Currently I run a opt-in hip hop newsletter. Response rate is great, plenty of clicks through to my blog for the various articles I post. I've been running with Aweber for a while now and they've been ok other than the fact I keep increasing their tiers and I don't mail every day (once a week or so) with updates on my website. So , what I want to do is expand the list even if I have to buy data. Obviously I can't use Aweber with imported data, so I figure using interspire to email the list would be a generally good idea. So , my question is this : Would it be a good plan to install interspire to my blog's domain and use it to mail directly from the website? My plan was to start small using ONLY my current optins which have a very low complaint rate. Then after a month or so start adding more subscribers via paid lists. I know seasoning a IP can be quite important, so I figure if I send 30k-50k out to my current, high quality list it will build at least a little bit of reputation. So , if anyone could critique my plan , please let me know!
You have the right idea. If you've already built up a decent sized opt-in list, why not expand on your efforts to naturally grow your list ?
Because to get where I want, i'll have to wait 5 years, if I could add 250-500 a day instead of just 50-100 a day I'd be much happier. If I could assemble a list of 1m emails who like free mp3s I'd be golden.
You're overall plan is good and getting away from Aweber is definitely a good start. The next challenge will be to segregate your data by domain and start building your ip rep. Mail for a few weeks while monitoring your response and compliant rates (FBL) and then start applying for individual whitelists with AOL and Yahoo ...ect... *do make sure you have fbl set up on all major cable domains that offer them. good luck!
My answer to this is a quick, no, do not, for any reason, mail out paid data from your good domain. Your rep is probably awesome, and exactly what rep building is about, if you enter in to that with some paid data and you either get some crap data or just get the normal complaints that 3rd party gives, you will burn your legit website. Your site is pure gold, and where you should capitalize on income and loyal subscribers, what you should do instead is farm out new subscribes with paid data (or use other forms of advertising too), but from a strict mailing perspective, take your 3rd party data and mail it out on other ips. Now how to do that can be tricky, its what we all do here, so you have options, like using other esp accounts that you know might get turned off, get a mailing platform and servers and mail it that way etc. So here are some tips. Since you won't get many complaints from your current subscribers, use that to your advantage. You can warm up new esp or hosted ips with it, same way you are talking about on your real domain. You have have a gold mine in transactional data that you aren't considering, mailing like opt in confirms or any non commercial messages to that data to warm up ips is also an amazing idea, but figure out the warm up, then blast your 3rd party data with your own offers, promoting your real website, get that 3rd party data to click through to your real site and sign up. Now they are not 3rd party anymore, but direct opt in sign ups and can join your pool of real subscribers. Good luck.
That's AFCPMC - That's what I'm looking for. The site itself is pretty strict on content, however with all the opt-ins coming via SEO it just seems too slow to me. I guess the best thing to do is look into setting up other IPs to mail 3rd party data. Is there a good place to look for music related (hip hop specific) data?
AFCPMC is absolutely correct in his method, the only thing I'd add is get another server for your 3rd party data. Transactional data is great for building rep but the last thing you want, is have your server shut down due to complaints from your 3rd party mailings. Therefore, get a new server and build rep with your transactional data and slowly start to adding your 3rd party data and you should be golden.
Not sure what to get data for that, you might just go to other music sites and ask them, might be fairly exclusive too if u can make a deal. They might even mail it for you if u want that. Definitely too slow building on its own, some sites can explode fast but commonly you need to advertise, and email is awesome for that if you get targeted users. And just to clearify what I meant about transactional email, your main site is warmed up already, so I was talking about using the transactional email and even your current users to warm up a 3rd party ip on another server / domain, like completely separate from your main site. Warm up like that means in like 2 months u could be able to blast that 3rd party email and get a lot of it inboxed.
Yeah , i understand warming up a separate domain/IP from my current data, since my current data is good and i Know what they want (with low complaint rates). My problem as stated before has been the #s of subscribers I'm getting, 25-75 new subs a day with a total list size of 7k. Very low complaints, very low unsubscribes as I'm sending them stuff that everyone wants rather than trying to push sales on them. 7k is obviously a drop in the bucket considering the pool of people out there interested in music (Hip hop specifically) is closer to 5m-10m or so. My goal is to get a subscriber list of 100k by the end of the year. If I continue to grow at the rate I have been, I'll only be to 25k by the year's end unless I do something more effective than what I'm doing now. Edit : Also ,what is the typical cost going to be on data for something like this? I also need to decide whether increasing advertising to my lander will be more effective ,or just buying data then trying to clean it out.
I think you might be better of taking this in a new direction to get your subscribers. I really don't think email is the way to go. I'd look at Social Media and a serious backlinking strategy to get your traffic up but by doing it this way you have a better shot at more targeted traffic. And since you're blogging (I would assume with WP) make sure you have all the necessary SEO plug-ins installed and you're keeping your keyword density right to get your articles/pages ranked - get some of that beautiful organic traffic! Then you're golden!! You'd then use your email to push out you "what everybody wants" stuff to your growing subscriber base and keep that list clean.
Push has some really good points here and everything he just said is definitely stuff you should be doing. Here's the thing about email, if you start reading the volumes bulk mailers talk about, it makes you feel kinda shitty thinking you only have 7k addresses. And 7k is low, and only advertising will grow your list, but keep in mind quantity of numbers is meaningless to someone like you. Bulk mailers are trying to farm out people who want their offers, you already have almost 100% of your list in that group. So look at your users like we look at openers, and even as clickers, i.e. valuable people. What matters is, how much reach you have and of course, how much money do you make. I think what Push is telling you about email is that you don't really want to be like us and deal with the problems we do, I'd still say email is one of the best marketing tools out there, but its not like you have to start out like some new mailer getting screwed on bad data, having hosts shut you down, burning domains, etc, when you are only using it as a form of advertising. Now if you can find good data for yourself, like music related, from sites that are like yours, then great, mail the shit out of it, or like I said earlier, you can just pay them to mail their own data for you, i.e. no drama for you. You can also go to the same affiliate networks we use and create your own email submit or some type of offer and let real mailers drop the offer for you. Anyway, you have lots of options, not a terrible thing to learn how to mail, you need to know how to convert your own data so 3rd party can help you with this, just don't approach it like a new mailer and be willing to try anything, you don't need it that bad. Drive traffic to your site with every method you can, build your subs and just focus on building a great site. Volume grows fast if your product is good, at first no one knows of you so you have to jump start it, but once you get to 20k people you will see free traffic from search engines and word of mouth, news sites throw you a link here and there, and it all comes faster and faster.
90% of my new traffic right now is organic, on-page they can opt into the email newsletter or liking us on facebook. 0.1% like us on facebook while 1% or so subscribe to the 'newsletter'. Retention and interactions via email newsletter are 4x to 5x higher than facebook interactions.
