Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Ok..I don't want to seem like a jerk, but why doesn't he just offer to pay your employees $0.15/ email address they bring in? Because no one will do it.

Maybe someone else has a better view of this than me. If he just wants e-mail addresses he can spam, we'll dig up a bunch fo him and he can own them. No guarantees that they are still good or active or even the right target.

Michael

Hi mschlossberg,

The question is not really if it is feasible under those cost parameters. the real question to ask is it will it be successful regardless of the price?

The answer, I can guarantee, you is no. You and your VP Marketing will be disappointed and for you it is also a lose/lose situation because besides the poor response, you are also going to be labeled as a "spammer" by a large percentage of the recipients of whatever list you use.

Basically, the quality of any list, rented or otherwise, is going to be considerably less than for a list that was obtained more "organically".

One example would be that you try to partner with another company in your vertical industry who already has a list in place and can give you mention in their newsletters with a link to your website where you can develop a compelling offer and call-to-action requiring a positive response such as a registration etc.

This is just one example of a better solution, there are more that you can implement that are more "permission based" but time and space doesn't permit me to elaborate here, contact me off forum if want.

It would be helpful to know more about your product - and since I don't know much about your "wireless product" I'm shooting in the dark... but if I felt forced by my boss to SPAM a list yet wanted to safeguard my company from harm, I'd really push the partnership angle - partnering with existing folks in your industry as Pepper Blue suggests , but I'd also consider setting up a relationship with an additional third party (reseller?) with a valid IP address / etc - and send the emails in their name. This way, the partner shares some of the risks as well as the rewards (email must be CAN-Spam compliant of course) - and you can "test" the approaches in a relatively safe way, yet begin to draw a line with your boss.

Your VP Marketing is a lousy manager. Instead of telling you how to do your job, why doesn't he/she tell you what the objective is and let you figure out how to do it and how much it will cost?

OK, so you can't go to the VP and say, "You're a lousy manager. Some guy on MarketingProfs said so." Instead, why not try to figure out what it is he/she is trying to accomplish and give him/her a few options, along with the costs. Be sure to include your recommendation and rationale.

If you must, include his/her bad idea (spam) and the realistic cost for implementing it, along with your rationale for why you wouldn't recommend it.

Whenever you're given a stupid assignment like that, it's usually better to back up and figure out what the objective is than try to jump through hoops to deliver something that won't work and could do some harm.

For 10 cent per name. I can get you every position in a high tech company. Email me to thanh.nguyen@netzero.net.

I've done email marketing for a living for six years.

I strongly recommend that you set up a Return on Investment agreement with VP so s/he doesn't expect miracles.

Get the industry standard benchmark report from https://www.marketingsherpa.com, so you have an impartial arbiter of what is realistically achievable.

If the numbers look dismal, which they should, suggest that you purchase an advertorial in a high tech e-newsletter.

If you go with an email vendor - and I hope for your sake that you don't have to - please repost a question about how to choose an email vendor. I can tell you briefly and it is a minefield. If you need to just move ahead without coming back, please insist that the vendor let you do a test mailing of about 100 to 200 addresses to see what the bounce rate and open rates are. Don't let them fool you. This is standard practice.

Regards, and good luck.

Win

Winthrop Morgan, CeM
Certified eMarketing Professional
win@winthropmorgan.com
https://www.winthropmorgan.com

Don't do it.

First off, you are a complete stranger to this list, and your ROI will suck bigtime. So much so, I would consider the cost of this exercise a complete gift to whomever you pay to send your message.

Second, what you are about to do is basically spam. I would hope my spam filter picked up your message and deleted it before I ever saw it, because I don't care for unsolicited email like this. Really, ask yourself, and your boss, why would I be interested in your wireless product? Is it simply because I have a few dollars in my pocet and happen to be in business? Well, any warm body and a pulse would qualify as a recipient for that message.

Youd would be better of spending a few dollars on Google Key words and some banner ads. Perheps even better of spending a lillte more time on your website and direct mail then sending unsolicited email to comeplete strangers. Working a phone book would produce better results.

My two cents, plus or minus.
Darcy Moen
www.customerloyaltynetwork.com

You have received some superb advice here and most of it starts off with ”Don’t” or “Take Great Care” Once you are recognised as a spammer in a finite and defined market, you will discover that it is very difficult to win back any credibility. Your Marketing VP’s $0.15 per lead could cost him $150 per lead in the very short term – now he wouldn’t do that with a bank – would he?

As to the offers of cheap names – forget those “advertising” here – they are expensive and this isn’t a trading site. Use mine. $0.05 a lead, payable in advance in blocks of 100,000, to the same bank account in Nigeria those guy’s use when they write to tell you that they’d like to share $270Million with you that their brother accidentally left in the toilet at Lagos airport.

I think that the key thing here is to work out how to distil the wisdom and advice from everyone else into something that:

a) Stops you getting the sack because you are not going to do what you’ve been ordered to and:

b) Shows your twit of a VP that its value that counts not cost. If you can’t do the latter, my bank account details in Lagos are----------!

Wireless products are professional services, so the people who buy them will expect a professional approach. To do that you will need to establish some reason why they would want to receive your email.

To do that, you can’t just take someone else’s criteria for judging someone to be a wireless products target and say “Hey guys, this list is of people who have expressed and interest in wireless products, lets email it” You and how many other thousands? It happens to me weekly – buy a list of 1000 executive email addresses who have stated that they are interested in purchasing a CRM system in the next 12 months. Will my uninvited email be the 100th or the 100,000th?

We have utilised a further method to the excellent ones expounded already – Telemoxie may well support this idea, I don’t know. We buy lists according to the demographics we feel like using for a particular campaign – maybe I just want to get some business within a 20 mile radius of my home address. Then I get a professional telemarketer to ascertain who the relevant contact is (Or to confirm it, if we have the name) the telemarketers ask for permission to write or to email them with an outline of our services. No offers, no sales pitch, no spin.

If the company says write, we write – nice letters, nice envelope and often – a device of mine - a handwritten address. We ask for permission to use their email address in future and enclose a reply paid envelope for them to send it back to us, a toll free number and our own email address and web site. We get a high response.

If we get the email address, we send out individualised emails which could have been hand crafted one by one (They come from Maximizer’s Email Campaign Manager, so they are as personalised as the telemarketer is able to populate the system) Again the response rate is 4-5 times the industry average.

Then we telephone again and try to get to see them.

OK we’re not sending out 3000 emails in one day and getting 3 real replies and the undying dislike of another 300 (2697 just deleted them!) but over a year, we are sending out 8000 emails and 8000 letters. We are getting 200 short term enquiries and about 600 enquiries with a 12 month framework. It’s hard work and it costs a lot more than $0.15 per person we contact, but I’d say that we earn about $10,000 for every $1000 we spend in this manner. In addition, few people, if any don’t want to hear from us again.

Look, you deserve good luck with this as you are confronting a difficult issue and I can only guess that your heart must have dropped when you saw the advice printed here, rather than seeing a list of $0.001 / name list-brokers. It’s often the case with MarketingProfs that the members tell you what you don’t want to hear, but it’s usually what you should strongly consider listening to!

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions, but written based on facts about one of my other companies