If you’ve been looking into buying or renting a mailing list or e-mail list, you may well have come across some people who claim to be list compilers while others (like List Guy) are list brokers. The two kinds of companies tend to sound like they do similar things to each other, but in reality they are quite different and a list broker can actually save you money and hassle in the long run. Here’s what you need to know:

A List Broker Defined

Just like a real estate broker, list brokers don’t actually own any mailing lists. Or they own very few of them. Instead, they act as a kind of a middle man between the people who have built the list from scratch (typically by doing the hard work of building it up over time) and the people who want to purchase or rent a mailing list for their new products.

A List Complier Defined

A list compiler by comparison will create the actual list of e-mail leads and will know exactly where the information came from. At times, it’s a legitimate list of e-mail leads, which will allow you to sell products to this person’s own clients. However, at times, a list compiler will compile their lists through scraping, meaning that they looked for e-mail lists from people who posted their e-mail address in forums and the like online.

Isn’t It Cheaper to Cut the Middle Man Out?

You may think that cutting out the list broker is a good idea – after all, why should you pay a percentage to a middle man? In many cases, not paying the percentage does make sense. It make sense for example to not pay a percentage to the middle man when you can buy a product directly that you know meets your needs.

List Brokers Can Help Pinpoint Just the Right List

However, in the last of mailing lists, you need to consider more than just the question of saving money. You need to consider as well the question of what you actually need. A list compiler, even one who doesn’t cheat and compiles a quality list, knows only about his or her own mailing list and nothing else. They can’t help you to find a different list which may be a better choice for your needs because they don’t have one. In this respect, it’s no different than working with a real estate broker in a new city – you try to use someone who knows the area because you don’t know it yourself.

List Compilers Don’t Like Small Clients

The other reason why you want to work with a quality list broker as opposed to a list compiler is quite simply that most compilers are busy running their own businesses. They aren’t interested in renting you 1,000 e-mail addresses. They want to rent out the whole e-mail list of 250,000 people or not at all. A list broker by comparison can make deals with individual list compilers to arrange access to their lists so that you can get rent or buy just what you need.

Bottom Line

In short, think of the list broker as being the personalized service that you need when you work in an unfamiliar area whereas the list compiler is kind of like dealing with the manufacturer when you know exactly which product you need and you just want to negotiate the best bulk deal available.

For a technology which has been around for a long time, SMS has taken a while to catch on as a way to do direct marketing. However, these days the short text messages which were an afterthought on the cellular system have become an important part of the direct marketing tool chest. Here’s what you need to know:

Cheaper than Direct Mail

As much as we are fans of direct mail campaigns, they are quite expensive and they can be difficult for some small businesses to use as a way to make sales to customers. The costs of printing and the costs of postage have become quite high and this has meant that people have been looking for alternatives to this traditional method of direct marketing.

E-mail Takes Some Marketing Efforts

E-mail of course has been used for some marketing efforts and we heartily recommend it as an inexpensive way to do direct marketing. It is quite inexpensive and still effective. However, as much as we’re fans of e-mail marketing, there are limits given that e-mails don’t always get opened by the people who receive them, meaning that you are losing a portion of your potential customers before they ever see our message.

SMS Gets Opened

By contrast, almost everyone will at least look at an SMS message that they receive on their cell phones. This means that you are able to get your message out to more people than you might otherwise manage to reach out to. Of course, the downside is that you have to be really concise since SMS messages are so short.

Crafting an SMS Message

When crafting an SMS message for your direct marketing campaign, consider it to be much like a Twitter message – it needs to be extremely short and get right to the point. “50% of 42” HDTV” along with a phone number or short web address is pretty much all you should be putting up on your SMS message rather than a long explanation. This means that SMS direct marketing isn’t going to be useful for everyone – your product needs to be one which lends itself to being explained in short, simple terms.

Who SMS Is Not For

Basically, if your product or service requires any kind of explanation, or if you are trying to raise money for a non profit which doesn’t have a super simple message (i.e. “help feed hungry Americans this Christmas”) then you should probably consider using some other form of direct marketing, such as direct mail or e-mail instead of SMS.

One issue that many people have when working with e-mail lists is the question of open rates, meaning how often the e-mails actually get opened by the people receiving them. You can generally track these numbers through your e-mail listserv program and it is quite important that you do so if you want to ensure that you get the most from e-mail lists that you buy or rent.

