Question on Email Lists

by gpacx
5 replies
I have a quick question about e-mail lists. A lot of people have opt-in lists or scraped lists from a particular niche - that is to say, they build their own mailing list by having people sign up who are actually interested in what they have to offer and want to receive emails about it in the future.

Does anyone have experience with cold emailing either scraped or built email lists with completely out-of-niche offers? For example, if I scraped like a million emails randomly from the internet and gave them an incentive to sign up for a free dating site, could I expect any response rate at all if I was just going for free signups?

What if the list was actually an opt-in list from a different niche - like if you have an opt-in list for a certain interest group in your niche and you randomly send them an offer from an alternate email, what is the difference in response/conversation rate versus sending an offer in the actual niche? I guess on some level what I'm asking is how much of a difference does it make to have targeted vs non-targeted viewers for an offer?
#email #lists #question
  • Profile picture of the author DIABL0
    I have been monetizing purchased data for 16+ years.

    Scraping random emails is going to get you a bunch of bounces / spam traps and will cause you to get your account terminated or IPs blacklisted / blocked. I buy data that the users have provided permission to receive messages from 3rd parties. Which sending to is can-spam compliant. Where sending to scraped emails is not.

    When you first acquire a list and it is non targeted, How responsive it is going to be will depend on your deliverability and the offer sent. While dating is a vertical that has mass appeal, the response rate and profitability can vary greatly based on the offer itself.

    Additional, your cost to send non targeted dated is going to play a big role on your ROI. Regardless of your ROI, you want to be collecting your opens / clickers and removing your non responsive users. That you are building a smaller but very responsive list, that over time you will be able to mail less and make more with each mailing. Essentially you are converting the data from quantity to quality.

    Doing the above is all about sending offers that have mass appeal and at the right cost and building your opens/clickers.

    As to sending a non relative offer to a targeted list, that is going to depend on how non relative it is. I do this, but I generated leads (no purchse required). So if I get data of users that are interested in getting life insurance, then I send them a life insurance offer. Obviously I can't just send them life insurance offers forever and have to send them other offers.

    The key to making this work is to send them offers that have the greatest mass appeal. For me this has been lead generation offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to the,. Then it's just a matter of testing offers and finding which perform best.

    One note, even with targeted data, you still want to be collecting your opens / clickers and removing the unresponsive users. That is key to working with cold email.

    Anyway, not the exact answer you are looking for. As it is impossible to say anything as to actual response rates, because there are so many factors that can effect it.
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    How to Build LARGE EMAIL LISTS on a Budget and MONETIZE Like a PRO
    20+ Years Exp . . . . . . . . . . . . Email - CPA - PPL
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  • Profile picture of the author gpacx
    This is a great response - pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Getting rid of unresponsive emails is such a great pointer - you don't want to bog down your lists with folks that won't be responding to anything, and it's probably very important to purchase lists from people as opposed to scraping because everybody is scraping the same emails from the web.

    Obviously you can't speak to specific response rates because aggregated data will always be different, but it's cool to know that you've actually had success buying non-targeted opt-in lists and monetizing them.
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  • Profile picture of the author DIABL0
    It's all about testing.

    You always want to test a new data source with a small, but reasonably sized sample, before spending a bunch of money. That way you can get an idea of how long it is likely to take to break-even on it. Using the test results you can then try and negotiate a better price, if you need it to break-even faster.

    Sending non targeted data is much more complex than starting out with targeted data. With non targeted data you are mostly likely going to want to send using a self hosted mailer and your own server / IP. Additionally, you will want to buy domain target data, of the domains that you know you will be able to get reasonably decent deliverability with, using the IPs that you have.

    You IP costs is what will make or break you. Because initial response rates will be low, until you build up your opens / clickers. So you have to keep your costs as low as possible to compensate for the initial low response rates you will get.

    I forgot to mention. In addition to collecting opens / clickers, you want to also be collecting what they opened and clicked. That way you can also build targeted lists.
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    How to Build LARGE EMAIL LISTS on a Budget and MONETIZE Like a PRO
    20+ Years Exp . . . . . . . . . . . . Email - CPA - PPL
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  • Profile picture of the author desireedavid
    I strongly advise against sending to scraped emails!
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  • Profile picture of the author JohnVianny
    There are problems:

    the first you go against CAN-SPAM compliance: so you may be banned by your autoresponder, have some legal issue.

    the second is that you waste your Brand name: you'll be forever associated to spammers.

    the third is: who may opt in to a cold mail spammed in his mailbox? An opportunity seeker with no experience and probably no money to spend. Or a person who made a mistake.

    So it doesnt worth at all.

    Better using Solo Ads.
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