All about Mailing Lists
Email marketing can be advantageous for any business, regardless of what product or service is on offer. It is much cheaper than other kinds of advertizing. Moreover, it is good for building trust between your customers and you. As a result, your sales will increase and you will make more profit.
The basis of email marketing is a targeted, voluntary mailing list. If you have a list of subscribers who trust you and consider you an expert in a specific area, you are on the right path.
Why do you need to create a mailing list
Here are some tips to help you create your mailing list:
- Direct electronic mailing is a tool of mass communication, group communication, and advertising. It consists of automatically sending email messages to a group of recipients by using a pre-made list of email addresses.
- A mailing list (email list) is a named list of email addresses. It is used for mass sending of email messages, which usually advertise something or inform the recipient about something.
- By sending such messages, you can increase the loyalty of your customers, keep them interested in your product or company, tell them about new products, conduct surveys, and so on.
How to Create Email List (Mailing List):
To make an email list, you can use one of the following three methods:
- Scrape email addresses using special programs, known as email extractor software. (This is the fastest and most reliable method.)
- Collect email addresses through a website subscription form.
- Buy mailing lists of email addresses from specialized companies.
If by regularly sending entertaining or informational emails you manage to amass a sufficient number of subscribers, you can insert advertisements in your messages, which will help you cover your expenses or maybe even make a profit. (But it’s important not to overdo it with ads.) It may seem that sending ad-sponsored messages to mailing-list subscribers is less effective than spamming, simply because the number of recipients is much smaller.
Nonetheless, such low-key advertizing is in demand as not every advertiser wants to be associated with spammers. Besides, this approach has an important advantage: Thanks to useful information in the messages, they won’t be blocked by spam filters.
Why you shouldn’t buy email lists
A lot of people would like to get a ready list of email addresses, which can be used for direct mailing. Why spend months to collect email addresses, if you can buy them for a reasonable sum?
But it’s not that simple, and in most cases buying a list of addresses is a waste of money. Let me explain the reason.
Suppose some guy has collected a list of email addresses for his own use; surely, he has acquired a very valuable resource! In this case, email marketing will work great, because that guy has a list of persons he can send messages to on a regular basis; it will help him increase his sales, build trust, stimulate software downloads, etc.
However, the value of such list may decrease if it’s misused. For example, if you flood your subscribers with tons of ads, they may stop replying to you or just unsubscribe. Besides, spam abuse complaints may follow.
As you can see, there is a good reason to value your mailing list. If the list owner decides to let third parties send messages using that list, he would surely want to control the process. Be warned that if someone offers you an email list without any conditions, thousands of other people may get that list too. The end user will be receiving thousands of messages; naturally, no one is going to read all them, so the effect from ads will be very small (if not zero).
Therefore, if someone offers you a list of email addresses or proposes to send direct emails on behalf of you, in 99 out of 100 cases you will get a list of addresses flooded with spam.
In the best case, the effect from your direct emails will be negligent; in the worst, your site will be banned for spamming. Beware of offers like “1 million email addresses for $10” — that’s just another way to say goodbye to your money!
It is much more effective to collect a list of email addresses on your own by using a special program, so-called “email extractor” (also referred to as “email grabber”). Thanks to such software, you can create targeted mailing lists by specifying keywords for searching or websites for scanning.
