Approaching Others for Data
Believe it or not, you may be able to get other people to share their data. You
can put together a nice email explaining what you’re interested in and ask if
they are willing to share it. You can also try asking them if they will sell it.
Most people are going to ignore you, that is a fact of life in a situation like
this. But you’re probably going to get lucky a few times and dig up people
that are willing to give you some data or sell it to you. In your email, you
might explain that a Facebook lookalike audience will not actually use their
customers, and you can sign an agreement specifying that you won’t contact
their customers via the provided email (unless the customer happens to come
to you some other way, of course). Since Facebook is taking the data and
generating a new set of people from it (and the generated audience is a much
larger size), you’re not really using the customers themselves.
If you’re willing to spend money, then you can search on the web for data
brokers that can supply you with names and email addresses of people that
have bought certain products. Just be careful if taking this approach as you’re
going to want to make sure you get recent and updated lists and not emails
from ten years ago.