When I first started off in email marketing I was really worried about getting enough people to opt into my mailing lists. I didn’t know about solo ads and I didn’t have enough subscribers to perform ad swaps to build my nascent lists. I started looking into purchasing email lists from other internet marketers.
Everyone I spoke to told me this was going to be a bad idea. The usual warnings are:
- The list will be filled with “scraped” email addresses harvested by tools from websites. Once I start using the list subscribers will complain and opt out.
- The list will be filled with “dead” accounts and no matter what I do it just will not be responsive.
- The list will be filled with “fake” accounts and no matter what I do it just won’t make me any money.
I went ahead and started looking more seriously into it anyway. It’s not that I discount what my colleagues say but I’m skeptical by nature and need to verify these sorts of things for myself. I did find that it was possible to find quality lists for sale but the cost of entry was very high and transferring those lists over to a new provider would be very painful.
What I’ve learned is that places like Aweber and MailChimp don’t like importing email addresses. So not only would I have a hard time vetting and making sure the list is good once I get it it just might not be useable for me unless I have my own email delivery system.
What I prefer to do in place of buying email lists is investing money into solo ads through Ezine Directories like the Directory of Ezines (aka DoE). With the DoE I can look at different email lists and contact the list owners and send solo ads to them.
Each of my solo ads contains a link to a free report or something along those lines to entice people to opt in into my new list. This way I know:
- The users who opt-in are real and engaged in joining my list.
- Their joining my list is a completely voluntary action.
