As some of you may have noticed, we at ReachForce were founded on the principals that B2B direct marketing was failing due to the poor quality of lists – it was and is egregious that we get less than 1% response rate from e-mail campaigns and that the list industry had not changed in 100 years and I quote are like “dinosaurs in a marketing 2.0 world”. Then, this week I see a picture of a dinosaur on the cover of the BtoB magazine and it alludes to the “L-word”.

The article titled “The List World - List managers unable to adapt and create new products and services that dig deeper into data are in danger of extinction” is a very interesting piece. Carol Krol, great job on this article, you absolutely GET IT!

Here are some of the points covered in the article:

1. The “List industry” is undergoing dramatic change and consolidation is underway – the OLD way of list marketing is dying
2. Database marketing is emerging (my view is that isn’t that what we all learned anyway?)
3. Data now constitutes 2 dimensions: Analytics and the leads databases (not lists)
4. Custom database development is what people want with more precision
5. E-mail marketing emerging as the # 1 way to target 1:1 messages to the right people
6. Nurturing contacts using e-mail marketing is also a driver to this trend
7. Database analytics and segmentation is becoming a natural extension in marketing departments

As I say every day, fellow B2B Marketers, let’s get together on a crusade to put an end to the 90+% waste in marketing spend - stopping the bleeding on lists is a good start, let’s think about targeted databases built on analytics and focused messages to the right person at the right target company.