I got a PM after replying to an earlier thread about monetizing email contacts, so I thought I'd share my input with the forum. I typically lurk here to learn from others, so hopefully this provides some basic insights in to how monetizing email works (at least in my world). YMMV
Below are some basics to monetizing email lists. If you can get 4 or 5 lists out there that are decent, you can usually generate $2k-3k per month in completely passive revenue.
We work through a company that specializes in leasing out the contact lists (email files). There are many of these "data brokers" who sell to enterprise for marketing purposes.
1. Most of these brokers only care about corp email addresses, and don't even count B2C addresses (@gmail, @hotmail, @yahoo, etc). Those get filtered out because they are not highly valued.
The more fields you have, the more valuable your list is. If you just show up with email addresses, it will be nearly worthless. You'll need a minimum of first name, last name, email address. Higher value lists require job title, company name - mailing address is huge.
2. Brokers look for brands associated with your list so they can market it for you. For example: if you approach them with "100K loose contacts", they will have zero interest because they can't sell it. However, if you approach them with "100K IT Managers who subscribe to your CompTIA training newsletter", they will be very interested.
Creating a "brand" attached to your list is relatively easy to do with a Mailchimp account and a decent site. It will give the broker guys selling your list a ton of leverage. They create a "data card" with a synopsis of your list to try and entice corporate buyers. Example: <sweet logo> "90K HR Professionals who have purchasing authority and opt-in to this newsletter at ABC.com and care about hiring best practices". Boom - your list just became really valuable.
3. If your contacts are trash, it will show early due to terrible opt-out rates. To protect against this: make sure you do a proper test newsletter with actual articles in your niche, and have a clear opt-out at the bottom. One pass with this test send should opt-out all the crappy records on your list who would otherwise sink your list value.
A decent list broker will do everything for you from marketing your data, to doing the actual sends for a small fee (worth it imo).
This should be enough to get you a marketable list.***
Have a great day, everyone
*** That said, truly crappy lists will still perform horribly via response rates, and you won't get many rentals from it.
Below are some basics to monetizing email lists. If you can get 4 or 5 lists out there that are decent, you can usually generate $2k-3k per month in completely passive revenue.
We work through a company that specializes in leasing out the contact lists (email files). There are many of these "data brokers" who sell to enterprise for marketing purposes.
1. Most of these brokers only care about corp email addresses, and don't even count B2C addresses (@gmail, @hotmail, @yahoo, etc). Those get filtered out because they are not highly valued.
The more fields you have, the more valuable your list is. If you just show up with email addresses, it will be nearly worthless. You'll need a minimum of first name, last name, email address. Higher value lists require job title, company name - mailing address is huge.
2. Brokers look for brands associated with your list so they can market it for you. For example: if you approach them with "100K loose contacts", they will have zero interest because they can't sell it. However, if you approach them with "100K IT Managers who subscribe to your CompTIA training newsletter", they will be very interested.
Creating a "brand" attached to your list is relatively easy to do with a Mailchimp account and a decent site. It will give the broker guys selling your list a ton of leverage. They create a "data card" with a synopsis of your list to try and entice corporate buyers. Example: <sweet logo> "90K HR Professionals who have purchasing authority and opt-in to this newsletter at ABC.com and care about hiring best practices". Boom - your list just became really valuable.
3. If your contacts are trash, it will show early due to terrible opt-out rates. To protect against this: make sure you do a proper test newsletter with actual articles in your niche, and have a clear opt-out at the bottom. One pass with this test send should opt-out all the crappy records on your list who would otherwise sink your list value.
A decent list broker will do everything for you from marketing your data, to doing the actual sends for a small fee (worth it imo).
This should be enough to get you a marketable list.***
Have a great day, everyone
*** That said, truly crappy lists will still perform horribly via response rates, and you won't get many rentals from it.