I have often written to say that with B2B and B2C email marketing it is often necessary to build your own list.

This can be done, but it takes a little time, and generally involves gathering the email addresses of customers as they buy, while doing some telephone research on potential customers.   (If you would like to talk about either or both approach let me know – we often get involved in this sort of research work and can put together valuable lists of customer and potential customer email addresses).

But, as I say, such work takes a little time, and can cost a little money.

Which is why the notion of being able to buy in an email list of potential customers is so attractive.

Now we all know that each campaign consists of three elements: the creative material that you send out, the offer and the mailing list, and in any test we need to know which of these three elements we are looking at.

I’m in the fortunate position of being able to utilise creative copy which I know works, because it has been tested elsewhere before.  And I know the offer that we have works (an offer of a free report on how to do email marketing) again because we have tested it before.  I offer this report free simply to get the email addresses of interested people.

Past experience shows that with a semi-decent list such an advert can bring in a 5% response rate – occasionally even more.

In this case however we got a response rate of 0.01%.

The list in question was purchased on disk.  It contained 50,000 email addresses and cost us £250.  And now we know it brings in a result of 0.01% when offering a free item.

We did this experiment as part of our eternal research project into how direct marketing works and to keep an eye on what our competitors are offering, and inevitably in such a explorations, we will waste a bit of money and get some bad results.

So it was not too disastrous a situation for us – we expect this to happen sometimes.

But it could be a big problem for a company that has not been involved with email marketing before, for such a firm would not know if the problem was caused by the email list, email itself, the product or the copy.  Experience suggests that most firms tend to blame email, and then stop using it.

I’ve proved to my own satisfaction over and over again that email marketing can work, but the copy, the list and the offer all have to be right.

Getting all three right is what we do through our Velocity programme, and through individual projects.  If you are interested please do call 01536 399 000 or see www.velocity.ac

You can stay in touch with all our writings on direct marketing via Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.