Purchasing email lists is a tricky business
Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, posted a blog a couple days ago “outing” the PR professionals that spam him. One PR guy on Chris’ shit list pleaded his case, explaining that he (the spammer) had rented an email list that happened to have Chris’ name on it.
From the thread:
I spent $10,000 this year on lists, email software, promotional cards etc. to promote my business and my work. You’re on a list of people who buy creative work that is sold to photographers every day. If you don’t really buy photography, why not just hit the unsubscribe button? Why give out your email?
A response to this person’s comment:
You just admitted to taking the lazy way out of everything and spam people. If you are spending that kind of money you should be checking to see if the list(s) you are getting is even of value and not have people like Chris on it.
First, no marketer ever reads all the names on the lists s/he buys; what would you look for? How would you know that, based on an email address, Chris wasn’t a good potential buyer? Second, “If you don’t really buy photography, why not just hit the unsubscribe button?” Um, right… ever considered that Chris, or most of us who get unsolicited email, didn’t opt-in to the list… to that specific list? While content providers should always ask for permission to give your name out, they don’t. Far from it. If you’re a subscriber to a magazine or a corresponding website, odds are that your email address is being sold by someone without your knowledge.
I have tried email marketing many, many times, and 99% of the time it does not work. I have purchased lists from various list brokers, experimented with HTML and text email, offered different incentives and came to one conclusion: it doesn’t work. And yet, and yet, it’s still a huge business.
People like the photographer in the first quote do it because it’s cheaper than direct mail. So-called “clean” lists contain “good” email addresses insofar as the email doesn’t bounce. But that’s all that’s good.
Unless someone opts in to receive your email, they don’t want it. Really. The chance of you sending them email when someone is (1) in the market to buy your product or service and (2) actually has time to read spam is low. Not impossible, but low.
(So, just to contradict myself, I did respond to a writer who emailed me a few days ago to let me know about his freelance business, but I’ve deleted 100+ emails before responding to this one)
Better alternatives (in a random order):
- Cold calling. As time intensive and difficult as it is, it’s better. Maybe because people are used to getting solicitations from sales reps, but it feels less intrusive to me. And provided that the sales person is courteous and aware of my time and not pushy, I don’t mind taking the call.
- Word-of-mouth marketing. There’s a whole friggn association set up around this, plus many bloggers writing about techniques.
- Google Adwords
- Advertise in other people’s newsletters. Very likely, Chris opts-in to newsletters that have ads in them. He’s much more likely to open a newsletter that he subscribed to than an email from a stranger.
- Blog. And optimize it so it can be found.
- Talk to bloggers. This is one of Chris’ main points, too. If the PR folks would simply have read his blog, learned about him, contacted him through his blog (while being nice and courteous) and asked him “who should I contact,” likely he would have responded in kind.
It’s not all that bad, think of it as a numbers game: you need to email a LOT to get results of some description. The dollar numbers also have to work, if you can keep your costs down, then email is a cost effective medium. Another aspect to think about is what are you using email for: if it is for up-selling or cross selling to existing customers, then you may have a very effective medium but if you’re buying lists for client acquisition then… it really is a numbers game.
One further aspect is that it may not generate a lot of volume: you may have excellent ROI from an email campaign not because it sold a lot or a lot of high ticket games but just because the medium is so cheap that mostly any sale will have a significant ROI impact.
Using your own lists to cross-sell and upsell is fair game.
While purchasing lists for email marketing is a numbers game, IMHO it’s also a bad game. Just ask the guy who emailed Chris Anderson. There are better ways to generate leads without pissing off potential customers… like the ones mentioned above and here.
Jon,
Email marketing to “rented” lists is not a numbers game nor is it a bad game for those who do it correctly.
1.) While I agree that many people who “opt-in” to lists haven’t a clue that they’ve done so, that doesn’t mean that they are bad prospects for a particular mailer. An example: if you had an opt-in mechanism whereby visitors to your company site subscribed to an e-newsletter on building Wiki’s — and they opted-in to “mailings from partners” — I can promise you that any marketer with a product offering related to the building, maintaining, promoting of a wiki will find success with your list. Why? Because the mailer would be sending something of real interest to the audience.
2.) Another component crucial to successful email marketing is the offer. You will never close a deal with a cold-email. But you can begin building the relationship. By offering something of value — information via a whitepaper or webinar, perhaps a trial of some sort — you can begin the dialogue that leads to an eventual sale. Email is for generating and qualifying leads.
3.) It’s not cheap. One of your posters stated that “it’s so cheap mostly any sale will have a significant ROI impact” is not true at all. At least not for the marketer who is following best practices and not SPAMMING. Thus, testing of creative, offers, and “legitimate” lists is essential.
Consider your mail box. I’m talking about the postal one. Would it make sense for me to send a direct mail piece promoting a subscription to Vogue Magazine to you? I’d be wasting my money. But if I knew you loved golf, for example, due to your subscription to a monthly magazine on golf, I wouldn’t be wasting my money putting a Golfsmith catalog in your mailbox.
It’s all about putting the right message in front of the right people — whether you’re talking about email, direct mail, online, TV, etc.
Just because you personally have a distaste for a particular medium does not make it ineffective. In fact, if done right, I propose you can beat the ROI on Google Adwords any day! Then again, it’s all about testing and measuring. In the end you want to generate the lowest cost per sale possible. You should try everything … and do it properly.
Sorry you’re email marketing efforts haven’t panned out thus far. Don’t give up though!
Just thought I’d post a link to The Email Marketing Kit over at SitePoint for people who are new to Email marketing. I used it when I first started and it has some great tips and techniques for maximizing your email campaigns.
http://www.sitepoint.com/launch/c6ac756/3/84
Email markteting does work but only with the best firms with the best opt in lists that are updated regularly.
Netmax Marketing comes highly recommended and can save you $1000′s.
One thing I am noticing is that 99.9 percent of all the sellers of email marketing are either a page rank 0 or a grey bar. hmmmm?
Hahaha! That’s a cleaver observation!
To be fair, some of these brokers are one-person shops and don’t get a lot of traffic to their site (hm… maybe they should try some email marketing?)
Sorry sir, but it isn’t spam if your name is on the list. If you didn’t somehow get on the list, you’d have never gotten the email in the first place.. Why is this a big deal anyway? If you get an email you don’t want, you delete it. Big deal! I get plenty of spam. But I can recognize it a mile away! There are bigger problems than spam.. sorry…
my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.
I am new to email marketing and found this information helpful. I agree as I would not know what to look for and know that the opt- in list would be people really interested in what I have to offer, which makes me skeptical to shell out my dough. But I have read a few other people suggest nextmax marketing so I might give it a try.