Marketing and Sales Leads
Mailing Lists for Freight Forwarding Businesses
If you're a business that sells to freight forwarding businesses, sales lead lists might be the missing ingredients in your company's sales.
Be aware that freight forwarding businesses are diverse operations with unique needs and circumstances.
To begin with, most freight forwarding businesses are extremely discriminating in their purchasing decisions. Clear messaging is essential, but that alone may not be enough unless you have invested in a high quality lead list.
Lead Lists: Build or Buy?
Business owners often avoid lead lists because they feel they can produce the same results using in-house resources. However, they often overlook the fact that lead list providers are specialists who are highly skilled in identifying targeted leads. So a decent list provider can produce a list of prospective freight forwarding businesses more efficiently than in-house lead generation. Additionally, the best list providers have developed mechanisms that capture new freight forwarding businesses as they enter the marketplace and regularly update the contacts that are in their database. For most in-house sales units, it's impossible to match the performance of third-party list providers.
Criteria for Lead List Vendor Selection
In our experience, there are a lot of variations among lead list vendors and Experian Business services stand out from the crowd. What sets them apart is that Experian has all of the qualities we look for in a good lead list provider, including the following:
- Large database. We think it's important for businesses that sell to freight forwarding businesses to cull their leads from an expansive business database. Why? Because more contacts equates to a higher volume of truly qualified leads.
- Updated contacts. Contact updating is lead list 101. Long contact lists are worthless unless they are regularly updated for accuracy.
- Delivery speed. When your business needs a new supply of freight forwarding business leads, you can't afford to suffer delays from your vendor. Good list providers deliver tailored lead lists in hours or less.
Multichannel Marketing Tips
Businesses that experience the most success in selling to freight forwarding businesses make effective use of multichannel marketing techniques. For young companies, that makes the integration of lead lists into multiple channels a priority. Direct mail is a popular marketing medium in the industry. But more and more companies are achieving results by combining direct mail and telemarketing with online campaigns that drive traffic to the company's website. In some cases, it may be appropriate to incorporate a lead list into a strategy that automatically directs content into multiple channels.
Other Types of Lead Lists
If your marketing efforts go well beyond a single niche industry, most mailing list vendors are happy to help you out. You can even target things like Businesses That Own a Building, Businesses Owned by Hispanic Executives, and other niche segments. The key is to think through who your best prospects are. Explain that profile to your mailing list vendor and the good ones will figure out a solution that meets your needs.
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