The Messaging Times

I received an email this morning from a man who was wondering if GroupMail would help him to contact his list of one million emails. It was sent from a Yahoo address. I told him “yes it can but no you shouldn’t.”

If you have a small business and want to get the word out about your product or service, don’t shout it from the top of the Empire State Building. Take the elevator down to the ground floor and talk to people about it. Start some conversations. Attend some conferences. Create a presence and give people the opportunity to request more information. Work to be an invited guest and not the wedding crasher.

I remember a guy from college who would always stand on a chair at parties and make these huge, attention-seeking announcements. Everyone heard him, but nobody liked him. Don’t be the loudmouth who talks the loudest but says the least.

You will create more buzz about your products and services if you engage a smaller crowd, respond to their needs and surpass their expectations.

That’s not to say that you should never rent an email list. To rent a reputable email list of 1 million addresses would cost $170,000 dollars (based on average B2C email list rental rates of $170/thousand). The man who contacted me probably spent about one hundred dollars. Of course, his list will be full of invalid addresses and potentially have some spamtrap email addresses on it as well.

You can also use effective strategies to grow your own email list over time.

“…In-house email lists regularly outperform 3rd party rental lists simply because those people who subscribe directly on your website know what they are signing up for and are requesting to hear from you first-hand. When renting an email list, you are assuming that the people on that list are interested in what you have to say and sell. And you know what assuming does…” read 5 Tips to Increase Email Subscription Rates

Just don’t expect the old batch and blast email method to be effective as a long term strategy to build your business and promote your brand. It’s like shouting from the top of the Empire State Building.

The days of sending email campaigns blindly to a large group of recipients is over. Batch and blast days are behind us. That’s not to say that people don’t still use this big net strategy for their email communication. It means that the results achieved using those antiquated tactics have been proved to be less successful than when marketers target smaller groups or recipients with more precision.

According to a recent Email Marketing Metrics report by MailerMailer, open and click-through rates are influenced by the industry of the sender and the size of their lists. Generally, smaller list sizes yield better open and click-through rates.

“…Messages delivered to small and medium lists had higher open and click-through rates than messages delivered to lists of 1,000 or more subscribers. Religious and spiritual organizations had the highest open rates among large lists, followed by telecommunications and travel companies…” click here (no pun intended) to keep reading

Of course, this doesn’t  mean that you have to sacrifice open and click-through rates if you want to communicate with a large list of subscribers. It means that if you have a large list, it should be opt-in and targeted to the greatest degree possible. The fact that smaller lists yields better results has more to do with the fact that those small lists are generally compiled in-house and sent to recipients who consider the message to be highly relevant to them.

If you want to see the average open and click-through rates for your industry (or list size), read E-Mail Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates.

If you don’t currently track the open and click-through rates of your email campaigns, you might be interested in our GroupMetrics email tracking service.