Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dear Joel,

To build a list, offer something that the kinds of people you want to attract to your list will need, want, or find valuable. Then give people enough reason to want to voluntarily GIVE you their e-mail address.

With your thoughts above you're missing one point. You don't matter.
What you, as the list builder "want" is not what matters. It's what your potential customer wants. Pulling together lists in the way you outline won't give you a list, it will give you a bird's nest: a little from here, a little from there. But those bits and pieces won't have one critical thing: relevance.

Offer people relevance and significance and they'll value your offering far more by giving you their information, their time, and their attention. But when you pluck that information from a list, the people you'll be contacting don't get anything from you because they're not LOOKING for you, so there's no investment, and you become an irritant.

Get people to invest in your offer by offering relevance. You need your customers. But they do not need you.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Joel,

If it was that easy you wouldn't have anything to offer. I also think that if it was that simple, people would be more careful about what information in on the internet.


Michael

Jigsaw (https://about.jigsaw.com/) offers extensive and well segmented mailing lists which they have assembled via traditional means and also by list-sharing amongst their 1M subscribers. Some data you can get for free and adding to their data entitles you to a quid pro quo.

Once I’ve found out the stats for the UK, I’m going to give a whirl.

Steve Alker
Xspirt

after you started building your list, if you are lucky, you can use Google to dramatically expand your list.

For example, let's imagine that your initial research indicates that Fred Flintstone and George Jetson are very well-qualified prospects for you.

Try a Google search on:

+“Fred Flintstone” +“George Jetson”

Try Google searches on various combinations of peoples names, e-mail addresses, and company names. You may get some pretty amazing results, such as a list of attendees at a recent conference...