Email Advertising and Email Lists:
The Straightest Path to Fast Sales and List Building
The best traffic you can possibly get on the Internet comes from other peoples’ email lists.
That’s where the most value is concentrated, where you can get the biggest bang in the shortest period of time.
One blast to the right email lists could produce more results for you than nine months of search engine traffic.If you need fast results, the first place you should start looking is email.
An industrial client I used to work with finds that if they advertise in trade magazines, cost per sales lead is about $200.The same client can buy the top advertising slot in an e-zine that goes out to 50,000 corporate buyers for $1250.They offer a white paper or guide of some kind and collect 150 quality sales leads in one day.That’s a cost per lead of about $12.00.You can’t beat that in business to business!If your sales are sluggish, the right e-zine ad could save your bacon.
See the ads on the right side of this e-zine?If you do what ABB does here – or some variation on it, a white paper, a quick guide, a slide chart, a “cheat sheet” – you can collect hot sales leads quite inexpensively.
“How do I find good email lists?”
I’ve got a friend who’s a doctor, and wants to sell a non-medical product to other doctors.
Google AdWords is not very useful because doctors are not necessarily searching in such a way that specific keywords would bring doctors who want it.MD’s are pretty difficult to market to in general because their gatekeepers screen virtually all of their mail, docs tend to not be big readers (isn’t that reassuring?) and they’re a tad arrogant and tend to only listen to other doctors (imagine that).
He’s tried some trade journals but some refuse to run his ads because they’re off topic.And he tried in vain to find e-zines aimed at medical doctors.(He admits he’s not terribly Internet savvy.)So I offered some help.
I searched "physician online community" and quickly found
http://familypractice.com/ and http://www.medscape.com/home
Then I go to www.alexa.com and type in those websites. Alexa tells me
“People who visit FamilyPractice.com also visit…”
Main Street Doctor www.mainstreetdoctor.com (Site is out of date and non-commercial)
FamilyMDLinx www.familymdlinx.com This looks promising. The site is targeted at doctors in a wide variety of disciplines - Academic Medicine / Education, Adolescent Medicine, Atherosclerosis/Lipids, Basic Science / Genetics, Clinical Pharmacology… big long list. Their email subscription form requires them to submit email and snail mail information, as well as their medical specialty. They accept ads on their website and their mother site www.mdlinx.com states they are the “leading provider of online marketing solutions to the healthcare industry” including targeted online advertising. Bingo.
So hang on, before we go any further let’s check MDLinx.com on Alexa and see what sites are similar to that:
People who visit this page also visit:
Minority Health - MCW HealthLink minority-health.healthlink.mcw.edu
The Hope Chest - Patients Newsletter members.aol.com/lungnews/thc.html
Medical Newswire medicalnewswire.com (this looks promising, so let’s see… looks like it reaches a lot more people than just doctors, but it’s got 130,000 subscribers. The home page says it’s “the only source to send your press releases announcing financial earnings, job openings, job promotions, product announcements, educational events, and anything the healthcare marketplace would have an interest in learning more about.”)
American Academy of Family Physicians' Patient Education Doc... www.familydoctor.org This also looks promising. It’s a spinoff of American Academy of Family Physicians, even has a “health plan complaint form.” Has an article on the home page that directly relates to an issue my friend addresses. And they have a bunch of related sites. One has links to a dozen medical journals.
That’s from a quick swipe at Alexa.But Google has a pretty useful tool too – if go to the Google search box and type related:mdlinx.com we get a bunch of sites that Google thinks is similar to mdlinx.com:
This is VERY helpful.MDConsult is owned by Elsevier, who is a big trade publisher.
eMedicine is a medical knowledge base and they sell a lot of space on their website to drug companies.So they can be bought.MDchoice.com is a medical database too, and yes, you can “Advertise to our targeted audience…”
In this example I haven’t considered e-zine directories, which might be useful in some cases.But you can use Google and Alexa to keep drilling down and find “related sites” until you keep coming back to the same ones again.At that point you’ve probably tapped the entire niche.If we’re targeting MD’s, we want professional publications, probably not ad-hoc stuff.Also, I haven’t even mentioned the SRDS (Standard Rate and Data Service, www.srds.com) which though expensive is available at larger libraries and would certainly have some resources.
