Opt in lists contain email addresses of people who have signed up

Before we begin, let me first mention that the back of this article contains a compendium of dozens of opt-in e-mail list sources, including list owners, vendors, and brokers. And let me also mention that, for purposes of this article, we will look only at opt-in or permission-based e-mail lists; in other words, there are no bulk e-mail lists here.

As we saw, opt-in lists contain e-mail addresses of people who have signed up at some time to receive promotional offers and announcements within their selected categories of interest. A consumer interested in receiving coupons or sales announcements from online retailers, for instance, might opt-in to shopping categories across a variety of sites that offer it. List vendors such as Postmaster Direct, YesMail, DeliverE, 24/7, and others often collect opted-in e-mail addresses on their own sites; and they also gather them from other smaller sites within their respective networks. In other words, they are either owners of the lists or they are vendors (resellers) of other Web sites’ collected opt-in e-mail addresses (some are combinations of both). All e-mail addresses belong to people who have gone somewhere on the Web and essentially exclaimed, “Yes! I’m interested in receiving promotions and product announcements within the following categories.”

For the record, some of the list owners and/or providers use different tactics when opting in new e-mail addresses. Postmaster Direct, for instance, has people sign up on their site and then just to be sure, sends them a follow-up e-mail, requiring them to respond by e-mail from the address they signed up under. YesMail, on the other hand another opt-in provider sends a follow-up e-mail, but doesn’t require the recipient to respond. It only wants replies from people who have changed their minds about being on YesMail’s list, or have received a subscription in error. Two different opt-in policies, two different schools of thought. Those who believe in “double opt-in” also know it as “confirmed opt-in.” They believe it is the safest way to prevent forged subscriptions from inundating a nonsubscriber’s inbox.

Another category of permission-based list though many will claim that it’s not completely opt-in includes addresses culled from Web sites that offer free e-mailed newsletter subscriptions. IDG, for instance, who manages Industry Standard’s e-mailed newsletter list, used to collect e-mail addresses with a prechecked box at the end which read, “From time to time, we may allow carefully selected, reputable companies to send you information by e-mail which may be of interest to you.” Note that I said that the box was prechecked, meaning that new subscribers that didn’t uncheck it would receive these promotions. This seemingly small fact caused a constant commotion with the anti-spammers of the industry. They claimed that the prechecked box often went unnoticed by subscribers and that, in fact, they had not truly opted-in to receiving promotions: they just didn’t know any better. (For the record, IDG now collects those e-mail addresses with this box no longer prechecked).

List Owners and Vendors

Now that we’ve determined that opt-in lists are the way to go, let’s begin the search for the right ones for us. First, it should be noted that lists of e-mail addresses are completely proprietary, meaning that unlike the way it is with direct mail list addresses, the only people who actually see and maintain e-mail addresses are the list vendors themselves. Here is how it works: You send the vendors your promotion (your creative, complete with full text and links); they, in turn, will send it out to the lists that you’ve selected (they will not send you the list for you to e-mail directly).

At the time of this writing, there was talk of third-party service bureaus getting involved in the list process to ensure that an e-mail promotion isn’t received multiple times by a recipient who may be subscribed on a number of different lists. For the record, service bureaus act as “merge-purge” houses and remove duplicate e-mail addresses from campaigns. This, of course, is a benefit to the e-mail marketer because it will prevent a recipient of a promotion from receiving it more than once. You can well imagine how a duplicate, or even a triplicate promotion could certainly suppress response.