But just knowing that your e-mails are or are not getting opened is only one part of the equation. The other part is to know why they aren’t getting opened. Here are six questions to ask yourself if your e-mail list open rates are low:

Did You Have a Good Subject Line?

You want it to sound interesting and not spammy. I personally tend to delete the ones that try to get around spam filters with things like F’REE or F*REE. I also don’t like the ones which say that they are regarding my orders. While I am more likely to open them in case it’s something I really did order, I’m also more likely to hit the spam button for such junk once I see what it is. Try to make it something which sounds urgent but not like spam (Black Friday Sale for example).

Are You Sending Out Too Often?

People begin to tune you out if you send out e-mails to them too often. You want to make sure that you are sending out e-mails no more than a few times a week and often just once a week if you want to ensure that your e-mail lists will stay useful to you.

Is the Economy Bad?

There’s not a whole lot you can do about a crappy economy, but the fact remains that if the economy is bad, you can at least try to address this by offering limited time sales to attract additional customers. Mention this in the subject line when sending something to your e-mail list to ensure that they know that you are sensitive to their financial situation.

Do You Have Duds?

If you buy or rent an e-mail list from us, it’s usually going to be fairly fresh, with quality leads. However, if you have an old list or worse, one bought from elsewhere, it’s entirely possible that the list is full of dud e-mail addresses which are simply not valid anymore (if they ever were). You should be able to see the rejection rates for your e-mails as well to ensure that this isn’t a problem for you.

Are You Getting Dumped In Spam Filters?

There are two ways to end up in spam filters. The first is to constantly spam people and get your e-mail address marked as one that is owned by a spammer. The second way is to use spammy content or subject lines. As I noted above, if you try to game spam filters with silly tricks like writing F’REE, you are actually more likely to end up in spam filters because you look like a spammer.

Do You Have Lots of Freebie Seekers?

Finally, if you find that your subsequent e-mails are not getting opened, it’s possible that you have an e-mail list made up primarily of freebie seekers – people who didn’t really care about what you had for sale but who were merely interested in getting whatever you had for free. You can filter for this when building an e-mail list by offering a physical product which is “free” with a shipping charge. This will ensure that those who sign up for your e-mail lists are in fact people who have a credit card and spend money. While it won’t eliminate the deal seekers, it will cut down on them significantly.

No, I’m not trying to actually get you to play poker with me. I’m no good at it and would lose my shirt to almost any decent poker player out there. However, playing poker, or rather, knowing how to play poker can make a huge difference when you want to learn how to most effectively use the marketing lists you buy here at LisGuy. Here’s what you need to know:

Don’t Tip Your Hand

Look, if you want to succeed with our marketing lists, then you need to know one thing: there is a lot of competition out there and that means that you don’t want to let them know about what you have to offer until you are actually read to offer it. That means that just like when you play poker, you need to keep your “hand” or in this case, your offerings close until you are ready to reveal them.

So when you buy a marketing list from us, be sure to hold off on sending out e-mails until you have a finished product to offer. The coy hints that places like Apple or Microsoft use are not likely to be a good choice for you. Never mind that you generally get a limited number of chances to send out an e-mail to the lists your rent anyway.

Watch Your Competition’s “Cards”

Watch what the competition is doing, just as you might do in poker. This means that you subscribe to e-mail lists from your competition (best to use an anonymous e-mail address) so that you can keep track of them. This also point up by the way the comment above as to why you don’t want to tip your hand to potential competitors. They’ll likely be subscribed to your e-mail list and will do something similar.

Know When You Have a Good Hand

This is a bit of a stretch when it comes to using marketing lists, but it does still fit (somewhat) with my poker analogy. Basically, you need to keep track of your open rates on your e-mails as you send them out to our marketing lists. Keep close track and use split testing where you send one e-mail to one half of the list and one to another, with different headlines as well. This will allow you to keep close track of who is actually opening your e-mails and who is making purchases.

The poker analogy here is – know when you have a good hand. That means that you need to keep track of the cards and know that you have a strong hand or a weak hand, especially before you throw out cards and ask for additional ones. The same thing with marketing lists – before you waste money on sending out the same or similar e-mails again, know that your e-mails are actually getting some success before you use them.

