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Does anyone have much experience with using 3rd party Data Mining companies like www.zoominfo.com to help develop email lists of targeted decision makers?

Is the effort worth the reward?

If one had an email list of 1,000 people what % might result in a sale. 2/3rds of 1%?

I know you got to meet or call these people to close the deal.

How effective is email marketing? I know it can not be your only method of prospecting.
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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.
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.
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.
Last edited by SalesServiceGuy
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 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.
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
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?
copierdirect.ca just got me my first lead after being up for less than 3 months.

In my opinion, email blasting is not effective unless the customer chooses to opt-in.

Fax blasting on the other hand is much more effective. I use a PC Fax driver to organize businesses by vertical. Then I send out a mass fax with relevant information.

Emails are easily deleted, but faxes have to be read before they are thrown out.

I wouldn't buy a house or a car from a random guy who sent me an email. Better to use email and faxing as a way to generate customer rapport online.
I'm averaging about 2 per week but I sell desktop printers all the way up to 80 ppm copiers, both compatible and OEM toner, repair/maintenance agreements, document management and MPS. The ones that call in usually find me through keywords i.e. Atlanta Kyocera Sales ect.

Only downside is that the company I work for has a crappy website so, to an outsider, I look like a one man show.

I'm really learning web design as I go but lately I've been focusing on SEO. I'm thinking about buying up several domain names and pointing them all back to my site. We'll see how it goes.

As for blast emails...I don't do that. My company does but I think it's a waste of time for a rep to be sending out a bunch of blanket emails. I like to dig deep and learn what the company does before calling. That way I can already have an understanding of their workflow.
Sure! How much time ya got?

"Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic."

So, you want people to find your website? Think like a customer and put yourself in their shoes. If someone in your town turns to the internet because they need a new copier they might go to Google and type "New Jersey Copier Sales" or "City Copier Sales". Maybe they have a particular brand in mind. In that case they might search "Ricoh Copier Sales in New Jersey".

Come up with a list of keywords that describe what your product offering. Eventually the goal here is to have your site pop up first when any of these words are entered into Google.

These are the keywords I'm going after (at the moment) :

Jon Selman, Marietta Copiers, Marietta Printers, Marietta Copier Repair, Marietta Printer Repair, Marietta Toner, Marietta Toner Cartridges, Marietta Fax Machines, Marietta Managed Print, Marietta Managed Print Services, Marietta Copier Lease, Marietta Office Equipment, Atlanta Copiers, Atlanta Printers, Atlanta Copier Repair, Atlanta Printer Repair, Atlanta Toner, Atlanta Toner Cartridges, Atlanta Fax Machines, Atlanta Business Solutions, Atlanta Managed Print Services

Once you have your list of keywords established now it's time to incorporate them into the site. After all, Google isn't going to know your site is related to those words unless they're in it!

If you look through my website: www.JonSelman.com, you'll notice that, not only do I include these key words as often as possible , I also link them to other pages and write things out full length to increase the content. Google spiders crawl the website and all those things entice it to bring the page higher and higher on Google ranking by recognizing credibility and relevance to the particular keywords being searched for.

Some of the internal things I do are:

Name every page with a unique name like "Printer Repair" or Toner Cartridges".

Use H1 tags These are HTML tags given to text to show they are powerful and important to the content.

Back links These are links to your website from an outside source. These help drastically in Google page rank. I frequently post content on Social Media Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pintrest, LinkedIn and YouTube with links all going back to my site in order to 1) bring traffic and 2) increase Google page rank.

Tip: If you install Google Webmaster Tools on your site you can do some cool stuff to analyze the site traffic. I can post something on one of these social media sites and then look to see what content/site is drawing more traffic.

And last but not least, use Metadata as often as possible .

"The term metadata refers to "data about data". The term is ambiguous, as it is used for two fundamentally different concepts (types). Structural metadata is about the design and specification of data structures and is more properly called "data about the containers of data". Descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content. In this case, a useful description would be "data about data content" or "content about content" thus metacontent. Descriptive, Guide and the National Information Standards Organization concept of administrative metadata are all subtypes of metacontent.[citation needed]"

Scratch that. That was a horrible definition. lol

Metadata is HTML coding on the back end that tells Google more information about what the site is all about and where it is relevant.

An example pulled straight from the "Show Page Source" on my homepage :

meta name="keywords" content="Jon Selman, Marietta Copiers, Marietta Printers, Marietta Copier Repair, Marietta Printer Repair, Marietta Toner, Marietta Toner Cartridges, Marietta Fax Machines, Marietta Managed Print, Marietta Managed Print Services, Marietta Copier Lease, Marietta Office Equipment, Atlanta Copiers, Atlanta Printers, Atlanta Copier Repair, Atlanta Printer Repair, Atlanta Toner, Atlanta Toner Cartridges, Atlanta Fax Machines, Atlanta Business Solutions, Atlanta Managed Print Services" />


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