Third Party Email Lists – 5 Keys to Success with 3rd Party Email Marketing
The numbers show that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective channels for lead generation. Bulk email marketing campaigns require data, and the two ways to acquire it is to buy third party email lists or grow your email list organically. As a small business, you may not have the time, money and resources to grow an organic list. It could take years and constant maintenance to build an active list, and not all of your sign-ups will become clients. The fastest way to get your products/services in front of a large targeted audience without breaking the bank is to buy third party email lists. There are many providers of email data out there, some are legitimate and others are not. Some companies use email scrapers to generate cheap lists which will ultimately have a detrimental effect on your email campaigns. Cheaper doesn’t always mean better, and quality email addresses along with a well-developed strategy are essential to generating a positive ROI.
1. Identify your Target Market
If you are considering email marketing to third party email lists, you should create a buyer persona and focus on a specific target market. Use specific criteria like name, income, gender, company, location, title, company size, location, city, state, zip code and any other relevant information that clearly defines your target. If you are selling services to real estate agents it would defeat the purpose to send your offers to hospitals or accountants. Sending general email blasts to generic third party email lists won’t generate the results you are looking for from your lead generation email campaign. Nailing down your target market is the most important step before you go about procuring your email list.
2. Choose a Reputable Provider for Third Party Email Lists
After you have nailed down your target market, it’s time to find a reputable provider of third party email lists. Email data is one of the most important factors in helping inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Office360 determine whether to reject your emails or deliver them to the inbox. Your email marketing campaigns will fail miserably if you do not have a quality email list. Lists with non-existing emails (hard bounces and soft bounces), spam traps and honeypots are a sure-fire way to kill your campaigns. What you want to avoid are cheap, scraped or rented email lists. Find a third party email list provider who provides addresses of people who have opted in and consented to receive communications from third parties. Although they have not opted into you directly, your email campaigns will have a higher success rate because you are marketing to a targeted audience.
3. Buying Quality Third Party Email Lists
A quality email list must have current and accurate data. Your email list provider should give you the option to compile your list based on specific targeting factors like Industry, location, company, position and many more. Make sure the list contains the full name and email address of the recipients.
The list should be devoid of generic email addresses like info@, sales@, support@, etc. These addresses will not get good responses and are a sure sign the list was compiled by web crawlers. After you acquire your list make sure to clean and validate the addresses yourself. A few bad email addresses can cause your messages to good email addresses to be sent to the SPAM box or blocked.
4. Marketing to Third Party Email Lists
Now that you have created your buyer persona, nailed down your target market and secured high-quality third party email lists, you are ready to start your cold email marketing campaigns. The goal is to convert new customers and add new subscribers from your cold contacts by sending relevant and timely messages. A key component affecting deliverability is your email content. Take a personalized approach by incorporating the email data provided by your list provider. An example of this would be:
Hello {First Name}. I ran across your company {Company name} on Linked In and……
Email personalization drives engagement and engagement lets inbox providers know your messages are wanted and to let more of them into the inbox. Keep your emails short with concise messaging and clear calls to action. One or two paragraphs should be enough to explain your value proposition.
5. Things to Incorporate into your Lead Generation Strategy
Keep your opt-in lists and third party email lists separate. Mixing them will only do damage to your email delivery rates.
Segment your overall list into smaller lists and test with different subject lines and content to gauge performance. Your results will differ for each campaign you send to your third party email lists. Campaign one may go great while campaign two may be marred with SPAM complaints, blacklistings, and blockages.
Send different emails based on the actions recipients take in your campaigns. If someone clicks and opens your first email send them one message and for those who never open the email at all, send them something else.
Email frequency. The key to a successful cold emailing campaign is to warm up your IPs and domains by starting slowly and being consistent with your volume. You don’t want inbox providers to block you for overspeeding.