If you are an old hand with e-mail marketing, you may not need to read this, though it’s possible you’ll still find that this blog post is relevant to you. If you are new to e-mail list marketing however, then you definitely need to watch out for these pitfalls. These are “branding” mistakes which you can easily make (and people do them all the time) when you send out e-mails to a new e-mail list. Here’s what you need to know:

My Only Offer is Price

I can’t tell you how many people think that they can make money with an e-mail list by differentiating themselves from the competition on price. This is just a terrible idea for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, no matter how cheap you think you can offer your product, someone else will offer it cheaper to undercut you. This creates a race to the bottom which will ultimately lead to you and your competitors wasting money while the smart people make money by differentiating themselves in some other way.

Second and more importantly, when you offer deals which sound too good to be true, people’s scam radar is alerted and they assume that you must be a spammer. This is a terrible thing for anyone who works in the e-mail list business to have happen to them and it will ultimately sink your business before it starts.

Telling Lies

I will never understand why it is that so many people who use e-mail list marketing think that they can get away with lying to their customers. Whether the lies are about your pricing being a temporary deal (sure it’s temporary – we don’t expect to be charging the same thing 10 years from now) or your lies are about what your product will actually do for your potential customers, both will sink your business quickly and mean that your e-mail list rental will be an utter waste of time and money.

Now that’s not to say you won’t get a few suckers to buy into your lie. But ultimately, if you want to use an e-mail list to build a business instead of grabbing money from a handful of suckers, then you need to tell your customers the truth. Just do it in a way which doesn’t make them feel as if they shouldn’t care about your products (i.e. tell them why it is a good deal and really do offer a limited time offer).

Spamming Your List

Finally, I see so many e-mail list marketers who spam their lists that I’m amazed it’s still being done. No one wants to hear from you five times a day. Even once a day is extreme. Stick to sending out e-mails every few days and be sure to tweak your subject lines and your e-mail content itself until you find that you are getting decent sales numbers and decent e-mail opening numbers.

If you are working in the world of direct sales and buying marketing lists from us, then you need to think like a salesperson. That means that you have goals and you are results oriented in reaching them.  It also means that you are ready to fail and ready to learn from those failures. Here what you need to know about these lessons and others:

Goal are Important

I touched on this in my introduction, but let’s expand on this. Look into the locker room at almost any major chain store in the country and you’ll inevitably see that they have a sales chart up which tracks who has made the most sales that month. Ultimately, as a direct marketer, your goal is quite similar – you need to keep expanding the number of sales that you make to your potential clients.

Be Ready to Fail

A good salesperson is ready and willing to fail in their efforts to make a sale. They know that even a failure in sales means that they can gain valuable insight. They can examine where the sales failed and then decide how to proceed from there so that they can effectively change their tactics in the future. When you buy a mailing list from us to use with a direct sales campaign, you need to use the same kind of philosophy – if you don’t make the number of sales you want to make, then you need to be able to at least take some lessons from that failure and be ready to turn it around in a future campaign.

Don’t Dawdle

Walk into a store where people work on commission and you’ll inevitably be approached by a salesperson who wants to help you with whatever it is that you want to purchase. That’s because they know that their monthly income depends on making a certain number of sales. So why would you, as someone doing direct sales do anything different? Be ready to get the job done as quickly as possible so that you can move on to your next campaign instead of buying a list and sitting on it for three months.

Understand Psychology

The classic care salesman’s pitch is that they’ll insist that you must pick the color of the car that you are buying. Why? Because by doing so, they have taken away your choice of whether or not to make a purchase and replaced that with a different choice – which color to buy. People like having choices and don’t like to be pressured into making a purchase. So why not make sure that they are able to get what they want and offer them choices? Choose how you’ll pay for our products – American Express or MasterCard. Choose the color you want to order. Just don’t offer the choice whether to buy.

So you’ve rented an Email list or built one from scratch. You’re now searching for ways to expand that list further so that you can continue to get new customers. Here are five approaches that you can use to make that happen. Not all of them will work for your particular situation, but at least one or two of them should be helpful to you:

Keep Your Current List Happy

The first bit of this advice is to keep your current list happy. This accomplishes two things. First, you can halt attrition, meaning that you’re not constantly maintaining the size of your list by adding new members to replace those who walk away. Second and more importantly is that you can get people on your list to recommend you to their friends.

Offer an Inducement to Current List Members

Everyone wants to get a deal and we often lavish our best deals on those who are new to our business. However, the fact is that when we do this, we often ignore our current customers. Keep those customers happy as well and add new ones by offering them a deal for getting their friends to sign up.

