Stop: do not buy that email list

There’s a lot you can learn if you follow the blog produced by SoPro, one of the stellar clients that my agency Write Arm has been privileged to serve.

SoPro has single-handedly redefined email prospecting, saving it from the scrap bin of history.

You’ll also find a set of pretty awesome tools to use for free to help you manage your prospecting campaign.

These include:

1. A truly epic email finder and hyper-useful email address verifier
2. A market mapper helping you assess the size of your potential market (by industry, job title, geography and so on)
3. An email awesomeness checker
4. And tools to assess the deliverability and spam content of your mails.

Data half-life

One particular post that I wanted to highlight is this one: Is your data radioactive?

In it, SoPro's co-founder Ryan Welmans, persuasively demonstrates that within 18 months of an email list being created at least half of its data will be incorrect.

Long story short: As people change jobs or roles every 3 years your B2B data has a half-life of just 18 months.

This is just as true for internal lists as bought ones – except with bought ones the other half of the email addresses will have been pounded by business after business looking for leads.

So, what should you do?

You should only ever rely on fresh data.

• The good news is there’s a free online source of fresh date. It's called LinkedIn
• The better news is it offers plenty of ways to search and find prospects relevant to you
• The slightly sad news is that I’m not going to run through these right now
• The ‘smile on your face again’ news is that I’m at my kitchen table cooking up a whole series of tips on using LinkedIn for sharing with you later in this course

For now, let’s just say that finding the right people at the right companies in the right areas is a bit of a faff. But it is a doable faff: it’s the kind of thing you can set a day aside to do and get it done or chose to do in short spurts across a few days.

Having found your audience it is, of course, possible to use LinkedIn's internal messaging system InMail to contact them. There is a cost but the biggest drawback is perception. InMail is the favoured tool of recruiters not B2B prospectors.

As one recent study concluded:

‘LinkedIn InMail is a huge hit among the recruiters but the professionals were not a big fan of getting thousands of InMails throughout the day. They simply filter out the InMails.’

So, how do I find all these prospects’ emails?

This one’s easy.

Head over to SoPro’s Epic Email Finder where you can bulk check up to 10,000 prospects. (Not that I’d recommend hitting that many at once!)

With email addresses in hand you just need to craft the perfect prospecting mail.

As luck would have it, I’ve got all the advice you need.