Today we meet Warren Goff, CEO at Listdata in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, a company he’s owned and operated for the past 12 years.
Listdata primarily brokers and manages files in the automotive, educational and healthcare markets. A 20-year industry veteran overall, Goff says today’s challenges include less readily available response data and more fierce competition.
“There seem to be fewer real response names available and what we’re finding is that that mailers who need really responsive lists to complete their campaigns have had to go into the cooperative databases like Abacus and IBehavior to supplement their direct mail drops,” says Goff.
This is true, he notes, despite the emergence of the Internet as a marketing medium.
“Someone who buys [online] is someone sitting at home on their computer and stumbles upon or searching for a specific product and they buy that product online. That same person may not respond to a direct mail piece,” he says.
Of course, Listdata does deal in online lists.
“We’ve taken some of our clients and worked with other agencies to put together online campaigns for them to supplement their direct mail. If they’re mailing a couple of hundred thousand pieces per month we can supplement that with a couple of thousand online orders per month,” he says. “That’s really the only other thing we can do.”
One possible explanation for this move online may be that telemarketing has dried up.
“Previously, we were providing a lot of data for telemarketing campaigns but obviously when the [National] Do Not Call list and the Telemarketing Sales Rule came in telemarketing was hurt badly and so there’s very, very little telemarketing brokerage going on right now,” says Goff.
Overall, the growth of automaton in the past 20 years has changed the nature of the list business, Goff asserts.
“I think the biggest challenge just looking at this is the competition,” he says.
“When I first started, it was mainframes and tape drives and large computer systems
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