The deal may be a $5 off coupon for whatever product you offer, an extra freebie you mail to them or make available for download or pretty much anything else you can think of which gives them a little something extra. It goes without saying though that this method of growing your Email list works best when you are providing quality information in your newsletters to people getting it and not simply sending out spam.

Ask Everyone to Sign Up

People visit your website all the time. Many will drop by for no more than 30 seconds before they move on. Offer them a reason to sign up by using a slide in or pop up box which asks if they’d like to sign up for your Email list about 5-10 seconds after they arrive. Make them a deal where they get some kind of freebie for doing so.

And here’s a great tip: if you want to keep the pure freebie seekers out, you can actually get two things for your trouble. Offer something physical which is mailed to them. Then, charge something like 99 cents or $1.99 for shipping (or even a bit more depending on what you’re sending out). This will get you an address and phone number and will also tell you that this is someone willing to part with money and not just a freebie seeker.

Use Direct Mail

It’s old school, but direct mail can also help you to build your Email list in certain cases. If you have a product that you sell which is disposable, you can send out small free sample packets to targeted direct mail customers (we rent lists like that here at List Guy). This will help you build an audience for your products as well as build up your Email list so that you can sell them more stuff.

Offer a Coupon

Finally, consider offering a coupon which you make available to members of various deal sites like SlickDeals.Net, FatWallet.Com and Coupon Cabin. They get a percentage off of whatever you have for sale and in exchange, you get them on your Email list as potential customers for more products at full price.

E-mail used to be considered the new frontier of marketing.  It was once considered to be the latest and greatest idea to come about for a long time and as such was thought to be the thing that would sound the death knell for traditional “snail mail” marketing. The reality however is that today, e-mail has become so saturated that we’ve actually come full circle to the point where traditional marketing may be a better choice. Here’s what you need to know:

Don’t Get Me Wrong

Now before I say anything else, let me be clear – I do like e-mail marketing and I believe that it does have its place in the marketing arsenal. In fact, here at List Guy, e-mail marketing lists are a big part of the business and we definitely do see success for certain kinds of products with e-mail marketing. That said, there are some other products that tend to lend themselves more to traditional marketing, especially these days.

Retail for Example

There was a time when sending out e-mails to people in your neighborhood was considered to be a great way to drum up new business for a retail store. That was back when the concept of e-mail marketing was still fresh and new. Today however, it doesn’t make sense to do this because people are so inundated with e-mail pitches that you need to send out massive numbers of e-mails to make a good return.

Product Samples

Another place where traditional “snail mail” marketing shines in comparison to e-mail is when you want to send out free samples of a physical product. I mean sure, you could send out a coupon for a free sample in e-mail, however a coupon requires people to take the thing down to the grocery store, find it and purchase it. When you physically mail a free sample to a potential customer however, they’re that much more likely to make another purchase because they’re much more likely to actually try your product out.

Presentation

Another place where you have total control with traditional marketing is with presentation. In an e-mail, you can send out an HTML e-mail message. However, these often don’t get received well and don’t look the way you wanted them to look when they arrive. Many people also have graphics turned off in their e-mail to protect against malicious software.

However, when you mail a physical mailing to people, you are in total control of the presentation, from what the envelope says to what they see when they physically open up the envelope. In other words, you can put your best foot forward and know that everyone will experience it the same way.

Bottom Line

Yes, e-mail marketing has its uses. It is especially useful when you are providing a product which would offer “instant gratification” (i.e. a downloadable product). However, in many cases, for a physical product, you really do need to consider doing traditional marketing either as a supplement to your e-mail marketing efforts or even in place of them.

Writing an e-mail to your e-mail list means more than just coming up with something to say which is interesting. After all, you can have the best sales pitch on the planet, but if no one sees it, you won’t be able to get anywhere with making a sale. That’s why the title that you put into your e-mail matters so much. Here’s what you need to know:

Check Your Open Rate

When sending out e-mails to your e-mail list, it’s possible to find out with a reasonable degree of certainty who opened the e-mails. That’s because, if you include any kind of graphics call inside of your e-mail, you can have it pegged to the specific person. In fact, many auto responder services will actually let you track the open rate of your e-mails so that you can see whether or not they’ve actually been looked at.

If your e-mail open rate is really bad, then the odds are good that there is something wrong with your titles. That means that people who get your e-mails are looking at the title and immediately clicking delete or, worse “spam” on their control panel.

