Sat 19-Jan-2008 07:20 AM
Email Advertising - is it still viable?
tagged Internet Marketing and Uncategorized
With the enormous amount of spam being generated and ultimately being filtered and blocked on the Internet these days, is there any real value left in email advertising?
Well, yes and no. The trick is managing to find the correct form of email advertising and ensuring that the email contacts it is going to are verified, confirmed and actually receiving the emails. One of the most common forms of email advertising is to use safelists.
There are literally thousands of safelists available for you to join, own or administrate, but not all safelists are created equal. You might be surprised to learn that on maybe 60% of safelists, the emails only actually reach around 40% of those in their list (maybe even less).
If safelist advertising is a large part of your marketing strategy, make sure you check out the network before investing a lot of time. For example, a safelist network that contains hundreds of safelists might claim they have 300,000 members to send your ad to. Unfortunately, this is a highly inflated figure and reflects the total number of “members” but not the total number of emails. Generally, a member of one safelist in a network is also a member of multiple safelists, if not all of the ones in that network.
So a list of 300,000 members can be reduced to a total of 20,000 real people receiving your email. And of those 20,000 it’s highly likely that only 40% will actually receive it due to filtering, blocking and mail dumping.
This really is an unfortunate situation as safelists have long been the only method of “do-it-yourself” bulk email advertising that is free or very close to free. While not all lists suffer from these issues, there is a very large majority that do.
If you want to refine your safelist marketing, it would be a good idea to sign up for one or two lists in the networks you are considering and check to see if you are receiving emails - your own and others. If you don’t receive any email, the chances are that nobody will receive yours either. In addition, you will want to monitor how many solo ads are sent to your contact email address. Traditionally, your contact email address has been just that - an address to receive important emails when your admin needs to contact you. Today, however, it is mostly used as a means of generating income for the safelist admin by sending single ads that are paid for by members and other consumers.
If you find yourself receiving 10 or more of these solo ads a day, it might be better to look for other lists that are not emailed so heavily. Not only is it annoying to receive so many ads from each list, it also ties up their email server which usually delays or completely drops other “less important” emails, such as the advertising ones you intend to send to the lists yourself.
Some safelist networks, admins, hosts and owners do run responsible safelist sites, ensuring that solo advertising is kept to a minimum and that lists are only allowed within a few select submitters (a topic for another day). These managers ensure that bounce scripts are run frequently to clean out and delete email addresses that are blocked, meaning that the receipt rate for emails is closer to 90%.
Remember if you do sign up to any safelists to test out their responsiveness, you will need a very good email account that can stand receiving a lot of emails every day. Do not use your regular ISP email as it will most likely block safelist mail anyway. And when you send your ads to the lists, make sure you use a tracker such as GoTryThis to test the responsiveness of your ads on different lists.
If you are interested in finding out more about owning your own safelist, we recommend the following reputable networks:
Ultimate Safelist Host
Ezy Safelists
WooDoggie
For your safelist email account, we recommend one of the following:
Tags: Internet Marketing, Uncategorized
1 Comment »
With the enormous amount of spam being generated and ultimately being filtered and blocked on the Internet these days, is there any real value left in email advertising?
Well, yes and no. The trick is managing to find the correct form of email advertising and ensuring that the email contacts it is going to are verified, confirmed and actually receiving the emails. One of the most common forms of email advertising is to use safelists.
There are literally thousands of safelists available for you to join, own or administrate, but not all safelists are created equal. You might be surprised to learn that on maybe 60% of safelists, the emails only actually reach around 40% of those in their list (maybe even less).
If safelist advertising is a large part of your marketing strategy, make sure you check out the network before investing a lot of time. For example, a safelist network that contains hundreds of safelists might claim they have 300,000 members to send your ad to. Unfortunately, this is a highly inflated figure and reflects the total number of “members” but not the total number of emails. Generally, a member of one safelist in a network is also a member of multiple safelists, if not all of the ones in that network.
So a list of 300,000 members can be reduced to a total of 20,000 real people receiving your email. And of those 20,000 it’s highly likely that only 40% will actually receive it due to filtering, blocking and mail dumping.
This really is an unfortunate situation as safelists have long been the only method of “do-it-yourself” bulk email advertising that is free or very close to free. While not all lists suffer from these issues, there is a very large majority that do.
If you want to refine your safelist marketing, it would be a good idea to sign up for one or two lists in the networks you are considering and check to see if you are receiving emails - your own and others. If you don’t receive any email, the chances are that nobody will receive yours either. In addition, you will want to monitor how many solo ads are sent to your contact email address. Traditionally, your contact email address has been just that - an address to receive important emails when your admin needs to contact you. Today, however, it is mostly used as a means of generating income for the safelist admin by sending single ads that are paid for by members and other consumers.
If you find yourself receiving 10 or more of these solo ads a day, it might be better to look for other lists that are not emailed so heavily. Not only is it annoying to receive so many ads from each list, it also ties up their email server which usually delays or completely drops other “less important” emails, such as the advertising ones you intend to send to the lists yourself.
Some safelist networks, admins, hosts and owners do run responsible safelist sites, ensuring that solo advertising is kept to a minimum and that lists are only allowed within a few select submitters (a topic for another day). These managers ensure that bounce scripts are run frequently to clean out and delete email addresses that are blocked, meaning that the receipt rate for emails is closer to 90%.
Remember if you do sign up to any safelists to test out their responsiveness, you will need a very good email account that can stand receiving a lot of emails every day. Do not use your regular ISP email as it will most likely block safelist mail anyway. And when you send your ads to the lists, make sure you use a tracker such as GoTryThis to test the responsiveness of your ads on different lists.
If you are interested in finding out more about owning your own safelist, we recommend the following reputable networks:
Ultimate Safelist Host
Ezy Safelists
WooDoggie
For your safelist email account, we recommend one of the following:
Tags: Internet Marketing, Uncategorized
