Comments on: Purchasing email lists is a tricky business

By: christine

christine — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:29:41 +0000

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.

By: Martin H

Martin H — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:07:46 +0000

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�.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:14:01 +0000

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…

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:51:18 +0000

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?)

By: Jose

Jose — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:03:23 +0000

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?

By: Kev.

Kev. — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:07:38 +0000

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.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:21:08 +0000

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

By: Bernard Ryan

Bernard Ryan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:18:50 +0000

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.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:52:34 +0000

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.

By: Adelino de Almeida

Adelino de Almeida — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:14:06 +0000

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.