Some list owners will send solo emails for you, instead of just selling you a spot in their e-zine.This can be very useful.However I would be very wary of anyone who offers to do this who is not an SRDS style, brick and mortar publisher.And if anyone offers to sell you the list outright, run the other way as fast as you can, it means the list is worthless.You want an audited double-opt in list.
Perry Marshall
This is excellent information Perry. It opens up an area of marketing possibilities that hadn't even bleeped on my radar. So I do appreciate you sharing this insight. I'm a freight broker always looking for ways and means to market our services. Thanks Perry.
Fantastic e-mail. One of the best that I have ever read! Thank you Perry!!
Perry, personally I think your one of the best. you consistently give me little nuggets that I never knew.
Thank you.
Great information as always.
Everytime I read another installment or email from you it gets me all fired up to go in to the marketing battle again ! Keep up the good work Perry.
Awesome, Perry! You truly rock, dude. I love the concrete steps you take us through in this.
Is there a way to make this work on a local level for small business?
Tim,
Your ability to do this for a local business is ENTIRELY dependent on your ability to get local email lists. Which generally are pretty hard to find. But they can exist. You need to think in terms of local businesses who collect them. Chambers of commerce, restaurants with birthday clubs, anyone who communicates with their customers via email.
Perry
Thanks for this hot, hot, hot tip! Just what I needed for a client. I am have been urging them along this route and when I next meet with them, I'll have a list of related industry newletters. They use trade journals to advertise in and have no idea if they're actually gaining any leads from them. And yes, it's expensive.
Perry. Another gem buddy, thanks!
Franco
I'm going to do this tomorrow…can't believe I haven't thought of this.
I didn't realize list owners were able to sell ad spots in their e-mails. That's kind of cool. A nice way to make even more money off their lists.
Cool article.
Perry!
This is great – Thx! Yet another hot tip that can save us all some hard earned cash on the Google Adwords account
Hi Perry,
thank you so much for writing about your friend. It thought me about a lost of research I did not consider or know previously. Great information!
As marketing list brokers, we have located several sources of large (80 million & up) consumer email databases that are purported to be double opt in, CanSpam compliant. All of the eblasting is done by these companies; the list is never sold or relesed to others.
The problem is, that there is no way to verify which of these suppliers and lists are legitimate and which are just junk. One never gets to see any of the names or email addresses; and you just have to take the word of the supplier that the emails were actually sent, and that their "report" of deliverables, opens, and click-thrus is real, and not made up to impress the client.
My question is, how can we tell the goodies from the no-so-good suppliers?
John,
The best you can do is buy a sample of their list and send an email and see what the response is.
Then you have to be wary of brokers using the best (ie most recently subscribed) names for the test then renting you the bad ones for the big blast. Oldest trick in the book.
Above all you have to methodically test and never blow your wad on one big promo.
Perry
Hi perry,thanks for sharing your wonderful ideas with us.It works like magic just keep up
you the man Perry, as always thanks
It is a great piece of advice, and if it is free, it is doubly great and good. Thanx, Mr. Marshall
Short, sweet, concise & super-informative article Perry. I always thought you had to 'rent' a list and send mail directly to those subscribers, & that seemed unethical. This makes perfect sense. Thanks a million.
As usual, quite informative, and giving new ideas. Thanks Perry.
Perry – As usual, great material and insight. Your assert that this is useful for getting fast results, but I tend to start up new ventures and that is always when I need and look for the kick start. Problem – some list owners will not "partner" unless it is a long established venture – i.e. website running for a long time, etc.
Any pointers or tips?
