ZoomInfo—a company that gathers information about business executives from public online sources and compiles profiles—today unveiled a service that allows business-to-business marketers to download lists of names addresses and e-mail addresses of the people in its database.
The service costs from 30 cents to 60 cents per name, depending on volume, for unlimited use for one year.
The company claims to have the profiles of more than 45 million people and 5 million companies.
According to ZoomInfo executives, the firm requires customers to sign a contract that they will be Can-Spam compliant.
When told that touting Can-Spam compliance is usually a signal that a company is doing the least it can do under the law and not following industry best practices, Chip Terry, vice president and general manager of enterprise products, said: “To start with, we only take publically available information. So we need to find somebody’s e-mail posted on their company’s Web site, on a trade magazine article, somewhere where it’s been put in the public domain.”
He added that ZoomInfo also scrubs out any personal e-mails, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo.
“We’re not interested in those. That crosses a line for us,” he said.
Terry also said ZoomInfo sends e-mails to all the addresses in its database on a regular basis giving people an opportunity to opt out.
“We have a relatively small number of people who opt out and a relatively large number who ask to be included,” he said.
The company also encourages clients to refine their campaigns by not charging for selects.
“You’ve got every incentive from economic to response rate to hone it down as much as possible,” said Terry.
Because of the intelligence ZoomInfo gathers on the people in its database, the company offers some highly specific selects, said Terry.
For example, he said, a B-to-B marketer could target chief finance officers in Mississippi who went to the University of Mississippi.
ZoomInfo also takes steps to avoid Viagra spammers and other less-than-reputable firms from using its services, according to Terry.
“We regularly have shady characters show up on our doorstep saying: ‘I want to buy all 45 million names,’” he said. “And we do our due diligence and in every single instance we’ve turned those down.”
