New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

Question

We are trying to grow our customer base and we would like to buy email lists.  Do you have any good sources that you recommend?

Answer

The secret lies not in who the list broker is, but in your understanding of who your customer is.  Job one is to identify who your best customers are demographically (attributes such as age, income, marital status, etc.) and psychographically (attributes such as why they buy what they buy) and then, to buy lists of prospects that look exactly like those best customers. 

If you are unsure how to analyze and profile your customers -- which is an advanced marketing science -- you can always enlist of aid of a marketing consultant and/or a company that manages lists and sells demographic and psychographic data elements that can be appended to your customer list to help give you insight into who your customers are and why they buy your products and services.

Given your detailed profile of your best customers, you can then contact list brokers who represent multiple lists to buy the right list.  Even then, you would never buy the entire list, but only a sample.  You will then want to campaign to that sample and it if garners a good response, then you can buy as many emails as you want or can afford at the time.  If you do not get as good a response from your purchased sample as you do with your current customers, then I would recommend that you fine-tune your customer analysis and purchase other small samples to test out.