General

When looking for customers in foreign trade, we basically choose the channels that are useful, such as customs data, which is also a relatively direct way. But what you need to know is that customs data belongs to the privacy section, which is actually an optional method. The most you can see is a phone number, but it is also good to only get one contact information, after all, it is an accurate customer type. So is customs data really useful for foreign traders?

Take the United States as an example. The data of American companies is very public online, and contact information is easy to find. Some companies provide customs data that claims to include all contact information and is nothing more than a search engine model embedded in the software. Simply put, it is a simulation of manually entering a company name in Google to retrieve the network contact information of the enterprise. Some companies also intentionally claim to collaborate with world-renowned information and data companies such as D&B Dunbar and Kampass Compass, and their contact information will also be retrieved from the aforementioned company information database. At most, you can buy accounts for these company databases and go there to find some yourself. If there are many customers, I can't find that much time to inquire about prices for each household. In addition, in order to prevent replication, the number of queries per day for these databases is limited. In addition, the timeliness of their updates is also an issue.

So remember, the principle of their contact information is essentially the same as that of email search software: enter a company name in a search engine, and the contact information that appears online is the result provided to you. This is the principle behind all mass email search software on the market. If this is the case, the obtained customer contact information may have the following issues:

Who are the contact information for the production department, administrative department, planning department, sales department, after-sales department, and procurement department? What we most need in foreign trade is the contact information of the procurement department. Of course, the contact information of the boss is also important, followed by the contact information of the official website and sales department. How to ensure the timeliness and effectiveness of contact information? How many contact information? Taking data from the United States as an example. Can you provide all the contact information of customers who have purchased "tablets" within a certain period of time? It's just a matter of proportion. What is the proportion? Can you guarantee that it's all this ratio? Can this ratio be included in the contract for purchasing materials?

If a company dares to claim that all their customs data comes with the customer's email and position, you can ask them to show the data of customers who have purchased your products from all countries to see if they have an email. With this move, the scammer suddenly appeared. If we only retrieve network information based on the company name, it is completely irrelevant and can mislead users to send emails in groups. Additionally, if a search engine is embedded to simulate manual search, it is not possible to verify the validity and location of the searched mailbox.

Our suggestion is to first review the customer's import records, such as purchase quantity, price, date, origin, etc., Focus on selecting a group of customers who are suitable for your factory (such as supply quantity, supply cycle speed, product quality, price, etc.), and then find out the contact information of these customers in a targeted manner. Then, send targeted emails and phone calls to customers to understand their purchasing basis.

So, I suggest not to focus on contact information when purchasing customs data. If you value contact information, there is a high probability of being deceived. Because the contact information in the data cannot track effectiveness and specificity.

We suggest that the use of customs data should be: quickly find the resource pool of potential customers with demand, match their customer base (such as customer purchase quantity, purchase price, supplier distribution, procurement cycle, etc.) through customer purchase records, and then use search engines, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Identify the contact information of key customer groups (prioritizing the company boss and procurement department, followed by the official website and sales department) for effective follow-up and promotion. Many companies claim to provide query systems, which make people feel very tall and upscale. There are cat tricks in this (you can compare or verify them yourself):

Once the original data is purchased, it can be permanently saved. There is no time limit. Many foreign customers make long-term purchases. We don't need to purchase customs data every year. Just buying the original database from the past 1-2 years is enough. If the results are good, buy data one year later to see changes in customers and the market. Enter product keywords. At first, over a dozen pages were all about this product and related information, but when you look back, many of them were invalid data, especially the results obtained by querying the product code.

Because customs data is basically queried or extracted based on the first six international codes of products, and the last four codes are different from China, which may contain multiple enterprise products under one code. After the system query, you cannot eliminate invalid data because the system uses fuzzy query function. For example, the product you want to query is "cotton bag", but the system will search for things such as "cotton bag", "cotton bag", "cotton * * * bag", which appears to have a large amount of data in the query results, and all you need is "cotton bag". The EXECL format can use keywords to randomly filter out refined information that meets the requirements. So using system queries cannot effectively filter. Of course, if you are only checking customers or simply checking products, it is recommended to buy a query system.

If your product has 100000 customs data, you need to click 100000 times with the mouse to read it. Can such efficiency effectively develop customers? There is an analysis report from the buyer. As mentioned earlier, the basis of these reports is based on the product keywords or codes you input. However, as mentioned earlier, the query results contain a large amount of invalid information, and the system cannot automatically filter and filter invalid information multiple times. Therefore, the final buyer analysis and other statistical reports are not accurate, and even have significant deviations. The reference significance is greatly reduced, and even misleads us to judge the true customer group.

For the above four points, you can go to any data company that sells data software query systems for comparative verification at any time. So I still hope that doing customs data can truly operate customs data as market intelligence. Don't deceive or adopt the strategy of putting the cart before the horse and operating in order to earn a few dollars, as this will only make the industry lower and ultimately destroy it.