1,000,000 Double Opt-In List... Budget Needed?

So the assumption is that because they are freebie seekers they won't spend anything on offers you send them....?

I hear (and kind of "get") your question, but for myself, can't envisage any "list" like this. I have a slightly different approach from some marketers, and want to collect only the most responsive, most sensitive, most-buying subscribers within the demographic I'm looking for. Sure, within that demographic I want "as many of them as possible", but when I think of list-sizes like 1,000,000 I instinctively think of "big, noisy niches" and low open-rates and so on ... not my sort of business at all. Not enough money in it, for me. A poor use of my time/effort/energy etc. etc.

This is a big and important and under-discussed question, here.

My own perception on this issue is that generally, I don't think "problem-solving niches" are nearly as good as "enthusiasts' niches".

Once you've built your subscriber-list, established your credibility, formed your subscriber-relationships, and all the other basic, essential things you need to do to make marketing worthwhile, you're then going to promote your first product to each subscriber, according to the number of days for which s/he's been a subscriber and autoresponder emails s/he's already received from you (assuming that you have the sense to wait until then, and not lose most of the potential customers by promoting too early, as many people do!). A proportion of them will buy it.

At this stage, "in problem-solving niches", looking at it in very simple terms only, one of two things happens.

Either they like it, they think it's great and it solves their problem (the result is that you can't sell them anything else because they don't need to buy anything else, so you've just lost most of your potential future income) ...

Or they don't like it, they don't think it's great and it doesn't really solve their problem, (the result is that you can't sell them anything else because you recommended a bad product, from their perspective, and blew your credibility, and they don't trust you any more).

Not a great outcome for you, either way.

In "enthusiasts' niches", people gradually buy more and more and more, to feed their enthusiasm, so you don't have that problem to anything like the same extent. (Having bought expensive things from this winter's Louboutin collection won't stop me from enthusiastically buying more expensive things from their 2015 summer collection.)

Be aware that for many successful marketers, most of the long-term money comes from making repeated sales to the same captive audience (your subscribers - that's why listbuilding is so important!). That's why "enthusiasts' niches" are better than "problem-solving niches", and we're perhaps better off looking at those, rather than at how to solve others' problems.

Once you solve someone's problem, they may not still be a customer at all; and once you fail to solve it, they may not be your customer.

God, no. Hopeless. Targeting is everything. People with large "general lists" are the ones who end up trying to convince themselves that it's "normal" to have an open-rate of 20% or even less. Just my perspective, but a "general list" would be a real anathema to me. I don't even really know what "general offers" are, but whatever they are, I strongly suspect that if I tried to promote them, I'd be giving up most (maybe almost all) of the advantages I have, as a marketer.

(Actually, now I think about it, I'm probably being a tiny bit disingenuous, there , because I do also have, thanks to the labors of one of my VA's, a couple of Amazon sites which I use only to sell large volumes of very low-priced products to boost my "monthly sales volume" to qualify for Amazon's 8% commissions on the more expensive/"proper" stuff I promote in my normal ways - because of Amazon's weird, bizarre commissiion-payment structure, in other words ... so those sites aren't for the commissions I earn from those sites, just to boost my numbers by selling books/CD's/gifts. Those are "general offers", I suppose? But barely monetized in themselves, by comparison, and they serve a different purpose for me. I wouldn't ever try to make a living from them alone. And I manage to generate traffic even to those sites only by having built up highly targeted subscriber-lists in other niches in which I have trust-based relationships with the subscribers. It doesn't matter in what niche they're "highly targeted". It just matters that I've built up trust-based relationships with them, without the context of the relationships being relevant. Everyone buys books/CD's/Gifts. My point: even to sell those "general products" to "general traffic", I have to have subscribers who trust me from some other context. I couldn't do it "by SEO" or whatever (and neither can the people who genuinely try to: they're the ones starting off all the threads with titles like "Amazon doesn't really work, for affiliates, does it?".


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If during a 30-60-90 day period, you have subscribers that don't open or click, you can run a last ditch campaign to try and win back their interest. If that fails, then move them to a general offer list and see what happens. Ideally you should move them off the service you are using, as you only want responsive subscribers.