Email Lists: Size Does Not Matter, Quality Does

Email Lists size does not matterAccording to a recent research by MarketingSherpa, 44% of B2B email lists have less than 5.000 addresses.
The first message that we want to give is not to worry too much of the amount of addresses in the lists. To seriously do e-mail marketing it is not necessary to work with dozens of thousands e-mails. It is actually not rare to get satisfying results also with e-mail marketing activities performed with few hundreds of well targeted addresses.

An element that we consider essential to determine the success of a e-mail marketing campaign is the quality of the used e-mail addresses list.
We could have conceived an extraordinary campaign, but if the used list does not contain addresses suitable to target, the results will be modest. We already suggested avoiding lists purchase. We repeat it once again. NEVER buy email  lists, use only in-house collected lists!

A research carried out by Forrester Research last year in United States underlined that when you are using e-mail addresses of customers and potential customers personally collected, the average cost for each successful sale following an e-mail marketing action is 100 times lower than when using purchased lists.

If your e-mail addresses database is very poor and you want anyway to perform e-mail marketing campaigns you can rent a list. Beware of advertisements offering email list rental of “500,000 email addresses for $19,99″. They are just spam files! Make sure to choose an email list for rental that fully comply with the CAN-SPAM act. It is also recommended to verify:
– the addresses collection mode. The value of a list is very different if the addresses were transparently collected concerning their use, by asking the authorization to the owner, or if they were obtained by offering the chance to take part in a cruise’s draw or even by giving a computer as a present;
– the addresses list’s collection date: the lists that give better results are the ones with more recently collected addresses.

We summarize:
– it is not the addresses amount that makes the difference, but their quality,
– very specific tiny lists can produce very high feedback rates,
– in-house lists give much better results than the purchased ones,
– it’s ok  lists only after checking quality and privacy rules observance.

It is important to underline that the main role of email marketing  is not customers’ acquisition, but mainly building strong customer relationships. It is therefore essential to create and manage an in-house list by means of your website, traditional off-line channels and specific online promotions.