Email Marketing

I’ve never been big on mass email marketing. Building your own in-house list from scratch – yes. Mass mailings to lists from other providers – no.

What I’m talking about here is “technically” not spam. I’m referring to small ads in other people’s ezines. Buying double opt-in lists from list brokers. Mailing to people that, probably without reading the terms of service, unwittingly agreed to receive messages from anybody that the company they were giving their email address to wanted to sell said information to.

I finally broke down and bought some lists for doing some testing. Out of almost 62,000 emails, I actually mailed to about 30,000 over the past few days. The results? Pffft. I saw no increase in traffic period, and no hits that could be attributed to the email marketing campaign.

Therefore, here are some thoughts on lists if you’re thinking about buying into one:

1. Blind access to somebody else’s mailing list is probably useless without validation from the owner of the list – since the people on the list trust/respect the opinion of that person.

2. Ezine’s with subjects outside the immediate scope of your own endeavor are pointless to mail to (i.e., real estate stuff to a “biz opp seekers” list).

3. Blind lists are the worst of the bunch. Here I define a “blind list” as a generic double opt-in consumer email list where the people signed up simply because they were after the free ring tone, free iPod, or whatever other gimmick was used, and the conditions for which include allowing their email address to be given to, well, ANYBODY.

These are things that I already knew by intuition, but I’ve never been a big email marketer (it’s mostly spam to me) so I’ve never tested it. It’s nice when actual results can vet your own instincts, eh?