List firm Worldata, Boca Raton, FL, launched a Web site this month that features information on its Worldatabase of 450 lists of 40 million hi-tech direct response buyers.
To drive traffic to the site, Worldata has begun a sweepstakes offering daily prizes — usually software from one of the owners or Worldata's managed properties — on the site at www.worldatabase.com in return for visitors' e-mail addresses. At the same time, it has been using a similar sweepstakes to collect opt-in e-mail addresses at 1SmartSite.com, the firm's software-download site featuring shareware and software in beta.
Roy Schwedelson, president of Worldata, said last week that the primary reason for e-mail-address collection on the Worldatabase site is so Worldata can contact people on their preferred medium.
“The more we do business on the Internet, the more we find that the old truisms are still true,” he said. “Some people like to be reached by direct mail, some by telephone and some by e-mail.”
When asked whether the Worldatabase e-mail list ultimately will be a business-to-business property up for rental, Schwedelson said, “it may collapse into one of the other Worldata-owned lists,” adding that he didn't think it would be big enough to stand on its own anytime soon.
Schwedelson said, however, that the e-mail addresses gathered at 1SmartSite.com are slated to be available in September. Initially, the 1SmartSite.com e-mail list will make up 40,000-50,000 consumer names and about 200,000 names within a year.
Schwedelson said 1SmartSite.com is currently getting 5,000 downloads per evening. Buyers on the will be Internet-oriented consumers, most of whom already have demonstrated that they are sophisticated enough to download software. Worldata also will be able to determine what types of software the buyers on the 1SmartSite.com list are interested in, he said, based on the pages they've viewed during visits to 1SmartSite.com.
