I had a call this weekend for a cell phone database. We have access to millions of cell records and this client wanted a price for ALL of them. It struck me odd though when I told him I like to start small that he chastised me for not wanting to sell the whole thing.
He even asked me if I thought the file was not good enough as to not sell it. I had to stop him dead in his tracks. “we are not selling a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow sir” I said bluntly. It’s funny to think that although so many people buy data these days, there are still people willing to buy blindly without testing a marketing mailing list or telemarketing list.
After speaking with him for about 45 minutes, I realized he had been duped by a couple of mailing list suppliers that were more than happy to do a multi-million record transaction. His pride was damaged but he eventually saw the wisdom in testing small. The thing he finalized was that even though the price per record was going to be close to double on a small order, his cost to test and find out how and if the file would work is more important in the short term than a real ‘deal’ on the database over the long term.
So many people forget this simple fact and then they end up wasting valuable marketing dollars – TEST, TEST, and MORE TEST. Any marketing service/product vendor that says otherwise is simply giving you bad advice!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: direct mail, mailing list, targeted marketing
