A Little Tip on Whether to go with Lead Generation or Buying Business Lists

Establishing meaningful connections that could lead to profitable business deals with your business contacts is a process that takes time. What takes more time, however, is building a reliable list of leads filled with possible prospects for you. Reaching out to these business contacts is what matters when you want to foster goodwill between your companies, and of course, for them to know you exist as a company and that you and each other can work with one another to achieve mutual gain. What eludes marketing specialists at times though is how to effectively generate these business leads. One way to achieve this is through hiring a third party to handle lead generation services, another is to look for a list provider.

There are those that go with the former, and there are also those that choose the latter. Both approaches may seem different, however, in some way, they are the same as getting a business list. This is because lead generation can be done by a third party service provider, a telemarketing company for example, to generate business leads and find business contacts for you. They do this through cold-calling, an approach used by many telemarketers and one that happens to garner the best results in terms of data gathering and lead generation. List providers on the other hand do the same thing. They perform lead generation to generate business leads and business contacts, then they compile them into business lists which they then sell to those who are looking for such lists.

How Frequently Should You Send Your B2B Newsletters?

One very important factor in email marketing that gets downplayed a lot is the frequency of sending newsletters. Many newcomers to email marketing make the mistake of not finding the optimal time interval between two consecutive newsletters. This, of course, is the wrong way of doing things. Here are three simple ways to help you determine the right email sending frequency for your business leads or subscribers.

• Follow a general rule of thumb. Many email marketing experts suggest that consistently sending a new newsletter every two weeks or every month is a good practice. Although this may work in many cases, the problem with this method is its lack of flexibility; what works for US business leads may not work for others elsewhere. A more practical way to do this is to set your own sending frequency based on experience or observation.

• Ask your subscribers. A lot of times, your subscribers can be the best source of insights about your email marketing. At the opt-in or sign-up phase, you may want to directly ask your prospects to indicate the frequency at which he or she would like to receive emails from you. For contacts acquired through a business leads provider, this information should already be included in the package.

• Let your content decide. Sometimes, there arises the need to break a consistent email sending schedule due to something urgent or important. For example, your monthly schedule might be disrupted by the need to report current developments which you think will arouse your subscribers’ interest. An important lesson in email scheduling is to expect the unexpected and prepare accordingly.

Regularly-sent newsletters can be a great source for business leads. You should decide how frequently to send marketing emails before you begin your campaign. A backup plan or schedule should also be put in place to handle urgent emails that disrupt your schedule. The point here is to avoid as much inconsistency as possible.