Experian Friday launched a Web-based research service that lets business-to-business marketers download and sort data on more than 12 million U.S. businesses for an annual subscription fee.
Subscribers to Experian’s new BizInfo Online will pay a fee starting at $4,995 to access up to 15,000 records a month from the company’s national business database. The service is sold in tiers of licenses. The first tier buys access for up to five users, with higher prices for higher tiers of 6-10 licenses or 11-15. Access is limited by user IP address to protect the security of the data.
The new service is intended to sit in the mid-range of Experian’s business-to-business list products. “In the past, there were two ways users could access our national business database,” said Craig Whitney, senior marketing director for access solutions and market intelligence at Experian. “If you wanted to buy a single small mailing list, you could use our BizInsight Web tool set the criteria you were looking for, download the list and pay with a credit card. At the other end of the spectrum were more classic big customers who buy entire sections of the database and load it into data warehouses.”
The new BizInfo Online service combines the flexibility and scope of the big-list data services with the ease and intuitive interface of the one-off list services, Whitney said. Users can set filters to search businesses by geographic location, industry code or company demographics, then create printable or downloadable lists and even shift them directly into Excel format. Marketers and business planners can also plot statistical distributions of businesses within an area or category.
The “Company Report” function in BizInfo Online will provide focused data on a single company, using either name, address, phone number or executive name. Users can retrieve key demographic and contact information on the individual business, including commercial credit score, and can link to Experian’s SmartBusinessReports to purchase a full credit report on the enterprise.
Whitney said the new Web-based service was designed to be user-friendly by marketing departments that don’t have lots of information technology talent to draw on. “We’re targeting a marketer who may want to run a 10,000-name test marketing program one month and then maybe not use the service the next month,” he said. “BizInfo Online is not for someone who wants to generate a million-record mailing list. At the same time, we didn’t want to impose limits on users by saying they can only download 500 records at a time. But if you want to do a test mailing or pull a phone list, 15,000 records should be plenty.”
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