Active Safelist Promotion – The SPAM Alternative.

The purpose of an opt-in Safelist is to allow members to deliver emails to prospective customers without being accused of spamming. All the members of a Safelist agree to provide their email address in exchange for the ability to regularly promote to the list’s membership. There are several different “types” of Safelists and the most popular allow subscriptions to different membership levels, each with different features and benefits.

Safelists are great way to promote or find new business opportunities, affiliate and business partnerships for any product or service – Based on your membership level most Safelists allow for bi-weekly, weekly and even daily promotion to their membership base.
In addition, almost every Safelist provides the user with email distribution software along with their membership to the list itself. This allows the subscriber the ability to send out their ad without the need for expensive email distribution software.

Many Safelists offer lucrative reseller opportunities designed to help spread the word about the list. This allows users the ability to help grow their favorite Safelists.

A word of caution however: Be prepared to receive a fair amount of email to whatever email account you subscribe to the Safelist with. Most Safelist members use an account that can gather a bunch of email addresses. Also, be on the lookout for scams. Unfortunately many marketers offer Safelists that are nothing more then unverified email addresses or addresses of people who never joined the Safelist in the first place. Use common sense. Stay away from Safelists offered on poorly designed websites or that aren’t promoted by other websites.

Here is a good approach if you are considering Safelist email promotion:

Target Safelists of Marketing, Sales and General Business categories

Most businesses fall into these general categories and contain a good number of Safelist participants. We suggest you spend some time doing some research in order to find those Safelists which match your business best. Maintaining a simple spreadsheet is really the preferred method of comparing different Safelists. A spreadsheet will allow you to easily track the fees and benefits for each Safelist.

Here is an example of some directories that contain Safelist listings:

http://elp.global-lists.com/2/directory/
http://www.mailpro-network.com
http://www.jazari-mg.com/safedirect.shtml 
http://www.megasubmitters.com/
http://www.targetsafelists.com/members
http://www.101-website-traffic.com

xxxxxxx recently conducted a Safelist distribution campaign to increase the email subscription of author, Robert Bly. Starting with a subscription list of a little over 2,000 members, we were able to increase Mr. Bly’s newsletter list to over 60,000. More importantly, Safelists provided us with the ability to promote to over 850,000 email addresses daily. These results were obtained in a little over 40 days. Although the process took a good deal of labor – We were able to gather over 500,000 opt-in email addresses which could be used to promote Mr. Bly’s newsletter immediately.

After some research and some comparisons we targeted over 50 of the top Safelists on the internet and began our regular promotion of Mr. Bly’s newsletter.

Join FREE Safelists and purchase Safelists based on research

Most Safelists offer both a free plan and a paid plan and most allow you to promote weekly or daily to the list. We suggest using both free and paid Safelists so you can maximize your ROI.

Always be on the lookout for new Safelists. We would suggest subscribing to a few Safelist newsletters or perhaps even look into hosting your own Safelist. The more involved you are in promoting the Safelist, the bigger it will grow. Remember to promote the Safelists that are pulling best for you by putting a banner on your website or promote them in your newsletter.

Begin promotion to Safelists using a “two-tier” approach:

Free offers tend to pull well in Safelists. So by offering a free report or some “freebie” in your initial promotion you can expect to entice the reader to check out your offer, product or service

We call this TIER I. It means we entice the customer not necessarily by using the offer itself but perhaps by offering something more basic, in this case a Free report. This helps establish credibility with the subscriber and provides an incentive to investigate the source of the ad further.

Although many Safelists only permit the promotion of a text ad, if its possible try and promote a html ad .html tends to pull a more consistently then a text ad.

TIER 1: Here is an example of an html ad we designed for Bob Bly to promote to our Safelists. It provides a free report and entices the reader to the supporting fulfillment page.

http://www.bly.com/offer/index2.html

When the customer visits this page they are provided with the free report and subscription to the bly.com newsletter.

We tried many variations on the design, text placement and other elements in order to find which ad pulled the best response and make some modifications to the layout and design of the promotion

TIER 2: Connecting directly to Bob’s subscription database we were able to allow an email notification to be sent to the newsletter itself and an use an autoresponder to automatically fulfill the FREE report to the subscriber.

We suggest using a cgi-based autoresponder (as opposed to a pay-service). A good website which reviews different cgi autoresponder scripts is located at:

http://www.autoresponder-review.com/

The second tier of the promotion is the actual fulfillment of the freebie and the subscription form for the newsletter. Once the customer visits the fulfillment web page they have the ability to link the company website. The customer also is able to subscribe to the newsletter and receive the free report.

Gather emails for additional promotions:

As a Safelist member, each day your inbox will be flooded with potential opportunities and more and more addresses. By using an email extraction utility and a professional email list management tool we are able to strip these addresses from our email software. Next, we placed these addresses into an email distribution software and regularly promoted these names with the free report offer.

For Mr. Bly, we gathered and ran the email addresses each day through our in-house email distribution program. This allowed us to increase our results more quickly.

Further proof that a regular promotion schedule and a well designed offer or ad can yield positive results!

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