Startups Stack Exchange Archive

I have a great database of contacts and skill list of USA. Its approximately 10 million rows of data with numbers and details. How can I get benefits from this data?

Answer 8609

Very large lists of names/addresses within a vertical, in my opinion is now worth very little in its own right. Gone are the days when a company will send a spam email to everyone on their prospect database every week to gain new clients.

As someone who works in the data analytics field, and has implemented a few customer insight systems, the value of a list of customers / prospects is measured by how much individuals engage with a company and how much you know about the individuals.

A story of a UK supermarket chain being able to predict when a woman is pregnant or not, by the contents of their online food shop is true. One of our clients is able to suggest not only what the next product you might purchase is, but also when you might purchase it - based on past purchasing patterns.

To generate value from your list you need to enrich it, by adding extra information that will enable targeting of the emails, which means that people will be more likely to open the emails and more likely to click on the email content.

I realise you wont have access to sales transaction data like we do for our clients, but you should enrich your data with things like the following

Answer 8671

Ignore the email addresses… what other data is there?

Company names, contact names at the company and their postal addresses might help industry publications gain new advertisers or subscribers via cold calls, or via posting via snail mail.

Legally, the email addresses are worthless by themselves as the owners have not have opted-in. It is possible that the real owners behind the email addresses opted-in to someone else’s mail, but they have not consented to your mail, or anyone who might receive the list from you. Many US states, UK and Europe have laws that prohibit unsolicited emails.

Your unsolicited approach though to sell the list will be viewed with suspicion. The effort spent in selling the list might not cover any remuneration you win from a successful sale.

Once sold to someone, there is little you can do to prevent them from selling the list on, so you could end up creating your own competition.

Junk emailers and spammers might be interested.


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