Building a B2B prospect list in Australia

ABN Lookup, the public face of the Australian Business Register. It covers every entity with an ABN, which includes sole traders as well as companies, and it states the entity type outright. The weekly bulk extract gives you the whole register as XML. What it does not carry is any industry classification, which is the one thing you most want for targeting. ABN Lookup.

No. The bulk extract holds ABN, ABN status and date, entity type, legal name, business and trading names, the state and postcode of the main business location, ACN, GST status and Deductible Gift Recipient status. There are no ANZSIC industry codes and no full street addresses. This is the single biggest practical difference from the UK register, which does carry industry codes. What the bulk extract contains.

Yes. The web services are free, but you have to register, accept the agreement and use an authentication GUID on every call. They search by ABN, by ACN and by business name. They are a lookup and verification service rather than a discovery one, so if you want the whole register for filtering, take the weekly bulk extract instead. Registering for the web services.

Not from the register, because the industry field is not there. You start from a different axis, usually an industry association directory, a trade body membership list, a marketplace or a paid database, and then use ABN Lookup to verify each entity, confirm it is still active and establish whether it is a company or a sole trader. The register is the verification layer here rather than the discovery layer, which is the reverse of how it works in the UK. How the UK build differs.

Less than it does in the UK, and not in the way people assume. Australian email rules turn on whether consent can be inferred, which depends on the address being conspicuously published and the message being relevant to that person’s role, not on whether the entity is incorporated. Where entity type earns its keep is the phone: a sole trader is more likely to be reachable only on a mobile used primarily for private purposes, and that is precisely the sort of number that can sit on the Do Not Call Register. The phone rules.

You can, and for industry targeting you may have to, because the free register cannot do it. Ask two questions before you pay. What is the provider’s actual Australian coverage in your vertical, rather than their global record count, since ANZ coverage is where most of the large international databases are thinnest. And when were these contacts last verified, because Australian business data decays quickly and the register will tell you, free, which of them no longer have an active ABN.

Building it is not the regulated act. Contacting it is. The register is public and designed to be used. The Spam Act governs the email, the Do Not Call Register Act and the telemarketing standard govern the phone, and the Privacy Act governs the personal information in between. This page is general information rather than legal advice. The Spam Act rules.