Can you email contacts from our database?

Generally yes, although each customer’s situation is different and InsideView cannot tell you how to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other applicable privacy laws, such as the CCPA, CAN-SPAM, and CASL. 

We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the GDPR regulation and specifically Recital 47, which has to do with “legitimate interest,” because you may be able to rely on the “legitimate interest” basis to conduct email marketing. The GDPR puts it this way, “The processing of personal data for direct marketing purposes may be regarded as carried out for a legitimate interest.” 

You may also find these authoritative resources helpful.

What’s more, the information in InsideView’s database is about individuals in their business capacity, not as private individual consumers. This applies to the use of business phone numbers, as well.

For more information, review the questions and answers below.

Privacy Center

Does InsideView have opt-in emails?

We’re often asked this question. Let’s break that down. When someone opts in to receive emails, they are choosing to receive emails from a specific business, not all businesses. 

Any vendor who tells you they can sell you lists of opt-in email addresses is simply not telling the truth, because there’s no way for them to get approval from an individual to receive emails specifically from your business.

If you decide to market only to opt-in email addresses, you will need to get permission directly from the individuals to receive emails from your company. Here are some ideas to help you build an opt-in email list.  

 

  1. Attract prospects with valuable content such as webinars, ebooks, reports, and blogs
  2. Promote your content in ads and on social media to drive traffic to your website
  3. Place subscription forms in highly visible places on your website to make it easy for visitors to sign up for your newsletters, blogs, and other content 
  4. Require form fills to access your highest value content
  5. Be a thought leader so prospects will want to subscribe to your content

What email best practices do you suggest?

Having discussed data privacy and compliance, let’s turn our attention to email best practices.

Warm Up “Cold” Lists

InsideView provides business email addresses so you can communicate with potential customers, but it’s never a good idea to send a large number of emails to new contacts who are unfamiliar with your company. Email servers view new, unusual activity as suspicious, which can result in high bounce rates, trouble with your email service provider, and possibly getting blacklisted. And in the event your emails do get through, you may see high unsubscribe rates in response to unwanted emails.

Most successful marketers will “warm up” lists of “cold” emails before doing a large email send. You can do this by using a multi-channel approach. Reach out through social channels, targeted ads, and one-to-one emails or small email batches. The goal is to establish a digital relationship to turn cold emails into warm leads.

The days of “batch and blast” are gone. Buyers expect a thoughtful, personalized approach. So focus on a limited number of accounts at any one time. Gradually email more accounts and contacts within key accounts to include the entire buying group.

You can learn more about how to warm up new email addresses in this Guide to Email Deliverability.

Keep Your Data Clean

Various studies show that at any given time, the average B2B customer database is 25% – 30% inaccurate, and Biznology’s often quoted study claims it decays as much as 70% per year. With your data decaying so rapidly, a significant portion of your email campaigns will miss their targets, unless you regularly update your data. Doing so will also keep you in good standing with your email service provider.

Here are 5 tips to clean your data and keep it clean:

  1. Purge invalid and uninterested contacts
  2. “Wake up” or remove inactive contacts
  3. Delete duplicate records
  4. Implement a data management program to continually enrich and refresh your leads and contacts
  5. Validate email addresses

%

The savings we gained on data storage costs when we purged and deduped our own marketing data

Purge if:

  • No activity in > 1year
  • Invalid or blank email address or phone number
  • Contact creation date >3 years

Healthy Stats

You may be wondering what’s “good” in terms of email metrics. The answer depends on a number of variables such as subject matter, industry, audience, and timing, plus whether recipients are familiar with your company. Here are some general guidelines compiled from sources such as Salesforce Pardot, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Get Response.

  • Open rate: 18% – 22%
  • Click through rate: 2% – 3%
  • Click-to-open rate: 12% – 14%
  • Unsubscribe rate: 0.2%
  • Bounce rate: Below 2%

We also encourage you to get advice from your marketing automation provider.

Related Resources

Stat sources:
salesforceben.com/the-drip/how-do-your-pardot-emails-compare-to-industry-benchmarks/
mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/
sailthru.com/marketing-blog/email-marketing-benchmarks-2019/
smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/statistics-sources-for-email-marketing/
privy.com/blog/2020-email-marketing-benchmarks-guide

Please see our privacy policy for complete details.