Dun & Bradstreet recently launched D&B Email IQ, which “allows clients to get some free data from us — a number of free data contacts per month,” said CEO Anthony Jabbour. The service is an automated data exchange with email signature blocks mined in exchange for access to Dun & Bradstreet’s company and contact intelligence.
D&B Email IQ is an Outlook plug-in that displays company and contact intelligence, contact and prospect recommendations, and related companies. Firmographics include address, phone, social links, sizing data, ultimate parent, and D-U-N-S Numbers.
D&B Email IQ users that share signature blocks receive 50 free leads (e.g. additional contacts at a company) per month. Users that only share emails receive ten emails per month. There is also a ten lead bonus for referrals.
D&B Email IQ appears to be a tool for collecting email signature blocks similar to Zoominfo’s Community edition. According to their FAQ, “Business contact data collected via D&B Email IQ may be incorporated into the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud and be used to enhance and improve our products by enabling businesses to manage their financial risks, protect against fraud and dishonesty, know who they are doing business with, meet their compliance and regulatory obligations and better understand organizations, industries and markets. Where permitted under applicable law, this information may also be used for sales and marketing purposes.”
Unlike the Zoominfo Community Edition, the Dun & Bradstreet contacts are integrated into the Outlook workflow.
Dun & Bradstreet states that collected data includes emails, meeting invitations, and signature blocks, including “name, job title and department, company name, email address, telephone number, fax number, company address, corporate URL, and social networking URL.”
Dun & Bradstreet is being careful to comply with data privacy rules including GDPR, CCPA, and CASL. The plug-in is blocked in Europe and they are careful not to collect data about EU citizens. To ensure GDPR compliance, records with European emails, phones, or addresses are filtered out of the database so not available for sharing. As GDPR is extra-territorial, it is critical that private data concerning EU citizens not be collected and shared without opted-in permission, even if all of the parties sharing, collecting, and using the data are outside of the EU.
To comply with CCPA, no California mobile numbers are collected. To comply with the Canadian CASL regulations, no Canadian emails are collected.
D&B Email IQ users are likely to be small businesses and job seekers. Larger firms are less likely to permit sharing of emails and signature blocks. Small firms with fewer resources would be more willing to trade signature block intelligence for fifty leads per month. Assuming a value of $1 per record for detailed contact profiles at small firms, the potential market value of the leads is over $500 per user.
How on earth is this possibly compliant on a legal and/or moral basis? The people sending emails have in no uncertain terms agreed to have their data shared with D&B let alone have their data be monetized.
So based on the above this is technically only going to be viable in the US until the federal version of CCPA rolls out. Seems incredibly short-sighted.
Dave — This is business data, not consumer data that is being collected (CCPA does not cover business data). The only questionable field is the mobile number. The rest of the data has long been collected by B2B data vendors and legally sold in the US.
And it is possible that late in the Biden administration that a national GDPR or CCPA bill is passed, but no such law is in the offing, so we are looking at 3-5 years before implementation.
Zoominfo has been using a similar mechanism for the past five years and has not been challenged on it.
Yes, you’re technically correct. That said, it’s as if half of the industry is hellbent on driving straight into a wall at 100 mphs with signs constantly telling them that a wall is approaching from miles away.
At some point, there needs to be a course correction and focus on first-party data where users are proactively participating. The entire world is going that direction.