"There are so few
international lists for me to use". A common
cry that I suspect you may have found
yourself uttering. It is possible, although
happily unlikely, that this is indeed the
truth. More likely I fear, your list search
is not being conducted by one of the few
truly qualified international list brokers.
Here in the U.S., this is a rare breed, and
it's crucial as a marketer that you are
certain that you have correctly identified
one of the few. A positive identification is
harder now than it has been in the recent
past. I'll try to touch upon some reasons
for this, and offer some suggestions to help
find the real experts.
In the summer
issue of GZ News,
Simon Burrell of Newsweek provided an
excellent
overview of European list He highlighted
extensive list
resources, most of which are based within
specific national boundaries. For example,
Simon writes that in France alone there are
"over 2,500 different lists."
This does not suggest too few lists are
available, but admittedly many of these data
sources have a low profile beyond their own
borders. Managers and owners of these files
inevitably derive the vast majority of their
revenue from users within their borders. It
is understandable that they may not allocate
sales and marketing budgets to attract
international usage.
The inevitable corollary here is that there
is a real risk that they remain an untapped
resource for the uninitiated international
mailer. A big reason why this happens is as
follows:
Most list brokers today subscribe to one of
the commercially available list systems,
which collate mailing list information and
provide competing levels of indexing, search
and associated functionality for professional
list users. Available on-line, such systems
have helped revolutionize the efficiencies of
the list broking and managing business within
the past few years.
In the U.S., the likelihood is that your
domestic list vendor uses one of the U.S.
based systems, Nextmark
(into which former
competitor M.I.N. recently merged) or SRDS
(possibly both).
In addition to comprehensive coverage of the
list availability in their home markets each
of these offer some coverage of international
lists. It is by no means intended as a
criticism to comment that this international
list coverage is partial. Both focus on their
home markets and neither claim to have
comprehensive international content. Each
would face a formidable task identifying and
recruiting international data owners and
mangers to submit and regularly update their
information. Indeed, they do a good job of
including many of the higher-profile sources.
Neither however come close to including the
2,500 or so sources of French data, for
example, cited by Simon. And that's just one
country.
Here's the issue: the facility offered by
these systems may suggest to the hopeful list
broker that they constitute a platform from
which international list campaigns may be
planned. Couple and supplement this with the
ability now to conduct some internet based
research, and it is by no means unprecedented
for an otherwise unqualified broker to
succumb to the temptation to represent the
resulting international list universes as
being representative.
