In early March, someone in one of the MySMPS communities posted the following:
Our firm has traditionally steered clear of purchasing trade show attendee email lists from 3rd party vendors. However, I have been asked to reach out through MySMPS to see if others have found these types of purchases to be beneficial to their business development efforts. I welcome any and all insight into the pros or cons of such a purchase.
I have always found such a purchase to be a waste of money. Here's why.
In all my years as an A/E/C marketer, every trade show I have attended has included a list of attendees, mostly with complete contact information, in the "gimmee" bag provided at the registration table. And you can walk up and down the aisles in the exhibition hall and collect business cards from each firm's attendees, complete with phone numbers and email addresses. Or you can grab a cup of coffee, sit down with a total stranger, talk for a bit, and exchange business cards.
In addition, if you call the event sponsor a week or 10 days before the event, they will most likely send you the list of attendees current at the time of your phone call. That list won't be complete because many people wait until the last minute to register for an event, foregoing the early bird discount because of their own schedules, but the information on that list will be accurate and up to date—which is not always the case when you buy a list from a 3rd party. And even if the 3rd party list is purchased and then distributed within the first hour of the conference, it still won't include walk-in registrations.
When it comes to the value of these purchased lists, I think a lot depends on why you want that information before the conference, and how much advance notice your target contacts need in order to make their own conference plans.
If you just want to send an email inviting people to visit your firm's booth, it doesn't require a huge amount of advance notice. Even if someone doesn't get your invitation until the first morning of the conference, it requires no great scheduling effort for them to walk down the aisle and spend 5-10 minutes at your booth.
If you want to find out if specific people you already targeted will be attending, so you can make a point to meet them, even the almost complete list that you obtain from the conference sponsor gives you some "heads up" time to make some arrangements with most of those people.
If you want to locate specific attendees and invite them to join you for drinks and/or dinner—whether a one-on-one event or as part of a group—they will need some lead time, so you will need some lead time as well. But a 3rd party list cannot possibly be complete until the event begins, or maybe even until the event is over. So while that list may give you contact information for the people you missed meeting, it won't me much more helpful than finding those people on LinkedIn, Facebook, or some other platform. And that's assuming that all the information on the purchased list is accurate and up to date.