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Direct to Consumer Brand Discovery

  Online Marketing Whitepaper
 

Online Marketing Whitepaper

Introduction

The Imperfect World of Quantifying Website Traffic

Online Advertising Lingo

Necessities for Every Company with a Website

Paid Advertising

Leveraging the True Power of the Internet

Bootstrap Marketing Online

 

A Dated Introduction to Online Marketing*

*Note: This is the original version of a whitepaper that was authored in 2001 by iCondotta's founder and principal consultant, Stephan Aarstol. It's a useful primer, but dated - pre-Wikipedia (2001), pre-Google AdWords PPC (2002), way pre-YouTube (2005), you get the picture...

Rented Email Lists

In contrast to a paid sponsorship of an email newsletter where the advertiser’s presence is that of the underwriter, paying for a rented email list means the advertiser message is the whole email. It’s the online application of the traditional direct marketing practice of renting a mailing list. The advertiser is not given the email addresses for future use, but rather they are only allowed one distribution where the media owner maintains possession of the actual list. Rented email lists have a couple huge added benefits over traditional rented mailing lists – the advertiser knows who actually opens the email plus the recipient has the ability to carry out a direct response such as clicking through to a splash page for some desired result.

While rented email lists don’t hold the intrinsic value that comes from tying your message to popular content, they do have one big advantage over email newsletter sponsorships – they typically generate a higher direct response rate. Whereas an email newsletter sponsorship will usually generate a click-thru rate between 0.5% and 5.0%, a compelling direct email advertisement can generate a click-thru rate as high as 10% or sometimes even slightly higher. Of course, you’ll usually have to pay a much higher cost per email or CPM rate for a rented list. CPM rates for rented email lists are all over the board depending on the degree of targeting afforded, but the majority of lists are usually sold in the $100 to $200 CPM range.

The advertiser’s primary consideration when renting an email list should be the quality of the list. Send you message to a haphazardly collected list and your message could be construed as unsolicited spam email. Always ask how the list was compiled. See the section on “Email lists - Opt-in, Double Opt-in or Opt-out” for an explanation of the different email recipient collection methods.

Another important element in the effectiveness of a direct email campaign is the type of email that gets sent. In general, plain text emails don’t generate as good of a response as HTML emails, and rich media emails get the best response rates. If you’re going to spend the money on a direct email, it might be well worth it to look into investing some of the budget with a rich media email creative company.

>> Paid Product Placement & Directory Placement

Authored in 2001 by Stephan Aarstol
while Director of Business Development
at AuntMinnie.com