Renting an email listing means that you get access to an already-existing email list of folks you can email on a regular basis. When you rent an email listing, you only gain one-time rights to contact the sender, but the person who owns the list runs the list for you on a continuous basis. So, basically, you never own the emails you subscribe to. However, as you become accustomed to the program and utilize it properly, it’s possible to build quite a large list of members who will be happy to receive your emails. In order to do that, there are some things you need to do first. You should start by building the list organically.
Start with Facebook and Twitter. These two social media giants allow members to create accounts which they can then share with the entire world. It’s easy to reach out to friends on Facebook and Twitter who may also be interested in your niche. Additionally, there is lots of content sharing going on in these two locations, so you’ll definitely want to start building your lists through them, too.
The next thing you need to do is to look for the addresses of those who have indicated that they are interested in your marketing practice through Facebook and Twitter. These addresses can be found using a service called Address Buzz. This site pulls information from the social networking giant to find public addresses. You can also perform your own search for public addresses but you’ll likely get much better results from Address Buzz since it is more reliable.
Once you have collected addresses from Facebook and Twitter, the next thing you need to do is send out emails. This marketing technique should continue to be used until you have about five or six members on your mailing list. At that point, you can begin using targeted emails, not just bulk email mails. By now, people will have opened their emails and seen your messages. They are more likely to want to sign up for your list if they’ve seen that you’re putting a lot of effort into getting to them.
There are pros and cons to both of these techniques, but it comes down to how your marketing plan works. With marketing through Facebook and Twitter, it can be hard to focus on one group and market to them exclusively. That’s why many marketers rent lists for the sole purpose of doing that. However, they do so at their own risk. There are several groups that simply are not interested in any kind of sales pitch.
For instance, consider the following real estate market: A realtor has listings of homes for sale in her area. Every week, she sends an alert to her Facebook and Twitter account subscribers with information about the open rates of different homes. If there are a lot of sellers who are looking to rent their properties, she’ll mention the homes in detail in each of her alerts. If there are a smaller number of buyers, she won’t mention them at all. Therefore, even though the information about the open rates is useful to marketers, it doesn’t provide them with a specific group of subscribers to focus their efforts on.
On the flip side of this, when a person uses a contact list for the purpose of renting email addresses, the addresses she provides are specifically chosen for contact-making purposes. The problem is that many people will not share the exact same names with all of their contacts. Hence, the addresses may end up in the spam folder, where nothing but junk mail can be found. As mentioned before, marketers need to choose the right group of subscribers for their marketing plans.
Fortunately, there is a solution that can ensure that the addresses a marketer chooses for a mailing list are targeted ones. Mailing lists are typically sold to companies and individuals who are interested in a specific product or service. Because they are interested in the product, the subscribers on such lists are much more likely to be interested in the product as well. In other words, the marketing messages are more likely to land in the inboxes of those subscribers who want the products that are on the mailing list. Thus, they can be much more responsive to marketing efforts.