There is a website on the internet that sells bulk emailing lists. One of their offerings is a list of Architects email addresses – 21000 unique addresses for less than £500! By way of comparison another site will rent you a list of 12000 architects email addresses for £3000. Just goes to show how wide open the email marketing lists sector is! An established BSA client approached us with the £500 list of 21000 records wanting to run a campaign. Our initial response was sceptical. We all know about bought-in email lists (particularly big lists with relatively small prices). They should be avoided! or should they? We thought we’d investigate further. Using our experience, it was clear that parts of the list were wholly inappropriate for properly targeted email marketing and we quickly excluded these but we were left with a list of around 10,000 – still a substantial list – that, on the face of it, looked reasonable – but still we weren’t satisfied. We undertook some further research to a sample of the data to check it out and the results were positive. We were happy that we now had a well targeted list of architects with suitably up to date data. Our client wished to make a specific, and highly relevant service offering to architects so it seemed we had a targeted audience and a relevant message.
Note: We recommend that an email marketing programme should focus on building your reputation rather than overt selling. This said, including suitable offers or promotions from time to time is both acceptable and sensible.
Still wanting to keep things under control, we ran the email marketing campaign in batches to our refined list. I think the results speak for themselves:
- Over 2100 opened emails
- Bounce Rate: Less than 8%
- Unsubscribe Rate: Less than 1%
- NO negative feedback
And 18 solid business enquiries. If you make sure your email marketing is well targeted and relevant – it works.
