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 wherethe 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Main Street Doctor www.mainstreetdoctor.com (Site is out of date and non-commercial)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 Newswiremedicalnewswire.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. . . "

There's also http://lists.nextmark.com/ and the paid service www.SRDS.com as these two directories list most of the companies who make their email lists publicly available. And 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.

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