Opt-in e-mail bases

... did you try to buy them?

[Melkor111]

My site is a corporate web-page with very low traffic (about 30-50 visitors per business-day) as we are targeting only specific categories of people.

What I would like to make is to launch a brand awareness campaign, one of the elements of which would be email advertising. The matter of the fact is that at this rate our own decent base (made through sign-ups for news etc.) will be ready in ages...

I have searched in the internet and found several companies that do sell or rent email databases... but I can't be sure about their quality and/or the outcome of all this "emailings project".

What's your opinion on this? Have you tried purchasing ready-to-use opt-in email bases? Can you recommend some companies who can be trusted and who have a good quality/cost rate?

Thanks in advance
... and sorry if I posted this in the wrong topic.

[TrustNo1]

I would say I hope I don't get your SPAM. The only mail I would be sending out are to people who have opted in to receive it from my own site.

[zulu_dude]

From what I've found out, there are two types of opt-in lists:

i) Email addresses collected by email harvesters- low quality lists that are simply going to be a waste of your time.

ii) Lists from companies that have collected email addresses from people who have used their services and have opted in to receive offers from partners. For example, if I sign up to a property website, they may ask if I want to receive offers from their partners, such as home loan and furniture websites.

Obviously type (i) is going to be a waste of time and money. Type (ii) is much better and will have a much higher success rate. However, that doesn't mean the success rate will be good, just higher than type (i).

As with any of these sorts of things, try a sample selection first. If you have a decent response from that, then fork out the big bucks to buy a bigger list.

[Melkor111]

Yep, that's what I was thinking about - the option (ii).

I have also considered option (iii), which would be trying to get into newsletters of some major sites that are working in our domain. It's the same mailing, but of a higher value, I presume... some people even read them ^_^

2TrustNo1
I hate SPAM too, believe me. That's why I'm on this forum...

[JollyK]

While I'm sure there may be reputable list brokers out there, I have never encountered one. I have, however, dealt with the cleanup of many companies who *thought* they were buying an opt-in list, only to find that many of the addresses were sucked out of whois, usenet, or off websites.

I really advise anyone never to buy a list unless you know for a fact how that list was generated. (And never believe the people trying to sell you the list.) It may take longer to collect your own list, but I really think it's worth it.

It also depends on how spam-tolerant your ISP is. Some will immediately shut you down for one complaint, charge you a "spam cleanup fee," etc, while others are more lenient. You might discuss this with your ISP, but I imagine they'll tell you the same thing I just did. :-)

If you DO buy a list, please do post and let us know how it went.

JK

[zulu_dude]

In my opinion, option (iii) is by far the best. It allows you to avoid the problems associated with spam (you don't send the emails) and you're piggybacking on the back of a (hopefully) reputable company. It could also work out a fair bit cheaper than the other two options.

One thing you should do in this case is to subscribe to the mailing list (with a dummy email address) before approaching them about advertising. That way you can see what proportion of the newsletter consists of advertising. Obviously if most of the newsletter is ads, it's less likely to be read by subscribers and more likely to be junk mail that gets deleted right away.