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Had a B2B lead gen campaign crash and burn last month
I was running a cold email campaign for a client in the Chicago area back in June. We had this list of about 300 contacts from a data vendor we were testing for the first time. Everything looked clean on paper, but after three days of sending, we got zero replies and maybe a dozen opens. I started digging into the bounce reports and found out half the emails were going to invalid addresses or spam traps. Turns out the vendor had scraped the data from old LinkedIn profiles without verifying anything. I had to pause the whole campaign, lose about $500 in wasted send credits, and rebuild the list manually using a different tool. My client was not happy, and I had to eat the cost to keep the account. Has anyone else run into a data vendor that sold them garbage leads like that?
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ninaross2d ago
Oh man, I felt that in my wallet just reading it. I once bought a "curated" list of small business owners and it turned out to be mostly defunct Etsy shops from 2014. Nothing like sending 200 emails into the void just to watch your open rate sit at a flat zero. The worst part was I had to manually cross-reference every single bounce against LinkedIn and company websites afterwards. Spent a whole weekend playing email detective instead of, you know, doing my actual job. Eventually I just started asking happy clients for referrals instead of trusting those vendors. Learned that lesson the hard way, right alongside you.
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ninab952d ago
Building your list from scratch with manual verification is the only way to avoid that headache.
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