The ‘key ingredient’ in email marketing is having a quality email list, ‘quality’ being the operative term.
This means having a list of emails you’ve collected when launching marketing campaigns, usually through a reputable email marketing service (like GetResponse or Aweber), with specific topics. In other words, these are lists of people who you know are really interested in the specific topics of your campaigns.
By contrast, quality email lists are often not the ones that can be purchased online. Why not? Well, can you really trust the person who tells you that the emails they’re selling you are from people genuinely interested in, say, gardening or whatever else you’re involved with?
I remember in the early days of eBay, there were email lists for sale with supposedly millions of emails, which could be purchased for less than a dollar. How valuable do you think they were? The old adage “you get what you pay for” may even have been an exaggeration in this case.
And usually you could immediately recognize the scam for what it was, after buying these lists, by the mere fact that there were usually not ‘millions’ but only a few hundred emails (if that many). .
Another reason purchased email lists don’t work is that the people you communicate with using these lists don’t know you, don’t expect to hear from you, haven’t personally given you permission to communicate with them, and therefore , most likely they won’t. recognize you, trust you, or click on your email (if it makes it to your inbox and isn’t removed by increasingly effective spam detectors). Also, what you’re doing is called ‘spamming’ and guess what, it’s illegal!
To make a more general point that also applies here, in online marketing you need to know as much as possible about your audience. Your efforts must be “targeted,” tailored to your potential buyers. You need to have an idea of what they want, where in the world they live, etc.
Two email addresses can represent two people from very different parts of the world, with vast differences in socio-economic and purchasing abilities, vastly different age groups, etc. Wouldn’t you like to know which email corresponds to which?
Just as an example, the toy industry, a multi-billion dollar industry, spent vast resources to figure out how to market to a part of the population that has no purchasing power (children). And they succeeded in inventing clever ways to bypass children and target their parents, introducing the so-called ‘nagging’ effect.
Again, I mention this just as an example of the power of specificity and targeting in your marketing efforts, which naturally applies to your email list as well. It is absolutely necessary to know how the emails on the list were collected, whether they are from people genuinely interested in a specific topic (again, don’t take a stranger’s word for that or anything else related to your valuable business), the strength financial of these people, etc.