Do a Split Test to Be Sure

If you want to make sure that the problem is with your e-mail titles, try this simple trick to find out: do a split test. This is where you divide your e-mail list into several sub e-mail lists (i.e. if you have 10,000 people on your e-mail list, you divide it into 4 sub-lists of 2,500 people each). Then, try four different versions of your title. The odds are good that you’ll find that different versions of the title are getting a better open rate.

How to Pick a Good E-mail Title

Picking a good e-mail title is very much an art form. In essence, you want to pick a title which will get people to be interested enough to spend a few minutes of their time to see what you have to say without sounding like a spammer. For example, which of the following e-mails would you be more likely to open:

5 Ways to Make $50 Right Now

A Few Ideas about Money

Obviously the first title is much more compelling because it grabs your attention. That’s because it speaks to your sense of urgency that there is something to be learned right now. Notice as well that that the tile isn’t offering something pie in the sky crazy.

I personally hate the titles that say “make $5,508.97 in the next 24 hours.” They somehow think that by offering a specific number that it’s going to sound more exciting. Personally, I find that a huge turn off because it’s obviously not realistic.

Some Ideas for Improving Titles

However, even when you have a compelling title, there are subtle things that you can do which will improve the odds of getting your e-mail opened:

Free, Bonus, Etc.

Words like “free” and “bonus” in the e-mail title are useful, as long as you don’t overdo it and make it sound like some pie in the sky thing. Be realistic about it and people are more likely to believe that you have something to offer. I also prefer to mention something specific. So for example, “free MP3 music download” is more likely to get opened than “this is free for you.”

Avoid Sounding Spammy

Finally, whatever you do, avoid sounding like a spammer. That’s likely to get your e-mail dumped into the spam filter really quickly. Ironically, I’ve found that some people think that by trying to get around a spam filter they’re more likely to get opens (I’ve seen e-mails that F’REE for example or F*REE – obvious attempts to bypass spam filters). Just offer something real and useful and you’re more likely to get opens.

So you bought yourself an e-mail list and you’ve already started to send out some materials to your list. Or maybe you’ve even built an e-mail list for your business and you’ve been busy trying to figure out how to keep your e-mail list engaged. Whatever the case may be, there are a number of things you can to make sure that people continue to open up your e-mails once you’ve made an initial connection with them. Here’s what you need to know:

Don’t Lie to Your E-mail List

For some reason that I simply cannot fathom, it has become quite fashionable to lie to your e-mail list about what you’ll be able to provide to them and what you have for sale. People often exaggerate or even make up outright lies about what they’re selling just for the purpose of making a sale.

Now, these lies may work in the short term to encourage a handful of people to make a purchase. However, in the long term, you’ll find that the rates of attrition are much higher than they otherwise would have been because you lied to your e-mail list. People don’t like it and they’ll learn to avoid the liars.

I myself was shocked when one Internet marketer sent me an e-mail where he blatantly lied because this was a guy who I knew to be generally quite honest with his list. I’m now questioning whether I’ll ever open another e-mail from this guy (and this is someone I used to admire and whom I’ve recommended on other blogs I write for).

Follow the 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule states that you send out 80% useful content and 20% sales content to your e-mail list. Again, if your goal is to make a long term relationship with your clients, then you want to offer them a reason to look forward to your e-mails. So set up a newsletter with some truly useful content and make sure that you don’t overdo it on the sales pitches. Ultimately, you’ll find that your customers are more loyal and more likely to continue to make purchases from you.

Don’t Oversend E-mails

No matter how useful they may be, if I get too many e-mails in one day from any one person, I’ll delete the e-mails and unsubscribe from the mailing list. The reason is simple – I don’t want to be bothered with reading piles and piles of e-mails. Your clients are likely the same. They’re busy people and don’t want to be swamped. So don’t swamp them.

Don’t Undersend Either

The reverse is also true – undersending to your e-mail list is as dangerous as oversending. I like to do around once a week or maybe twice a week. Any more than that and you get to be annoying. However, if you start sending out an e-mail once every six months or a year, you’re less likely to keep your e-mail list engaged because people will forget who you are.

Think Like Your Customers

Finally, think like your customers if you want to make money selling things to your e-mail lists. If you wouldn’t want to get an annoying e-mail with lots of flashing lights, then what makes you think that your customers would want it? In other words, as in life, when sending out stuff to your e-mail list, follow the Golden Rule.