List Mailers, Safelists & Text Ad Exchanges

The phrase email marketing covers a multitude of strategies and marketing activities.

List mailer owners often call their services an email marketing service. While I guess that they may be technically correct, I’d respectfully suggest that they’re substantially degrading what email marketing is.

Let’s be honest about List Mailers, Safelists and their cousins text ad exchanges. While all of these traffic generators allow you to send an email to some or all of their lists, the email that you send is an incentivised one. The recipient is mainly interested in one thing- clicking on the link in your email to earn advertising credits.

In effect, List Mailers are glorified, more powerful versions of traffic exchanges. Years of experience suggests that you can expect three to five times the return on investment (whether that investment is in the form of hours or dollars) from a good list mailer than you can from a good traffic exchange.

They work, provided that you maintain a consistent marketing message and effort.

When marketing in this environment, every little nuance helps. Your email headline won’t have a massive impact the first time it’s seen (It will barely register) but the cumulative effect of consistent headlines will create awareness and interest. Unique squeeze pages are more likely to cut through then the same old same old affiliate pages most advertisers are using. Banner and text ad displays should be consistent with your main email message.

I’m not going to go onto the intricacies of setting up your list mailing campaigns, there are people who have already done that and done it very well.

Perhaps the simplest explanation for a basic setup is available at Simple Mail Builder. It was written a couple of years ago and some of the programs recommended (Adkreator for one) are no longer around. As I’ve previously stated, Leads Leap gives you enough templates and flexibility to create your own unique presence, wherever they mention Adkreator, read Leads Leap. The point is that Simple Mail Builder covers the basics of using List Mailers and Safelists pretty well.

What List Mailers to start with

I’m a member of well over 150 mailing sites. Of those, I’d say 50 are running really well and the worst 20 or so are pretty well useless. It’s a big market and you’re going to get the best results from those mailers that are well run and have a lively membership base.

I think a good first list mailer to use is Herculist. It’s probably the oldest program of its type online and it advertises a mailing list of 80000. When I send an email today it tells me that the advertisement was sent to 134000 subscribers. That doesn’t mean 134000 people are going to read it. Only a mere fraction will. But Herculist has regularly delivered results for me for nearly fifteen years.

It is free to join, but your reach will be limited unless you choose the upgrade option. Lifetime upgrades represent great value here. Mine has paid for itself many times over. Don’t upgrade immediately. Have a poke around, familiarise yourself with the site and all its advertising avenues. After a couple of days, you should be presented with a special lifetime offer. There’s no hurry it will stay there but it’s going to give you good advertising reach.

From the oldest, I’d recommend going to the hottest. Right now there is nothing hotter than Free Advertising For You, This site is an advertising powerhouse that offers a great start-up package to new members. Once you’ve joined, go to the Get Your free Ads tab on the left-hand menu. There’s a bucket load of free advertising to take advantage of listed under 5 different tabs -:

Welcome Promo Code – you have a choice of 2 – the 2nd is better in my opinion.
50000 Free credits tobe used how you see fit
5 Free solo ads (get this)
1 solo every month
Weekly promo Code

This site is super active and well worth your time. Upgrades give you more advertising power and flexibility.

From there, I would follow the recommendations from the Hoopla Family – specifically the List Hoopla Top 21. These rankings tend to jump around. Take your time and work your way through from top recommendation to bottom.