any type of prospect you want from these sites. You can manually go through these sites and copy and paste emails, but it would take an enormous amount of time to get a sizable database this way.
I offer a turn-key solution on how to target harvest email addresses from the most popular online classified sites. Find out more about it here.
