What Are E-Mail Lists?

What is the number one priority of businesses today? If you answered getting clients to purchase their products or services, you are absolutely right. With the advent of the Internet, businesses no longer need to spend thousands of dollars on advertising to attract clients; they can simply purchase e-mail lists. But, what exactly is an e-mail list? According to an on-line definition an e-mail list is “a list of target e-mail recipients usually contained within your e-mail program enabling you to send bulk e-mail to many recipients at one time. You build up e-mail lists in particular categories usually after each "subscriber" has specifically asked to be on your list via a web page guest book or a notice that says "Join our list". Otherwise if you start sending out e-mail ads to unwilling recipients you may suffer the reputation of being an annoying spammer. ” What exactly is a spammer?” A spammer is someone/company that sends unsolicited e-mail advertisements to unsuspecting Internet users.

What Are the Best Ways To Compile A Legitimate E-Mail List?

There are many ways to collect valid e-mail addresses. How about a Guest Book?  A guest book allows the website visitor to leave a comment or suggestion on your website. Before gaining access to the comment section, the visitor must provide an e-mail address along with a password/user name. This is beneficial in two ways, you have now have gained access to what visitors think about your website, services or company. Secondly, you have acquired a legitimate e-mail address that can lead to future business for your company. What is another way of building permission based e-mail list, Double Opt-In. With a double opt-in list, you have obtained a visitor's e-mail address not once-but twice. Now, you may be asking yourself, how is that possible? Well, it is quite simple. The potential customer has visited your website, approved your services and provided contact information which must include a valid e-mail address. You have now obtained a new customer and his/her e-mail address with complete consent. Double Opt-In takes this one step further by sending a confirmation e-mail to the e-mail address originally supplied by the visitor. By clicking on the link provided within the body of the confirmation e-mail, your newly acquired customer has opted-in for a second time. Congratulations, you are well on your way to building a legitimate e-mail list!

Buyer Beware:

Before purchasing an e-mail list there are several things you should consider. How did your service provider acquire these e-mails? How often do they update their database? Do these e-mails belong to an opt-in list? These factors can play a significant role in the success of your e-mail marketing campaign. What are some of the methods that your e-mail list provider may be using to gather e-mail addresses for your list? Well, the first method is pretty basic and is called E-Mail Harvesting. E-mail harvesting is when a service provider hunts and jots down the e-mail addresses of unsuspecting contributors to on-line forums, blogs, job sites, chat rooms-basically any place in which e-mail addresses are on display. This is in effect a spam list -anyone that you contact on this list can report your company as a spammer, you do not want that!

Opt-Out e-mail addresses are based on a visitor's willful subscription to a newsletter or service. Have you ever visited a website and found yourself checking off boxes nearing the end of the subscription process that asks you to sign on for additional newsletters? If you have ever checked off any of these boxes, you have been a part of the opt-out process. Now, what is the problem with opt-out lists? Have the e-mails been gathered with consent? Yes, remember you checked off the boxes for the additional newsletters/services. The problem is quite simple, toward the end of the subscription process; you are overwhelmed and will do anything to finish with this project. So, what happens next? You check off two or three boxes and begin to receive newsletters or other advertisements which you do not recall approving. Next thing you know, you have accused a perfectly sound company of spamming. This is a complete waste of a company's time, money and website space.

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