Email List - Firsteco. Anybody heard of them?

[MarketingFile]

Hi,

For what its worth here is some info that may help make a decision.

With business emails opt-in doesn't actually mean opt-in. When collecting UK business email addresses, you have to give the recipient the option to unsubscribe, if they do not unsubscribe they are then deemed to have "opted-in", it called passive opt-in. The EC Directive 2003 allows this to happen.

I would suggest given the price, they have harvested the web, collected the emails, passively opted them in and are then reselling the data. This process costs next to nothing to do, so any money they can get off the back is all good.

The price is amazing, but as they say, you get what you pay for! I had customers in the past take this type of data and have found themselves on spam lists as the email data contained "spam traps". This would be the one to worry me the most.

The emails are most likely to be generic, not such a bad thing though, as in most companies more than one person reads/has access to the email address/box.

All the above aside I have no experience of these people and it could be a fantastic email list that generates a lot of business for you.

Anthony

[firsteco]

Hello,


I am Sales Manager at Firsteco.


One of the challenges companies face when they are discussed on forums like these is ensuring that content remains factual and that any inaccuracies are corrected. Can I therefore clarify the following:


Firsteco is based in Geneva, Switzerland – and has been since 1998. We have been developing qualified B2B databases for companies in 12 different companies for the last decade.


There have been a number of database offers from Firsteco and affiliated companies since our inception. The offer available on firsteco “dot” co "dot" uk is our most recent offering to the UK B2B market and I would like to make these two important points about it:


anyone – including Anthony from ‘Marketing File’ – can visit our UK site and download a free database sample to review the quality of our data


the data has not been harvested from the internet but is the result of our substantial investments. As you can see in our sample, we do not provide only email addresses but also company names, full contact details, a contact name and position held and the personal (rather than generic) email address of each contact are proof of this (pseudo-database companies selling data harvested from the internet will never provide free samples nor anything other than a list of emails, 99% of which will be from hotmail, aol or any similar free web email service).


The data contained in our databases represents a substantial investment of time and money. Proud of this and our recent 10th company anniversary, we decided to offer our most recent package at the very low price of £399 for just a few weeks only. We are currently running a large online marketing campaign nationally to promote the package, primarily to build our client base in the UK as we are relative newcomers to the UK market.


Can I conclude by confirming to everyone that the data we are offering in our most recent package - for less than £400 - would be available from some UK list brokers for as much as £10,000, if not more.


Malo Andre
Firsteco

[mountrecruitment]

Hi Malo,

First of all thank you for coming back to us. I am sure you know an offer like this (especially in your industry) runs the risk of the "too good to be true" tag.

The point which made me suspicious was the fact the offer seems to have had two different expiry dates. Was the offer re-run because it didnt get enough exposure first time around?

I am sure you will get some responses to your posting but again thanks for answering.

Rgds
Grant

[MarketingFile]

Hi Malo,

You are right, lists brokers would sell the data for at least £10k.

I take on board everything you have outlined in your post, in fact I downloaded the sample data. I would suggest its a good way forward for anyone looking to purchase the CD, doesn't take long to review the sample to see what the quality of the data is like.

As some have already stated in the post, sometimes an offer can appear to be "too good to be true", generally in our industry they are, but some of course are not.

Thanks for the further info Malo. I would be really interested to understand where the data came from, maybe you could PM me.

Anthony.

[juicyjobs.biz]

As a toddler in the advertising world I've been doing some research and found a really good site with lots of marketing/advertising advice

http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/email.html

[Networkology]

Firsteco do have one or two anomalies that they need to address:

http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/fo...t=82646&page=2

[Marketing-r-us]

Sorry to say it, but some things are too good to be true!

We are a UK data supplier and bought this list in order to add to our fully complient opt-in list of 750,000 UK businesses (based on Thomsons and company house). Claims that this data has been collected through anything else than link farming are simply untrue. We had masses of complaints, which have lead us to stop all compaigns associated with their data.

Figures are also completely wrong (only 55,000 records with all details as stated from their 460,000 small business data after de-duplication).

They agreed to refund us, but no money has arrived. Funny that.....

The reason for my post is simple. I would like to form an interest group of companies who like us have been had by these cowboys. If we can't shut them down we can at least warn other business users.....

Any feed-back (in particular if you have purchased lists from this company) are welcome!

Udo Scherpe - Marketing-r-us Ltd.

[adventurelife]

Originally Posted by Marketing-r-us

Sorry to say it, but some things are too good to be true!

We are a UK data supplier and bought this list in order to add to our fully complient opt-in list of 750,000 UK businesses (based on Thomsons and company house). Claims that this data has been collected through anything else than link farming are simply untrue. We had masses of complaints, which have lead us to stop all compaigns associated with their data.

Figures are also completely wrong (only 55,000 records with all details as stated from their 460,000 small business data after de-duplication).

They agreed to refund us, but no money has arrived. Funny that.....

The reason for my post is simple. I would like to form an interest group of companies who like us have been had by these cowboys. If we can't shut them down we can at least warn other business users.....

Any feed-back (in particular if you have purchased lists from this company) are welcome!

Udo Scherpe - Marketing-r-us Ltd.

Glad I did not follow through as my gut was telling me something was iffy. Interesting to see if my next credit card bill has any charges from them?

[firsteco]

Udo,

We have found out that not only you received your purchase and downloaded both databases, but you have used the data to send massive email marketing campaigns nationally. We can in no way give any refund, whenever the data has already been used. You have already been warned of that before your purchase.

You still have different reports on spamhaus for mailings sent by your company, since well before you completed the purchase from our databases 3 weeks ago.
For example, SBL66944 on spamhaus which dates from August 12.

Thanks to one of our special offers, you have paid 400 pounds for a list worth and being sold in the UK for over 10,000 pounds. Yourself, you are selling your national B2B list for over 20,000 pounds.

Figures are not wrong at all. The databases you have purchased are intended to be used for email marketing. The number of entries you are telling about (55,000 entries) are entries that include tel and fax numbers. All our entries include the company name, a contact name inside the company, the mailing address and the email of the company. There are 350,000 unique B2B emails (after deduplication) in eMarket UK(with detailed information about each company) and 160,000 unique B2B emails in DecisionMakers UK. (the DM UK database include other info. as position of the manager, company income, no. of employees.)
There are over 300k unique small businesses with email in eMarket UK and 40K unique large companies with email in DecisionMakers UK.

Moreover, we recommend to all of our customers to send their e-mails to a limited number of recipients (no more than 20,000 per operation). Our software allow you to make selections by industry or/and location.


Billy
Firsteco

[streetslocal]

Im really confused.
10 years in business??

http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossi...&svc_scan=true