Shippers List For Freight Brokers (What You Really Need To Know)

The freight brokering business is all about the shippers!

Whether you’ve been around the business for a while or just getting started, I’m sure you’ve probably seen something about a shippers list come up at some point or another.

Most likely you’ve seen them advertised in a forum or group online.

People are all the time trying to sell a shippers list for freight brokers. But who do they really benefit?

Is a shipper list something you should buy? Is it worth the money they want you to spend? And, is it even worth your time?

Those are the things were going to be covering in this article.

What Is a Shippers List?

First things first, let’s go over what a shippers list is exactly.

Yes, it’s pretty self-explanatory, but we’re going to talk about it anyway. Just to make sure that all bases are covered in case there’s someone completely new to the industry reading along.

A shippers list is essentially a list of companies who manufacture, produce, or distribute a product and need services from an outside party such as a motor carrier or freight broker to help them with moving their freight from one location to another.

An ideal shippers list should have as much company information as possible; The company name, address, phone number, and a contact for someone who is in charge of the shipping department or logistics.

In a perfect world, if you had a good shippers list. It would have all of the information about a specific company right there on a few lines of text. And the list would have hundreds or maybe even thousands of companies on it.

But we don’t live in a perfect world now do we?

Types of Shippers Lists For Freight Brokers

When it comes to the world of freight brokering and logistics in general you will find out that there is a lot of misinformation out there and there are a lot of people trying to capitalize on you being new to the industry.

And some people unfortunately use a shippers list as a way to relieve new freight brokers of their hard-earned money.

Since the phrase “shippers list” is a general concept when it’s talked about by most people in the industry sometimes it can be difficult for a new freight broker to know what’s good and what’s bad.

When it comes to a shippers list, the meaning could be a few different things.

You have what normally comes to mind when someone says shippers list, which is the version that someone is trying to sell or give to you so that they can either make a profit off of you right now, or in the future.

Then you have other types of lists on the internet that people often refer to as a shippers list but are actually manufacturer directories, or vendor and distributor directories.

These are in fact lists, but not necessarily a shippers list.

They’re just general online directories for businesses, it doesn’t mean that any one of the companies on the list are a shipper looking to move freight.

Lastly, you have what I would consider to be a true shippers list. Unfortunately, this shippers list won’t be one you can purchase or find for free on the internet. I’m talking about a self-created shippers list.

One that you’ve put together personally, either on your own or with the help of an assistant.

Basically, what it all comes down to, is you have either a shippers list that someone else created, or one you’ve created for yourself.

And, we’re going to take a closer look at both of those.

Purchased and Free Shippers List for Freight Brokers

First, let’s talk about purchased and free shippers lists for freight brokers. Could there be any real benefit to buying or using a free shippers list?

Ultimately, I will leave that decision up to you, but I will tell you what I know about them. And, I will also say that I have never used one of these lists for growing my freight brokerage.

With that being said though, what benefit could you get from using them?

Most people who sell these types of shippers lists market them as an easy way to get shippers. All you have to do is start calling…

That’s at least what they say, right. But come on, let’s think about that for a second. If this shippers list has been sold to hundreds of other freight brokers, aren’t they all cold calling the same companies?

I’m just going to go ahead and say this. It’s hard enough cold calling businesses in the first place.

If you start cold calling companies on a shippers list and those companies have already had to deal with a bunch of other cold calling freight brokers before you, those are going to be some really tough conversations.

Not to mention, you have to worry about whether or not the contact’s name on a purchased and free shippers list are actually accurate.

I’ve seen many of these lists being sold on websites, and the lists have been on there for years. How likely do you think it is that the shipping manager stays the same for all of those companies over the years?

If you’re lucky, that purchased or free shippers list came with more than just a phone number on it. So, what about the email addresses?

Maybe you could just use the list for emailing everyone on the list, right. That is a possibility, and could be the biggest benefit of purchasing or getting a free shippers list.

There’s only a couple of things to be cautious of. One, just like with cold calling, if these lists have email addresses its fairly likely that everyone else is emailing them also.

Two, and most importantly, you have to be very cautious of how you send a cold email. Cold emailing walks a very fine line of legality.

If you’re not familiar with the CAN-SPAM act, you may want to educate yourself before blasting out a bunch of emails to companies on a shippers list so that you don’t get yourself in any legal trouble.

The last option that you have for using a purchased or free shippers list effectively would be an old school method. That is, if the list came with a valid mailing address, you could send out information about your company to the shippers with regular old snail mail.

The problem here is that most of the purchased and free shippers list that I’ve seen do not include mailing addresses.

With all of that being said, let’s say that you’ve somehow found a shippers list that hasn’t been sold or given away to hundreds of freight brokers. There’s still one more little problem with them.

Most of the time a purchased or free shippers list is not niche specific, and what that means is that the companies on the list could be moving a wide variety of freight and that’s not the most ideal thing especially for new freight brokers.

If you haven’t already figured it out. Purchasing or getting a free shippers list is not going to be the best option for most freight brokers.

I realize that may not be exactly what you want to hear. I know the thought of just buying a list and immediately getting shippers sounds so nice.

But you’ve heard the expression before and it still holds up here just the same. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Self-Created Shippers List

What I would consider being the best type of shippers list would be one that you’ve created yourself.

Once you learn how to find shippers as a freight broker, you can then begin creating your own list of valuable prospective shippers to call on.

Creating a shippers list for yourself eliminates nearly all of the problems that you’ll run into with a purchased or free shippers list.

Ultimately, a shippers list that you create for yourself will be a key component to your sales pipeline, in turn actually being a real benefit to you and your freight brokerage business.

First off, you have control over every piece of information that goes into your shippers list.

If you set the list up properly to start with, you will always have reliable information about the companies on the list.

A shippers list that you create for yourself should be finely tuned to fit your niche perfectly. The reason is because by making the list extremely niche specific it makes the rest of your job as a freight broker so much easier.

While cold calling is always going to be one of the more difficult aspects of freight brokering, it is definitely better when you have a shippers list that’s not being called by a ton of other freight brokers.

Not only that, but if you’ve created your list within a really good target niche, all of your cold calls will be almost exactly the same.

That means your introduction and pitch will be the same, and the shippers’ responses and objections will probably be very much the same.

This all means that you can then fine tune a pitch that works across all of the companies on your shippers list.

Emails work pretty much the same way.

While you still need to be careful that you’re not sending out cold, spam emails, you can do one of several things when building your shippers list to include email addresses.

When your list revolves around a very specific niche, you can fine tune the emails you send out making them much more effective.

By using analytical data such as open rates and response rates you can eliminate or modify any email scripts that are performing poorly.

And, of course, when you’re creating your own shippers list for your freight brokerage you certainly have control over getting the companies mailing address.

That way you can follow up, send offers, or just put them on a snail mail marketing campaign.

The real benefit of creating a shippers list for yourself is that as time passes, the list will evolve into a very valuable resource for your freight brokerage business.

Pretty soon you will find that you have a high-quality list of very qualified shippers who could use your services.

All you have to do is keep them in your sales pipeline and work on converting them into paying customers.

I used this same list building technique to grow my freight broke business, Menke Logistics.

I hope this helps you to better understand shipper lists and how to use them.

Remember, before you go buy a shippers list, or get a free shippers list to use, think about whether it’s really going to do your freight brokerage business any good.

You may find that it’s much more beneficial to create a high-quality list for yourself. If that’s the case head over to my website where I have plenty of resources to help you grow your freight brokerage business quickly and efficiently.