Email list rentals: Is the rented email list business dying?

This industry is certainly heading toward extinction unless a disruptive force comes in and fixes the problems that marketers face with renting lists. As a disclaimer, I'm the CEO of one such company that I think is doing that.

I've been a marketer for the past 18 years and Chief Marketing Officer for 3 companies. Over that period I've probably worked with hundreds of rented lists to generate almost 30 million marketing qualified leads. The things that frustrated me about this industry were:

- It took too much back and forth to find and secure a list.
- My partners couldn't/wouldn't give me insight into how a list performed until I spent thousands of dollars on a test.
- Performance information was hard to come by and not detailed enough for me to make better future decisions or defend the spend in the board room.
- I always felt like I was getting ripped off and entering into seemingly shady practices

There is also an over-arching trend that's affecting this industry. In today's board room, The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is the shortest lived position. According to Korn Ferry, the position turns over every 15 months. This is because there is more pressure than ever to prove immediate results on marketing spend. The CMO needs to prove the effectiveness of every campaign they execute. if they can't, they get fired.

I believe that the rental industry is behind the times in delivering the tools that the CMO needs to justify the spend. And without such tools, the CMO is forced to shift their dollars to those tactics they can confidently measure. While the rental industry provides some data today, it's not enough to compete with Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Enginer Optimization (SEO), or even Display Advertising.

Until the items listed above are addressed (and Marketfish was designed specifically to resolve these issues), the industry will continue to be in question and potentially in decline.

That being said, there is strong data to show that renting lists is one of the most effective lead generation tactics. The effective Cost Per Milia (eCPM) of search engine marketing (SEM) was around $60 across all of the top search engines this last quarter. It's getting more and more expensive to buy keywords. A strong list-based marketing campaign can easily beat these numbers and create a viable alternative to SEM.

Moreover, list marketing has its advantages over purchasing list and SEM. List purchases are usually cheaper in the short run, but have so much inaccurate data (IDG claims 60% accuracy on average), that you spend a fortune on qualifying the leads. Campaigns using rented lists are different and often times superior to SEM because it provides an active form of marketing often being able to attract customers into the buying cycle earlier than SEM. This tactic also allows you to control your brand and message better than SEM because you can brand the entire experience.

If this industry can provide marketers with the proper tools to find the right lists, optimize these campaigns and show results, I think this industry can flourish.

Dave Scott
www.marketfish.com