Starting your Mailing List

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I was asked by several readers and Editors to discuss the ways you can find email addresses to build your mailing- list. It is not my intent to advocate or disparage the concept of bulk or mass email. The legal issues surrounding unsolicited email have not been resolved So, if you're into mass emailing, be cautious - some restrictions may apply. (AOL set up a "Preferred Mail" service to avoid going to court over blocking junk mail.)

Whether you build it or buy it, you want to be sure your list is well targetted. The simplest way to gather a targetted audience is to put a box or button on your web site inviting the viewer to submit their email address and a "subscribe" message. Assuming you're getting a reasonable number of visitors to your web site, you will soon have a large and receptive subscriber list.

It is also a good idea to register or announce your mailing list or newsletter with several of the websites that allow this. Some of the following may have restrictions on new listing or are places you can see what has been done, but they are worth checking out:

http://www.liszt.com/submit.html, Get a listing for free. http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html, For ListServ Lists, has over 9,000 mailing lists in its directory. http://www.webcom.com/impulse/list.html#Search. Search lists to see who else covers your subject area. http://pub.savvy.com/welcome.html A place to get free newsletters. IMHO, is "the New Journal and Newsletter Announcement List for new serials on the Internet." http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/NewJourWel.html.

Other useful URLs

http://rs.internic.net/nic-support/nicnews/
http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/users/a/asdamick/www/news/create. html

Bulk mailing is another way to let the internet world know about your mailing list or service or products. There are many aspects to this technique and it is used effectively and with little or no problems by some. Others abuse and offend.

First, let us talk about the bulk mailing technique. There are organizations and individuals who will do this for you using your email list or by selling or leasing you a list. Be careful, some of the sellers of this service are amateurs and will cause more enemies for you than subscribers or customers. One solicitation I received recently used juno.com (a free email service). The solicitation was less than professional and offered to blanket the Internet world with my message, but, hide my email address so I would not have to put up with flamers.

He would use my list or he would let me use his list. The service was relatively cheap compared to more conventional advertising and the promises were great. Obviously this service did not use a targetted market approach. The hope here is that using the shotgun approach would accidently hit your target.

I canvassed some active email publishers about their experience with list sellers. Here are some of their responses:

Rob Zee of KISSWARE Works ! : "I've not dealt with any list sellers, however, I have checked into, but not used, Postmaster Direct (http://www.netcreations.com/postdirect/). They have a large database of e-mail addresses from folks that WANT to get e-mail about certain subjects, and they will send e-mail to a category for 10 cents per name. They do it better than most."

Rob is the publisher of a very successful mailing list recently renamed: Image (formerly DEMA).

Denise Maddox, Quantum Innovations(tm), maddox@shore.intercom.net offers to sell a large email list either by smaller segments or all 20,000. How targeted they are and where they came from you will have to ask her.

From: zen@sirius.com (Cynthia Kurkowski)

"For sites that sell mailing lists, check out R.R. Donnelly, CyberPromotions and Email America. "

CyberPromotions and four other similar organizations specialize in bulk or blanket mailing of promotional material in a big way. They apparently were stripping email addresses from directories of online services such as AOL, CompuServe, etc. AOL decided to block all email from them and the other organizations "spamming" their subscribers. A law suit resulted and for a short time, AOL was prohibited from blocking messages. Although the case is not settled, AOL has been given permission by the court to block this form of email, just as they do profanity and sexually explicit material. How this will impact on the bulk mailers, it is too soon to tell. For more information, look at: http://www.idg.com/idg/news/itnews/September/092496/10.htm

Another way to expand your email address list is by using software to "strip" all the email addresses from a source. The prices of this software, (Netcontact, Floodgate, Stripit, etc) and the quality varies greatly. It ranges in cost from $100 to over $350. (Several of these products can be downloaded by using one of the WWW search engines to locate their homepage. Most have a time-limited or crippled version. The higher priced ones do not always deliver the best performance. My experience has been mixed. The higher priced products are poorly designed and often very difficult to operate. The cheaper "strippers" work by finding anything in a line of text that uses @ and therefore need a great deal of your time in fixing and deleting. My experience was as follows: Out of over 10,000 email addresses stripped from about 2 months of messages received by me, I deleted about 5,000 and when I used the balance to send a message, about 15% were no longer "live". I gave each the option of being removed from my list and another 5% took advantage of this offer. I received three "flames".

Using a "stripper" to get your email address list from messages sent to you is a relatively good way of targeting your audience. In theory, the senders had some interest in your service or product or they would not have communicated with you . Not necessarily! The senders of most solicitation messages you receive are not interested in you except to sell you something. No matter how you get your email addresses, using a "subscribe", bulk mailer, stripping, etc., expect to be "flamed" by someone when you send a commercial message. Even subscribers to your mailing list, who have the option of "unsubscribing", will forget they asked for it and response range from rude to profane.

Next article in this series will deal with this aspect of using email to market. Keep in mind that "flaming" is the other side of the coin called "Spamming".

For reprints of three prior articles dealing with mailing list marketing, see http://referrals.com.

National Consultant Referrals, Inc. A No Charge Referral Service 800.221-3104 or fax:619.235-2184 URL: http://referrals.com