I speak to a great many convention, expo and trade show organizers. A recurring theme of these conversations is the merit of sharing the registration list with exhibitors. Some do but most don’t and for good reason, which was explained to me yesterday by an individual that runs a number of conventions.
In the past, they have always given away the attendee list to allow for exhibitor email marketing to the attendees. They trusted their exhibitors would use the list only once and this was the easiest way to allow them to send emails. Up until recently, this list included the attendee’s email address, although only the attendees that had opted-in during registration. Seems reasonable.
However, in the last few years, their opt-ins have been going down and their attendee complaints have been going up. Their attendees were saying that they were being bombarded with emails in the weeks and months after the event.
In an attempt to figure out what was happening and if their organization was at fault, they decided to insert a test record/email address into the list for the 2012 event. They figured they could determine which exhibitor was abusing the list and ask them to them stop.
What was determined was surprising to them. The test email account was receiving more that 120 emails per day within a short time after the event. The show only had 150 exhibitors and very few of the emails were coming from that group.
So what was happening? It turns out that at least one of the exhibitors had uploaded the list to both Jigsaw (www.jigsaw.com) and Zoom Info (www.zoominfo.com). These sites allow you to trade contacts with other users. For every complete record that you upload, you are allowed to download one that they have in their database.
This is merely what they found. They are sure that the list was sent to other sites like this, or possibly sold, or traded with a list broker.
