Don’t Buy Email Lists—Grow Your Own!
August 28th 2008
If you want to keep and maintain relationships with your prospects and customers (and who doesn’t), the best place to start is with proper introductions. Here’s an example of what NOT to do. According to a recent story in CIO Magazine:
Emailappenders, an organization that sells e-mail lists and has offices in the U.S. and the U.K, sold Javelin Marketing, a company based in Concord, California, a list of more than 100,000 e-mail addresses for people who had opted in to receive marketing material. The deal went sour when Javelin used the list for a marketing campaign. Javelin’s marketing director, Bob Richards, said that nearly 85 percent of the e-mail bounced, which he maintains indicates that most of the list was rubbish. He’s seeking a refund for the US$14,000 Javelin spent.
In the above story, email addresses were obtained through third-party systems. The ultimate recipient of the email didn’t know the sender and the likelihood that the recipient will be interested in what’s offered is slim (and in this case, the chances the the email addresses working were equally bad!). This is just one of the many reasons why list buying ultimately is a bad idea.
The moral of the story is this: Your organization can save a few bucks by growing email lists through healthier channels (i.e., not buying lists from third-party vendors) and, moreover, you have a much better chance at forming substantial business relationships with leads obtained through your own systems.
There are many ways to grow your list through the proper channels, one example being a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. By using a PPC campaign, you can forge a relationship BEFORE the visitor signs up for your email list. An interesting bit that may have been overlooked in the previous sentence: the visitor is signing up for your list, not being forced into it (like in the example story).
An example PPC process works like this: The visitor starts out by looking for something specific, something that ultimately you offer and decided to advertise on a search engine. When the visitor clicks on the link, it brings the visitor to your web site, which (if done well) should have a very targeted message that speaks to what this visitor was searching for. By the time the visitor gets to the point where he’s asked to sign up for your newsletter, the visitor will have a good idea that the content you’ll send will be useful, non-offensive information. And thus the beginnings of a healthy relationship are formed.
