Outbound Email Marketing

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Popular methods

A variety of companies can assist in this. If you Google outbound email marketing, there’s going to be a lot of results.

Buying email lists

First thing when it comes to outbound email marketing to think about is the idea of buying email lists because it can give you a sort of quick return in a very short amount of time. This is because it can take years and years and years to actually create a really solid amazing email list. Alternatively, though, you can buy email lists, which will be targeted and curated and will provide you with emails that are active and being used as opposed to emails that have maybe been long forgotten.

Employing a freelancer

Number two, of course, is this idea of employing a freelancer to collect and help you bring in these email addresses and find relevant email addresses. Again, that idea of relevancy is very important.

Using freelancing platforms

There are platforms that will help you build your lists. You can get that jump-start on your outbound email marketing from Upwork or Freelancer, or Guru, just to name a few.

Disadvantages for purchased lists

We’ve got four items to think about.

Irrelevant audiences

If your content is specific to a particular geographical area or to a particular industry or sector or an age range, maybe a demographic, a cohort, for example, you want to make sure your content gets to the right person. That’s extremely important to you. Your content must get to the right audience.

And if you’ve got an email list that has irrelevant audience members, they’re not going to read it and it’s going to skew your results. It’s going to skew your data in terms of your open rates. And you want to make sure that you have people on your list who have a higher likelihood of clicking on your email and reading your content.

Dead email addresses

These may be email addresses of people who may be deceased and/or emails that just haven’t been used for a long time. We have a long history of using email. Globally, there have been countless email providers. People have made their own email accounts and their own web servers. And then, perhaps, they change jobs. So they just stop using those messages.

Dead email addresses will give you inaccurate data. And you don’t want to have those on your list. Just if you find out an email that you know is not working or no one is using it, just get rid of it. You can call some of your emails on there.

Unsolicited email addresses

These are the people who didn’t really want to come to the party. They didn’t want to come to your email marketing. Someone maybe added them, a friend thought they’d be interested in your content, or maybe if you’re doing B2B, maybe you already added them by default. Maybe you have a database of readers of people, your CRM, your contacts.

However, people want to come to your content of their own accord. And so you want to make sure that unsolicited emails or addresses they don’t get added to your list because again, those are people that might not be interested in your content and they might actually do more harm to your company and to your message and to your brand.

Potential violation of law

This can be a gray area for any of us who work within email marketing. It is vital that you learn the privacy laws and the email laws essentially of your region, and of your sector. You want to make sure that the content you’re sending out, how you’re sending it out, and the list that you’re sending it out to are all in line with applicable laws and regulations. And don’t just focus on your particular area, because email is global. And so you want to make sure that you’re following the laws and privacy regulations as much as you can on a global perspective.