Are you a Data Miner?

Very good question. I feel very strongly in email marketing. Depending on the size of the company you are calling on in your market place this can be very effective. Lets face it getting to "C" level people on the phone is very difficult. Crafting very strategic emails has worked for me. You can gatehr very good information from Zoominfo. The one I use which is a subscription is OneSource. By far this is the best. I haev researched them all. This has extremely accurate data. You can also use Hoovers.

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I am looking for a Service with Canada content. Zoom seems pretty good for that. I will follow up the two other services.

Good to hear, reach out to OneSource. I know they have Canada content. You can get a free trial to test it out.

I have contacted OneSource but the price is $4,600.00 per year for a single user license which is way beyond my budget.

I will stick to Zoom for now as the price is $0.00 with an optional upgrade to better features at $99.00 month.

I do find Zoom a lot of work to search for the email contacts. I cannot do more than 10 a day and would like to get to a 1,000 person list.

How often is too often to send unsolicited emails for prospecting? Once a quarter, OK?

I assume it is proper etiquette to state at the bottom of each email the option to remove yourself from this list.

BTW, I was blown away that OneSource told me they had 80,000 businesses listed in their database with 93,000 contacts in my territory.

Even if that is way exaggerated, it is still way more than I expected.

I guess you get what you pay for.

I think email marketing can be a big waste of time and resources. I would consider using email marketing for reaching out to my existing customer base. There was a question earlier indicating how often one should send email to prospects. If you plan on sending multiple solicitation emails, how do you know your email address was not blocked the first time around?

What’s worked and has been successful for me is traditional cold calling. If you have a solid product, can illustrate true differentiation, a well put together presentation, then the odds are on your side. Know your audience and who you need to talk to. Just my two cents. Happy selling.

If Email marketing is successful for 0.0067% of the emails that I send I will be happy.

Yes, I expect many emails will be shot down as spam.

Just the very process of data mining has already identified 50 companies that I did not know about and never touched.

Data mining helps to identify the players in an organization and the corporate structure. To be able to cold call an account and ask to see a specific individual is helpful.

Yes, it does take a significant of time to develop a list and maintain it.

It can't be your only prospecting method.

An interesting slide show on how to design your email message ... like a magazine cover!

http://static.slideshare.net/s...s-1195810117312900-5

Also, no attachments in your email campaign. They will get shot down by Spam filters. Hyperlinks only

In the first round of 700 emails that I have sent out so far, I have sold one 20 cpm Colour and quoted a KIP wide format to customers that I would have never met otherwise.

I hope to get to 2500 emails sent once a quarter a year from now. That would be 10,000 emails a year prospecting to new customer's

As the message I send is very small with no pictures or web links, I do not get shot down by many web filters. So far only a handful of people have asked to be deleted from the list.

I would be careful doing email blasts because they can be looked like they are spam and you will be tracked down and fined if not worse. They are unsolicited advertising. I am not sure what the laws are in Canada but I have known people in the US for getting in trouble for doing this same thing when they were called out on it.

There have been many studies on this topic and it has a very very low rate of return. Just look you sent 700 emails with only one small 20ppm unit sold. Most people do not read them and if you do not follow up with them in 24-48 hrs after they are sent the odds decrease significantly. There is no personalization and it is hard for people to pick up a tone or your demeanor through a first contact email.

It is a couple of months later and I have sent out maybe 3k emails. Not a whole lot of success yet but I remain optimistic. Very few requests to be deleted from my email list and I have a list that I can continue to expand and reach potential customers that I could never get to.

I like the fact that I can contact 200-300 people every 8th week, 50 weeks of the year, that I suspect at some point in time in the next five years will buy a copier.

I once saw a little book that had 365 ways to recycle/reuse/renew and thought these would be nice little tidbits to throw out in an email so that people would feel non-threatened and perhaps look forward to the next one. Down the road I become the "Recycle Guy", never did anything about it though.

maybe a better idea to reduce the list to 5 or 6 lists for different vertical markets? I may try something like this in the near future from email addresses I have for wide format users

I got a lead today for a 65 cpm Colour machine from the emails I sent out yesterday.

"The harder you work, the luckier you get"

I like to put little helpful tidbits in my emails. I will take your advice Chuck and track down that book.

The current one I was doing was during flu season offering a free bottle of hand sanitizer to place next to your current copier. I thought it was a perfect excuse for me to do a site visit and place my logo next to a competitors product.

Anyone know if such things work in Singapore? and if you have any template to share pls??

This will work anywhere but you have to subscribe to a database service that costs at least $100.00 per month. Then you have to be prepared to donate a couple of hours of your spare time per week for an extended period of time to build your database.

I do not want you to think that this is a road to fast sales because it is definitely not but it will help to increase the pool of suspected decision makers that you can contact on a regular basis

That lead turned into the sale of one 55 cpm colour and one 85 cpm black copier last week.

A take away from Xerox.

I would have never have known about this opportunity if not for the email that I sent.

I'm really not a data miner, however in the last 3 months, my personal blog or the one I have focused for central new jersey has developed 3 decent leads. One I sold, I don't have as much time as I like to update that one. But it just goes to show you that interested parties can find you via the web, I would also admit that on all three deals it wasn't about price, since one lead was for print production, one for a duplicator and another for a mid volume color.

Is anyone else getting leads from their blogs?