- Opt-in or Opt-out?
- Why Not Spam?
- Email List Development
- How to Find Email Addresses Online
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Email List Development
There is an easy way and a hard way to obtain your email list. I am sorry to have to tell you that the hard way is generally going to produce the best long-term results for your business. First, though, let's consider the easy way: renting or buying lists.
Buying Lists
"1,000,000 email addresses. Clean and all brand new! Just $299!"
"35,000,000 email addresses on CD-ROM! Free with the purchase of our $299 bulk email program!" "25 Million Free Email Addresses With Purchase [of bulk email software]!" "1,000's of email lists where you can advertise without spamming!" Should you start shopping for address lists to use in your direct email marketing efforts, and there are certainly plenty to choose from on the Web; in the spam you receive, you will find a stunning range in prices—from $.0000085 or even less to $.30 or more an address! The top price is over 35,000 times the bottom price! What is the deal?
There are actually several factors at work. First, as I've already said, those offering to sell bulk email lists are almost universally despised, so you are not dealing with mainstream business people. These folks are not above "generating" email addresses by using a software program. Historically, this has been done with CompuServe addresses, which not long ago used to contain a ten-digit numerical account "name," followed by "@compuserve.com." With a setup like that, it is easy to see how a computer could generate several million such addresses in just a few minutes by repeatedly scrambling the digits. How many such randomly generated addresses are likely to be good? In one study, less than 4% were good addresses. That means more than 960 out of a thousand messages sent were bounced back for a bad address!
Most of the customers for bulk email lists are business novices trying to capitalize on the Internet gold rush. Like most novices, they are easy to bamboozle. After all, what is a mere $1,000 minimum when the budding capitalist expects to make $50,000 in Internet sales by tomorrow afternoon! The hype in the realm of bulk email will take your breath away.
Renting Lists
When you rent a mailing list for ordinary "snail mail" (regular postal mail), the list is delivered pre-printed on mailing labels. You use the list one time and then rent it again if you wish to send a second mailing to the same folks.
In email, when you rent a list, you never even see the addresses. If the list owner showed you the email addresses, you could just copy them for reuse as often as you liked. Obviously, the list owner would not like that. Customers would quickly get tired of getting too much email and would opt out or start doing hostile things.
If you never see the addresses you are renting, you must be careful. As in most projects having to do with Internet marketing, you need to move one step at a time. Start with a little test, then increase to a larger test, then a little larger, and so on, until you get where you want to be. A reputable company will assist you in such an approach. Beware the guy who insists on a great big program out of the starting gate. Such an approach is dangerous. On the happy side, you might get such a great response that you become overwhelmed with orders or inquiries, with the result that many of the leads you spent money to generate end up going to waste before you can get back to them. On the darker side, if your vendor is not on the up-and-up, and you pay for a big mailing, the negative reaction it triggers can sink your ship before you know what hit you.
Building Lists
When you think about developing an emailing list for your business, you might consider using one of the harvesting software programs. Here is how they work: The harvesting program sends instructions for a search to each of the search engines on the Web, just as if you were visiting the search engine site and had entered your chosen search term at that site. When the search engine sends the search results back to your computer, the program intercepts them, and instead of displaying the page in your browser, it searches through the page looking for "@" symbols. Each time it finds one, it assumes it is in the middle of an email address. All it has to do then is find the front and back ends of the address and put the whole thing into a text file, then go on with its search. A modern harvesting program running on a typical powerful desktop PC can search through thousands of pages an hour, collected from dozens of search engines. Sounds great, right?
In theory, harvesting addresses will produce a high-quality list if you choose search terms related to what you sell. The claim of the harvesting software vendors is that the address owners are likely to be interested in what you have to offer and the addresses harvested will be current and active. By targeting the harvesting program on special interest sites, the claim is, you will be able to collect addresses of individuals as well as companies.
In practice, harvesting addresses is a waste of time. Consider first the quality issue. Try this: visit AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com), one of the best search engines on the Web. Enter a search term and view the results. The first several listings are almost certainly relevant, but go down a few pages. What you will find is that, after the first two or three pages, the remaining thousands of pages that were returned are not the least bit relevant to the search terms you entered. In fact, it requires a very technical analysis even to see why the search engine chose to return most of the pages.
Another thing you will find is that a harvesting session will return a very high percentage of SYSOP addresses. Web developers and systems operators frequently put their addresses in a "footer" at the bottom of each Web page for the benefit of those who need technical assistance related to the page. (A footer is a few lines of text set up to appear automatically on each page.) These technical people are exactly the people a spammer does not want in his list. These folks have the means and the attitude to do you the most harm in the shortest time possible. If you want to see a rapid and hostile response, just send a spam message to a bunch of SYSOPs!
How about freshness of addresses? Netizens (net denizens) are nothing if not adaptable. Today we have all learned that the more often we put our email address out there, the more spam we receive. Many folks use free "throwaway" addresses at Hot-mail or Yahoo, which they change frequently when they start getting too much spam. Web page owners, especially those whose pages contain directories of email addresses, also use a number of tactics to make harvesting more difficult, such as replacing the "@" symbol with some other character.
As has often been observed, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Okay, here is the hard way to build and maintain your own prospect lists. Forget automatic harvesting. Forget the mailing list vendors. You do not need them, and if you try to use these tactics, you will probably suffer more than you prosper.
What does that leave? Simply put, collect your existing customers' addresses and dig for prospects' addresses using conventional methods, the Internet, your Web site, and any other tactics you can think of. Using these tactics you will not generate a list with millions of addresses on it. Your list will not even have hundreds of thousands of addresses. Your list will probably begin with just a few dozen or a few hundred email addresses and/or names. As you work on it, your list will grow to thousands, but they will be thousands of interested potential or existing customers, and if properly managed, this list can easily become your most valuable business asset.
Collect your customers' addresses at every opportunity, one at a time. Set up systems to collect each customer's email address automatically during the sales process or during any customer contact event. Pay bonuses to employees for meeting a quota of addresses—but be careful that you do not reward employees for unethical collection practices.
Collect your prospects' addresses wherever you can legitimately find them. If you exhibit at trade shows, make sure all the cards you collect in your fishbowl have an email address on them. If your customers have a common interest—quilting, auto mechanics, antiques, or whatever—find their special interest groups on the Web and mine their email address directories. Sending a promotion for quilting classes to a list of quilting club members is fair practice in most peoples' minds. Just be sure that you honor any remove requests when you get them.
Collecting the addresses of prospects when they are individuals with no organizing behaviors to help identify them is a lot more difficult, but savvy business promoters can still manage to do it. Two tried and true methods are customer referrals and contests. Ask customers for the names and addresses of friends who could be interested in what you have to offer. If they do not have their friends' addresses, look them up on the Web. Several great personal address directories let you do this for free. For a tutorial on finding addresses, take a look at the CD included with this book.