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Rent an email list to grow your business

Written by John Kerr | Nov 13, 2015 9:33:20 PM

If you're trying to grow your business, you might consider using rented email lists. The process works by reaching out to a company that already has a large list of people's email addresses that may be interested in your product. You don't get to see the list, but rather the company that has it will run a campaign for you which can drive traffic to your company. So how can you make this process work for you?

How is your list performing?

Most companies have a mailing list, but only a select few really know how to utilize reaching out to their customers. Running similar promotions every month, sending out too many messages or unprofessional emails don't capture people's attention. It makes some business sense to have as much publicity as possible because you're getting your name out there, but you run a big risk of having a potential buyer associate your good or service with spam. If you haven't been seeing the response that you want from your email list, then using rented email lists can be another strategy to try to help you zero in on the perfect customers who may not know about you yet. 

List Rental Tips

If you're going to use a rented email list, you'll need to make your offer exceptionally good. This isn't the time to send an introductory letter with merely great content. You'll have a very limited chance here to engage with these new people who aren't familiar with you, and their attention spans are not on your side. There are lots of lists out there, but that doesn't mean they're any good. Using a reputable company is pivotal in picking up the right kind of business by getting you to people who have a good chance in being interested in what you do.

There are companies out there that will not cultivate the lists to your brand, and they may have deeply discounted prices that reflect their lack of effort. Some have servers that are used to send wide-scale emails which are immediately recognized by the email servers and are flagged as spam. They may make you pay for email addresses that have already been closed by the account holder. These less-than-ethical companies give renting email lists a bad name because the business owners end up contacting people who were never going to buy. If you're going to use this rented lists, you need to do it right. 

Once you do find a company with trustworthy practices, one suggestion would be to send out a test email to a portion of the list, say 20% of the people on it. Make your offer simple and valuable. If you're going to give a discount off something, make sure that it's your highest selling product, and make sure you don't run the same sale every week. You can then gauge the quality of the response you receive, and either tweak your message or try something else entirely. 

There is definitely opportunity in this strategy, but it takes some forethought and planning before you'll get any payoff. Hopefully you understand more about why rented email lists have gotten a bad reputation, and you're open to the possibility of what it can do for your business. Sometimes even small increases in your customer base can do wonders for your bottom line!