A while back, I wrote about IBM’s transparent campaign using a purchased list, and the ethics debate of using B2B contact databases like Jigsaw.com. Sites like Jigsaw, Hoover’s, ZoomInfo, etc. are extremely popular in the B2B world, as a means of obtaining corporate information, from financial numbers to regional locations to key executive names and everything in between. Many, many businesses rely on these sites for cold-calling, direct mail campaigns, prospecting, and due diligence.

There is a lot of controversy around B2B marketing and what many in the industry deem as “cold-calling by email.” If a company buys a list of executives and mass emails them, it’s easier to identify that as not permission based marketing. But if a lone sales person emails one executive about a potential business opportunity, is this spam? Sure, if you’re a named executive of a company, your name is out there, and vendors will contact you by whatever means possible – phone, mail, in-person visits, etc. But is email sacrosanct? Most B2B salespeople would say no, some would say “if it’s relevant, it’s not spam,” but I’m willing to bet the recipients would disagree.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Jigsaw has taken a lot of heat about their practices –- even getting blacklisted by Spamhaus –- and in turn helped escalate the debate within the blogosphere and Twitter. It now looks like Dun & Bradstreet (who own Hoover’s) are taking the high road and offering executives listed in their directory the opportunity to remove their email address from the database. Take a look at this email that was forwarded to me recently (click to enlarge):

Interesting, eh? I’m not sure why they felt the need to push their service offerings ahead of the main point of the message, but this is a great step towards allowing people to protect their workplace email inbox, just like they can with their personal addresses. Of course the recipient’s name and contact info (including email) is probably on other similar sites, but D&B/Hoovers is one of the biggest names in the industry, so it should help the unsolicited email onslaught they likely receive on a daily basis. The executive who received this removed herself from the directory, and I will be interested to see if she finds it makes a difference in her inbox.

The bottom line is that sending unsolicited email is a bad practice no matter if you’re working in the B2B or B2C spheres, and whether you’re sending one email or 100,000. If you’re a B2B email marketer and want those hot execs to opt-in to your list, then create a strong campaign to target them by direct mail, telemarketing, conference event or SEM/PPC to drive them to your signup page, convince or incent them to join…and once they’ve joined, deliver good content and information as promised. Want more advice? Check out this article, 7 Steps to FTC CAN-SPAM Compliance for B2B Email Marketing.

Julie Waite
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto

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