InfoUSA Lists are Expensive Mistakes
- Comments: 4
- Written on: September 13th, 2009
This afternoon I did some research for marketing a computer repair company resource website. I planned on directly marketing the website to computer repair companies, and to do that I needed a list to work from.
The first name that came to mind was InfoUSA, and I was thrilled to find that their lists can be purchased online through an automated system!
InfoUSA Sells BIG Lists But…
I entered SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) numbers 7378 and 7379 and their system returned just over 38,000 results. The price of the list was a WHOPPING $6,227.00!
For that price I might as well build a bot to harvest names and phone numbers from computer repair web searched on Google. The only down side to that is that harvested lists are rarely accurate, and can lead to wasted marketing dollars (unles you have a desire to become a mass spammer).
Holy Proofreading Batman!
InfoUSA had a cool feature where you could preview an entry from the list you are about to buy. I hovered my mouse over the option to see what my 6K was going to buy.
There is no excuse for a result like this to show up in a database search. I entered SPECIFIC SIC codes that should have returned computer repair companies.
They obviously had this listed in a database somewhere with an Automotive Repair SIC code because they listed it in the result. Why would I pay $.16 per name for a list of businesses that will have no interest in an IT shop website?
If InfoUSA can’t manage their results database, there is no way I am going to trust them to sell me a $6,000 targeted list for a marketing campaign. Anyone know a good coder who can build a bot for me?
