We’ve got a new CEO at Electric Marketing. He’s called Joseph Kingsway and he lives in Manassas, Virginia, 3,687 miles from our office in London. We’ve never met him, we’re not paying him and he has zero responsibilities at Electric Marketing.
But he is on LinkedIn and whether by design or accident, he has associated himself with Electric Marketing in London, claiming to be our CEO. Which means that mailing list companies which use scraping software to gather their data from the internet have scraped his name from LinkedIn and their AI software has matched it to our company name and address.
Get onto US company ZoomInfo and they will sell you Joseph’s email address, at our domain name along with our correct address and phone number. Plus Marty in Ontario, Laxmi in South Delhi and 4 others who have no connection with us. And of course, all emails sent to these addresses will bounce right back to you.
It is easy to see how software can make this error. It highlights that while the new generation of mailing list companies are using technology to gather data, match data and update mailing lists, their levels of accuracy are pretty poor. Our view is that you need to get humans involved to pick up errors and check data.
Electric Marketing continues to use the telephone to research and update our business mailing lists. True, our mailing lists are more expensive than the data scraped from the internet by bots, but if you are selling a high-value service to a senior manager in a UK company, you want to use accurate email data.
ZoomInfo’s proud boast is that they have ‘B2B data quality that you won’t find anywhere else’.
Quite.