Your Questions About Email Marketing Lists

Jere answers:

Emails are a tough thing to obtain – especially those that target people for certain things. How many times have you had an email that requested information which would allow and advertiser to actually target you as a prospective customer? I haven’t seen any yet.

Also, emails can often get lost in spam.

I work for a direct marketing company. More and more people are asking for this due to the low cost of getting the message out, however they don’t realize the response rate is MUCH lower than about any other advertising medium.

There are many places to go to get data – check out the Direct marketing association to find out what might be the best way to do what you wish to do. Also there are companies list InfoUSA that deal in data mining and may be able to help you.

What about placing an advertisement for your site on other sites that people looking for your services are likely to be visiting? This could allow them to come to your site, enter their information and now you have a viable, accurate email address?

You may also determine what cities and audience demographics are most likely to come to your site also – I don’t know for sure what they’d be, you likely know better, but say “San Francisco – men aged 25- 35” are most likely to be fitness fanatics – or maybe women between a certain age with children of a certain income level are the best place to start targeting. You can purchase “resident” lists quite cheaply for these people – they don’t include the person’s name, only the addresses so they are cheap to purchase. Then if you send out the smallest cost communication you can – such as a 4.125 x 6 postcard simply advertising your site and how to get there perhaps including an offer like “enter this code to receive 10% off when you become a member”. If you were to identify say 3 large cities and use very narrow demographics then build on that by offering things like discounts for sharing with friends, a small investment in print/mail might get the generator starting.

I think you’d have to purchase like 10X as many emails as you wish to have people contact you (or more) because you can’t target email nearly as well as you can mail. List companies use public domain information such as information found in phone books or the like to identify a person. They routinely proces their data against NCOA data bases by the post office and update when a person moves and leaves a forwarding address for the post office.

Good luck!

Jere answers:

MailChimp is an awesome company for sending email campaigns. They offer a free plan but depending on how may emails you plan to send they have a tied paid plans. Our business uses them and have not been disappointed.

Jere answers:

Blacklists do not decide to block or allow your email to be delivered. The mail servers may check your IP address and the URI’s the message contains against blacklists and decide to block or allow delivery.

There are two types of blacklists that will effect your operation. They are IP blacklists and URI blacklists. One of them lists possible SPAMing IP addresses and the other lists possible URI’s associated with SPAMing.

Different blacklists have different listing policies. While some collect and list IPs of mail servers that send to some “trap” email addresses others might list dynamicly assigned IP addesses, such as ADSL subscribes. There are many variations. You can find a list of blacklists on http://www.blalert.com/dnsbls and details on how they work.

You could also use a monitoring service like http://www.blalert.com to monitor your IPs if they are listed on any of the blacklists.

Jere answers:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But when you buy an email list you have essentially paid good money for a list of strangers who do not know you.

If your intent is to eventually get them to respond to one of your promotional messages, you have to first warm them up to you. What do I mean? Build a relationship with them. No, I don’t mean get to know their inner soul but rather to communicate with them and let them get to know you. It’s best if the list you bought naturally ties in with what you intend to offer them. Start out slow and send them some useful info. Do it consistently over 2 weeks before you even think to send them a promotion.

Here is an example of what I mean: have you checked out some of the unknown comics on Comedy Central? You’ve never seen their act before but after they are done, usually 15 minutes, you feel like you’ve known them your whole life. That, in a nutshell, is what you have to try to do with your email messages.

It’s hard if you don’t prepare. So make sure you do. To get you started, I’ve written down some sources of articles that teach you how to do this.

Some stress targeting your market, others stress building the relationship and other’s deal with how to create your very own list. That’s the list that always pays big. There is one article that gives you the details on how to avoid being penalized by the CAN SPAM law. That one is very important.

I suggest you read the one on the WordPress blog. It goes straight to the point.

Jere answers:

There are plenty of bulk email marketing and creating lists and automated responders how tos, ebooks, articles and software i found at this site as i am doing the same thing thought id help u out and share it with you , its a free signup and access to 1000’s of business related material all free to download and view it helped me greatly