SAFELISTS

Safelists provide an opportunity to send promotional emails to many hundreds of subscribers, many thousands in the case of the larger and more established lists. Each subscriber has agreed to receive emails from other subscribers to that list. This protects against accusations of "spam".

The principal motivation of each member of a list is, of course, the oppportunity to send their own messages. It is a certain fact that a large proportion of emails received are deleted without being read, and even without the subject lines being scanned. However, some get through, and recently on some lists I've had as high as 15% click throughs to the web site I've been promoting.

Safelists are not dead

The larger lists are still worth using. After all, 1% or even 0.5% of a very large membership can be a worthwhile number of visitors to your site. Herculist has a membership in the tens of thousands; even as low as 0.01% would be worth it for the price of an email.

On the whole I find that the percentage response rate from smaller lists (say under a thousand members) tends to be higher. My guess, not scientifically researched but based on my own personal reactions, is that the smaller number of daily emails is less overwhelming and therefore gets closer attention. However you look at it, though, any percentage of a small number is going to be only a small number. Email advertising is a numbers game, and we'll return to this point further down the page when we look at auto-submitters.

Credit-based Safelists

There's another important element in this, however. Safelists are changing. Increasingly they are becoming "credit-based". In other words, in addition to simply subscribing, you earn the right to send promotional emails to others by reading those which you receive and clicking on links embedded in them. Each time you click through to a web page from one of these links you will be credited with the right to send a message to x (number) of the list's subscribers. The value of x varies between lists, influenced heavily by size.

The motivating effect of credit-earning certainly increases click-through rates. Exposure is increased and the challenge is to make your promotional page sufficiently attractive to draw more potential customers into the next stage of your selling process.

It is often claimed, and may be true, that these more recently developed credit safelists bring more business to one's sites. But do they always lead to greater serious attention to a site? There are times when I think that I'd rather have one person click deliberately on a link in a regular list because their attention was caught by the email content than have twenty people click on a credit link only to close down the page without reading it once they've got their credits. For me the jury is still out. Only long-term testing and statistical analysis will reveal the reality.

Some lists I've used with reasonably good results are:

Quite recently (October '07) Frank Salinas added to his growing family of excellent services with a new safelist offering which shows considerable promise and has some quite unusual and imaginative features: The Traffic Secret.

I hope the above does not read as too sceptical. I certainly do not believe that safelists are the most effective advertising medium, but I am sure that both traditional and credit-based lists still have their place in a campaign mix and will do so for a long time to come. In fact since late-January 2008 I have owned a small but growing list of the "regular" type: Evergreen Mails - only $5 for a lifetime subscription to Platinum status, daily mailings and banner rotations.

And almost finally for now, a very recent testing of a set of credit safelists showed the following one as outstandingly responsive in terms of clicks through to the advertised site. It is large by the standards of credit-based lists so that, even though the percentage of members clicking through is a little less than on some others, the number of clicks through per email sent is substantially higher, and from an advertiser's point of view this is a key index of safelist productivity.

IMPORTANT - Your email boxes for bulk safelist use

Don't forget that if you are using safelists to any significant degree you will need a large POP-3 email box which is designed to accept huge volumes of incoming mail reliably. Do NOT use your normal ISP email box; it will be submerged under the flood of messages. Also, many services such as Yahoo are widely rejected by safelist owners due to the frequency of "bounced" emails, and others get swamped by the volume of traffic. For a reliable service you might try one which we are now using - www.yuhknow.com.

The above will be especially important if you decide to go in for bulk safelist emailing - and by that I don't mean simply thousands or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands and even millions of emails sent automatically to thousands of lists. This procedure has both its advocates and its critics. However, it takes no longer to send an email advertisement to three million inboxes than to three thousand, so why not? True, most will not be read, as we discussed above; but a very small percentage of a million is a bigger number than the same very small percentage of a thousand.

The elite among safelist auto-submitters is iPostad. It takes a little effort to set up, with two dedicated large POP3 email boxes to allocate to this purpose only, plus an autojoining and autovalidation procedure for the thousands of lists available, but in my opinion is worth the effort. Look now at the iPostad web site for further details. I suspect you'll be surprised at the potential.