Why You Should Never Buy a List

What if you could drop a marketing email into 100,000 email boxes in one day for just a small fee? That sounds pretty enticing doesn’t it? There are companies around trying to sell you an enormous list to send your messages. This is a methodology commonly called “Mass Mailings”. That is the polite word for this technique. The correct term for that is simply SPAM. And there is one thing you should get straight into your head: You should never buy a list!

There are two problems with this marketing model. First, you definitely do not want to be classified as a spammer. Now, it is bad enough that the explosion of SPAM in the email world has made life difficult for the average cyber citizen and that those cyber citizens are the human beings you want to turn into your customers. But a by product of spam has also made life a lot harder for you and I, the average internet marketing business person.

Life has gotten harder for us because of SPAM, because of the reactionary explosion of SPAM filtering software being used by internet citizens and ISP’s. And those filtering programs are aggressive and successful, which means that most of your emails never make it to the customers, but disappear into SPAM folders to be eventually deleted. So because of this new problem, email delivery failures have skyrocketed, which has seriously harmed the value of email marketing, which is what we were hoping to use to prosper our online businesses in the first place. Ironic, isn’t it?

There is one more reason why you should never buy a list. The large email mailing list that the service brags about, is of dubious value. For one thing, you may or may not know how they harvested those emails, or whether those emails are even still valid. You have low confidence in that mailing list, and the only thing that makes up for that low confidence is the huge number of email addresses that they have on that mailing list.

Just a large mailing list is not a good mailing list, if it results in a low percentage of new customers, customers who purchase low values and customers who do not return for repeat sales. Because this big list will not help you any, if 90% are going into the SPAM folder, not even 1% are getting read, out of this 1% who are read, you get maybe 2% to click at your offer, and since they are not really interested, only 2-3% of those will buy. You see how your list is shrinking down to really an insignificant result, and you get a bad name as a spammer on top of that. You normally get less in sales than you paid for mailing the list. And you risk to be banned by your ISP and your Email Provider, besides of possible fines, which can get quite costly at the end. This is why a new marketing model is called for, that abandons the mass mailing approach and abandons your participation in SPAM, which is actually illegal by federal regulations of the CAN-Spam Act. I guess you get the picture why you should never buy a list.

That new marketing model calls for you to build relationships to your prospective clients. You offer them some value in the form of an insightful blog post, a free report, a good video or even a webinar, and you be sure to put those goodies into your email campaigns, so that they will be looking forward to receive your next email. And then, as soon as they get confidence in you as an authority in the field, as soon you have built a friendly relationship with them, they will be willing to buy, and they are willing to shell out quite a bit more of their money then they would at the first cold turkey offer.

Be sure to catch up with your existing customers as well, because those who have purchased already and are satisfied, are the group with is most likely to accept another offer from you. Those are the ones who know you already, and who have proven already that they are shelling out money for your offers. This way you build up your faithful customer base and will be set up for some recurring income. It really pays off to invest in your customers, because if they are satisfied, they will be your customers for a long time.

Once you have a faithful customer base you can enter into a referral contest. This way your clients will be reaching out to bring you like minded friends and family members to join your list, which gives you a potential of exponential growth. Because your satisfied customers will be the most convincing to get their friends on board.

With this method you will not have millions in your list all at once. But you do not need a big list, you need a responsive one. If you start right, you may have just a handful of subscribers to start with, but you do things right and the list will grow. Are you ready to start your email marketing the right way? We have prepared for you a free report showing you step for step how to get you set up with your email list, and how to grow it consistently. Just download the report now and get on your way to lasting success.