Notes

Avoid the Pitfalls of Email List Rental
There's a lot of buzz these days about email list rental and the many benefits that come with it. To start, an email list is a virtual list of customers that you can contact time and again to provide information to them. As more businesses realize the potential of online marketing , they're beginning to hire companies like ListRan to provide them with email lists, and there are a number of advantages to this setup. However, before we get into that, you need to understand how email list rental works.

With email list rental, the business receives the emails as long as they request them. The same goes for bulk email marketing companies, as well. The basic premise still stands, however: a business sends out content on behalf of another advertiser through their email marketing company's email list. In either instance, the advertiser rarely sees the actual emails that they're sending to their subscribers, which is why email list rental is different from purchasing email lists from companies like ListRan. Instead, the business simply sends out consistent promotional emails to the lists each month.

Another difference between email list rental and purchasing email lists is the way the email is delivered. With rental, you only pay if you actually receive delivery. This is because your email list broker will purchase the lists at the distributor level, and then deliver them to your subscribers via email. With these types of lists, it's important to have a good delivery mechanism in place so that all of the promotional emails make it to your subscriber base. You can achieve this with a system called suppression file.

A suppression file is a program that works just like a header for email addresses. When someone sends you an email with a different header than the one you've set up, they are sending you an email with your suppression file that may not be the one they intended to send. If you have this suppression file set up, when an email address changes, you'll know right away that the email address was changed, because the change will show up as a different header on your server than the one you've previously used. With email list rental, you don't get this notification, and you end up paying for the wrong things every month.

Different email list rental companies use different approaches to ensure deliverability. Some use geo-linking, where they put a link to a specific product or service on every page of their website. Other lists use what's called "double-opt-in" which means the email list owner has to specifically request the double opt-in, or the email will be rejected. The other method that some list owners use is what is known as "double-capture" which means the email capture portion of the form requires the user to confirm the form and click on a link to confirm, so that the email will be delivered to the correct place.

Even though it might make more sense from a buyer's perspective, there are problems with email list rental, one of which is the risk of spyware. When you rent these lists, you might be getting them from an outside source, like a broker or other third party. This means when the customer goes to renew the subscription, they might receive a message asking them to confirm their subscription by returning to the site and doing another kind of keystroke. This opens up a lot of potential security issues, since if the customer uses their real email account to sign up, they can easily track who has rented the lists and then go after the people behind the fraudulent activity. Many times, the only way to tell if someone is renting lists is by checking their IP address.

This issue is especially important in a multi-tiered marketing campaign. Say for instance you have a separate email list for leads, then you want to send something out to subscribers. However, you need to be able to ensure that the information you are sending to these subscribers is relevant and only people interested in your offers will actually opt-in. If you do not account for this aspect of email list rental and just randomly use anyone's personal email address, you could end up having thousands of people signing up for your list, all of whom don't really care about your product.

One of the best ways to ensure your marketing campaign stays safe and secure is to avoid renting email lists in the first place. If you're just starting out with an online business, you probably do not have a large number of paying customers yet, so it's not wise to risk investing in email list rental just to get some lists to market to. Instead, focus on building relationships with prospects and only share information with those who are truly worthy of your trust. It's okay to rent lists as long as you verify who is really on the e-mail list and you keep track of your subscribers and their opt-ins in an organized way so that everything is well managed and you will know exactly who you're sending your promotions to.
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