Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

In the case of purchased or shared lists, I normally ask the seller of the list to also make the email shoot.

Just prepare the email template you want and give it to your list provider to send, you should have negotiated this as part of the price.

In addition, it is much better to pay on a success basis so either an agreed price per

- mails successfully delivered (you don't know how good the list is)
- mails opened (higher price but lower volume)
- mails Clicked (higher again but lower volumes again )
- leads collected (if that is your goal )
- Sales achieved (an agreed commission )

We work with many affiilate platforms and list owners and all pricing is negotiable but you need to of course achieve ROI regardless.

Nowadays, it is not very common for people to just sell a list - there is just too much risk for the buyer.

The problem is the relevancy of the target audience, what are you offering exactly? how many people in the list you bought are potentiall clients for your service or product?

What is the size of the list we are talking about? a few thousand or a couple of million?

If it is only a small list like 500,000 then just shoot from your own SMTP. There are plenty of free tools in the market or very low price tools such as email marketer which I have used successfully or Group mail which is also great.

Don't expect great delivery success or great opening rates and be ready for a high level of opt out and Spam report clicks but nothing to worry about, it is normal. After your first shoot, you will have all the return logs and you can see exactly how many good addresses you actually have.

I would also suggest that during your first action, you 're opt them in' on your brand and then with this new 'Clean' list, you can go to a 3rd party email service to send succeeding mails.

Please feel free to get in touch with me if you need help, I will be happy to assist.

PS: just for your info - I am currently sending around 400 million opted in emails a year so I have a little experience in this space :)

Good luck.

Matthew
[Email address deleted by staff]

Matt is right, don't even send to a purchased list. Anyone who would sell a list is suspect. If it's really opt in they'll do a mailing for you for a fee. It's also not opt in. The person opted into an offer for the owner, not with you, so you'll be getting spam complaints if you send to it.

As the other two said no one is really going to sell an opt in list as it's worth too much money. We currently do a huge amount of email marketing and it's taken a long time to get the right lists. So it's question of price versus cost, price being what you paid for the list and cost being the overal cost of what it take to send it.

We guarantee a 95% delivery and a minimum 20% open rate or your money back on all opt in mail, so it's something that we don't take lightly as we're not in business to loose money.

Just be careful how you send it or you will get blocked or even worse banned by your isp.

Good luck and if I can help, gimmi a shout

Nev

Nev, I've always wondered about these guaranteed open rates.

As you really can't guarantee an open rate, isn't what really happens that the list gets overmailed so that the client gets an effective open rate on what he paid for?

In other words, 100,000 emails generate a 10% open rate, then you just send out another 100,000 emails -- at no cost -- to get another 10% for the client...

I've heard this is how it really works, but I wanted to ask.