Keep it up – love your depth of sharing.
Most partners only care about your ability to make money NOW, not how long you've been in biz. Start with the ones who'll take you.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew about the related: command for google – but I was not thinking of it as I've been looking for a way to find a few more sites for my client to research.
Now I won't forget! I just used it and found some more sites.
By the way- the use other people's email list tactic works wonders for the music biz. If an artist with some credibility sends an email to their fans endorsing an unknown artist –it drives attention and usually sales (if the unknown artist's music is perceived as good by the audience that received the email.)
Glad I clicked through to read the article.
Jason
Perry
Excellent article – as always!
Can I ask further to Ken's question – you mentioned being wary of list owners who offer to send a solo email who are not an SRDS style, brick and mortar publisher.
I have a "Learn Massage at Home" product I am looking to get off the ground, and I would definitely like to pursue your method (I've tried AdWords, Article & Forum Marketing, and it's going very slowly!)
If I'm looking for a JV partner / list owner, should I be looking for such a brick and mortar publisher?
Before I read your article I was just thinking of finding a list owner in a related niche (e.g. yoga / stress relief). Don't know where to start in finding them yet but that was my thinking!
Great information again, thanks for sharing
Regards
Aidan
http://www.planetself.net
Excellent, Perry. We've experienced the same thing.
A good offer in a respected e-newsletter drives downloads.
Thanks for validating and inspiring us to do more of it…
Absolutely Fantastic Perry, this is just what i needed to know today, right now.
I just put up my first ad on google (using your book of course). This post about the list has given me ANOTHER route to success.
May I ask how does a person build his own list from ZERO? Spam rules apply no doubt.
Buy Google clicks, send them to an opt-in page. Get traffic from any other source, do the same. Put a flash popup on your site.
Perry
This is an absolutely brilliant strategy.
I'm going to use tools like this to help some of my marketing clients increase traffic, not to mention for my own websites.
Thanks so much, as always, Perry. You are truly the only 'guru' that I actually trust anymore.
Not only an excellent article on search techniques but also a template for writing Work Instructions. A great example of turning technical complexity into clear, actionable tasks. Can anybody guess what my passion is? That's right, training / technical writing!
Great article Perry, I had question, how could I get this to work for me I write copy for non profit and for profit organizations What are some of the email lists I should look for ?
If you subscribe to http://www.srds.com you will find there are THOUSANDS. Especially if you use direct mail.
This is a great article, Perry. The related sites aspect of Google search can turn you on to lots of things that are hidden under the surface!
Hi Terry,
Thanks for the tips and as usual you always provide
value to your readers.
Charles
Dear Perry,
Just got a chance to read this ariticle. Great information. We are a chiropractic office that does Fibromyalgia. You had said to go for it locally. Do list exist locally on that subject that are for sale?
Sincerely,
Karen
Karen,
Sorry to say, I'd be surprised if there was such a thing.
Thanks Perry for a great information given by you. Really it has expanded the area of marketing in a real sense.
Perry, Great info! Can you recommend professionals who have their arms around this whole quality of list subject and who are available on a contracting or consulting basis? thx
I keep coming back to you Perry.
I've been reading late agin from my mentor Franco and ended up here from his blog post.
He said you would explain ezine marketing better than him.
Not sure if that's true but another great peice of info from you.
Thanks
I wonder is the same true of mobile number lists, I appreciate there is less space for advertising copy but will it still offer value.
John
Great stuff, Perry. It's amazing how you consistently provide golden nuggets – every article has useful/hands-on info.
I have discovered only one downside: between your B2B system I am starting to implement and these great articles, it is hard to pull myself away from marketing my business and actually work on the many client projects we have going – marketing has never been so interesting and exciting. Thank you!
Too many clients…. ¡Que Lastima!
I'd like to say I love You Perry, but I don't "get down" like that. One thing is for certain, however, my bank account and wallet are head over heels for you. Thank You. & Keep on lighting the path…