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  • From: "Shea Tisdale" <shea AT sheatisdale.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Is there such a thing as an "opt in" email marketing list?
  • Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 17:25:16 -0400

Michael, having worked in direct marketing for a major online player, I can
tell you that there is no such thing as a good opt-in list you can buy - or
more accurately rent. Those that are available have been rented so many
times that their value is very low.

And, the serious online businesses guard their list very carefully. As we
did. If you think about it, a customer list can be the most valuable asset
a company has - especially for businesses in service industries or in
industries where their product is a commodity that is available from
multiple sources.

This is not to say that lists you can rent won't be productive, just that
they are not what they are cracked up to be. You can expect very low
return - several orders of magnitude lower than names you collect yourself.
And much lower than direct mail or other promotional methods. However, the
costs can also be significantly lower than the other methods.

To look at your two points.

1. No. From and end user perspective there is no such thing as a true
opt-in list that is available for rent. Any email from any other source
than where they opt'd in is perceived as SPAM or more appropriately as
unsolicited bulk email. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it will piss
off everyone on the list or that it won't be effective. The reason there is
unsolicited bulk email is because it works to some extent. So you should
expect it to work for you to some extent. In our case, we saw a conversion
rate of .001% - .015% for rented lists. With a complaint rate of about
.008%. Compared to a conversion rate of 1% to 14% for our in-house list
with perhaps 1 complaint for every 1 million emails. And we never rented
our list to anyone. FYI, our active in-house list was 1.5 million and most
of the lists we rented were 1 million or less and supposedly targetted to
our market.

2. Real potential customers do join these types of lists, but frequently
forget about it. Therefore many recipients perceive messages from those
lists as unsolicited as well. But a fair number don't forget it and don't
mind the messages. The best email you can do to lists like this are partner
emails. Where the site owner who collected the addresses sends out a
message featuring your company or product as part of his email. These tend
have a slightly higher return rate than those I've mentioned above. I know
I signed up at the XYZ site and now the XYZ site is telling me about
something - so I read it. More people open the messages. Therefore higher
conversion. This is just like editorial placement in magazines.

One thing you didn't touch on was how you will email and how you will track.
That is just about the most important thing you can do, because otherwise
you won't know if it's working or not. And in many cases you won't be able
to verify that the list owner actually sent the messages. Some simply don't
sent them and that is a major problem in email list rental. We had it
happen numerous times. In traditional postal bulk mail the major players
measure everything and test frequently. I'll skip over the details, but
suffice it to say it can be very scientific. Traditional bulk email has
been just the opposite in most cases and then people wonder why they upset
people, or the return rate is so low, etc.

I actually took the methods used for traditional postal mail and designed
systems to do the same for bulk email. This gave us a significant advantage
in our direct email efforts. If you want to know more, I'd be happy to
discuss it off the list. I'm sure any more would bore people on the list.

Shea


----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Winslow Czeiszperger" <michael AT czeiszperger.org>
To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/";
<internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2003 3:19 PM
Subject: [internetworkers] Is there such a thing as an "opt in" email
marketing list?


> Recently I've been working with an electronic marketing class at NC
> State, who in conjunction with the professor worked up a couple of
> critiques of my company's marketing plan. One of the main suggestions
> was to start using "email marketing" by purchasing an "opt-in" email
> list, so rather than dismiss their suggestion out of hand, as I would
> like to do, I thought I'd run it by the collective IW brain trust. It
> seems to be there's two ways of looking at this for marketing to IT and
> computer professionals:
>
> 1. As far as the technical customer is concerned, there is no such
> thing as an "opt-in" marketing list, and all email sent would be
> unwanted and would piss off any potential customers.
>
> 2. Real potential customers actually do join "opt-in" lists, say
> through a web development magazine, and have indicated they like (for
> some reason) to receive email about products.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
> _________
> Run, run, run, as fast as you can. You can't catch me, I'm the stinky
> cheese man!
> -- michael at czeiszperger dot org, Chapel Hill, NC
>
> ---
> Come and play at the InterNetWorkers Web site!
http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/
> You are currently subscribed to InterNetWorkers mailing list
> To unsubscribe visit
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/internetworkers




  • Re: [internetworkers] Is there such a thing as an "opt in" email marketing list?, Shea Tisdale, 04/24/2003

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