Analyzing email lists

These days everyone wants your email address. And then they want to form a relationship with you. And then you are supposed to buy something from them. At least that is the general plan.

But not all websites have enough visitors to make collecting email addresses worthwhile. So what do you do then? Why not buy access to a list?

I will assume that you know to check that the list is truly double opt-in. You do not want to buy a list that is "harvested" from the internet. Spam is bad. Really bad. I also assume you know to buy a list with people that have shown an interest in your industry.

With these assumptions out of the way let's get busy. You will find that most email list brokers are more happy to sell you thousands of email addresses. But is more always better? Does the success of your mailing only depend on the number of people you have permission to email? Of course not. Is there an easy way to evaluate an email list? Of course. Is it useful? You bet.

Evaluate the email list

It is really easy. We will use an old proven direct marketing technique - RFM. R stands for Recency. F stands for Frequency. M stands for Money.

Recency simply refers to the freshness of the email data. Freshness is important because people move, change IPSs and abandon free email services. A fresher list would indicate that you can expect to reach more people at active, in-use email addresses.

Frequency refers to the number of times the members of the email list have responded to offers in the past. If there is no response from your mailing - what good it it? Frequency is important because it tells you if the mailing list is made up of real people that take action. Because no action means no sale.

And then the big one, Money. Here we look at how much any given email address is spending. We look at the total as well as the average ticket. If you do nothing else, do look at the Money factor. If you are selling $150 software why spend money on an email list with an average ticket size of $20?

To buy a list because it is cheap or contains lots of email data is not necessarily a good idea. Looking at the list using RFM will help you get more from your mailings. It is all about asking the right questions. List brokers may not have all the data you are looking for. That does not have to mean it is a bad list. But asking the "right" questions will put you in a good position to get good email data at a good price.