There is a long way to go before you can address target customers with marketing messages in a legally compliant manner. You first have to acquire the contact data of your target customers. You can do this in a number of ways.
Clean up the address data records that you have acquired from customers in your business and add to them on an ongoing basis. This requires organization and a high degree of discipline. Make sure that all employees who process the address data pool work with the same standards and that duplicates and errors are avoided.
The hard way is to select contact data from industry directories and trade show catalogs. Industry associations can also be a good source for identifying target customers. The research requires a lot of manual effort, but can result in useful lists of relevant target customers.
A next step is to find relevant personal contacts at the target customers. To do this, you can either hire a call center or have your sales team conduct a phone campaign themselves. Unfortunately, the latter option is usually nipped in the bud because sales people don’t like to do such work. A call center costs money, but with a clear briefing you can get amazing results in a short time. Call center employees have the advantage of being able to focus exactly on this task and not have any distractions. Most importantly, many call center employees bring an admirable frustration tolerance to the table. You can also motivate your employees to use social networks like Xing and LinkedIn to find and connect with relevant people.
An alternative way is to obtain contact data on your relevant target customers through a so-called list broker. The price you pay per address record is put into perspective when you consider the effort you have to put into your own address research.
In addition, list brokers have usually already obtained the approval of the target customers and provide them to you in a legally secured manner. This is a significant advantage for marketing messages by E-Mail.
As a rule, list brokers offer you several options: You can buy the address data or rent it for a one-time application. If you buy the address data, they are available to you for an unlimited period of time.