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The good news when it comes to marketing by email is that there are many excellent types of optin prospect lists or leads to choose from. You may be surprised to learn that autoresponder leads can be placed on your short list and some marketers may wonder why?

The answer is simple. You can acquire this type of lead in ample quantities so you can have enough leads to beat the numbers game. And with the tips you’re about to learn, you may find that you can turn even an average autoresponder list into a list that will perform beyond your expectations.

Why Autoresponder Leads Make Sense

The good news is that you can find higher-quality true opt-in auto-responder leads in great quantity and save a bundle if you know how to use the leads. But, you’ll need a strategy to get the best value from the leads given that email marketing has changed dramatically over the years.

Take responsibility for the Quality Issue

In times past, quality was the big buzzword. Within and outside of IT departments, quality programs were all the rage. Today, we know that quality doesn’t have to be a department to be practiced by those who are actually on the front line.

When it comes to marketing with sales leads in general, quality is still an issue and needs to be addressed by everyone from the lead generator all the way down to the marketer. From a practical standpoint, ultimately, the marketer is the front-line entity who needs to test and take a look at what he or she can do to insure that they are working with data that offers that best chance of success based on real-world successes and failures.

When it comes to email marketing, the good news is that it is relatively easy to measure quality in a way that is meaningful. Specifically, it is possible to determine the effectiveness of a campaign based on how many people open an email and how many people click on the link in an email - this, of course, assumes that the email is delivered.

Therefore, we can state, that the ability to have your email delivered is the first prerequisite of success – of a successful email campaign. As an online marketer who helps other marketers with email and other campaigns, it has become clear over time that it is becoming more and more difficult for marketers to send email to certain domains.

This has led us to make some rather interesting recommendations. When it comes to quality, an easy place to start is with the list that you are working with.
 

For best results, practice list hygiene

Guess what? Since prospects are just people and some are not always on the up-and-up, you may find that doing a little list hygiene may help you in some obvious and not so obvious ways.

I understand that if you purchase a list, you’ll want to send your email to everyone on your list but this may not be the best idea.

To start, I recommend that you think about whether or not you want to send email to people who provide what is known as “junk” email addresses. You know what I’m referring to. We’re talking about those temporary email drop accounts that people use so they won’t receive the information they requested. Go figure!

At the very least, I’d recommend that you divide your list into two functional groupings by placing records with junk email addresses in one file and the records with non-junk email addresses in a different file.

This way, if you’re interested, you can run your own experiment by doing what is termed split-testing. More on that later.

Legitimate Email Marketers – something you want to know

Today, getting email through is contingent on many factors. One thing is observable and it simply this – it is very difficult to get any type of email through to yahoo.com and related domains.

Yahoo now manages outsourced email domains such as att.net, bellsouth.com and others. The impact of their, shall we say sometimes over-zealous anti-spam filters, is that a percentage of legitimate email doesn’t get through. You may find that if you send email to your own customers, it won’t make it if the customer has provided a yahoo-type email address.

Email marketers can be proactive

Even though much of the email you will send  - when you send to temp addresses, will go to spam folders, it is possible to get email through. If you recognize the problem, you will be much more likely to find a solution.

What does this mean and a simple solution

Given that temporary email domains are often overly restrictive and that when you are working with auto-responder files that often contain hundreds of thousands of records, you may find that you can send email with less drama when you separate the wheat from the chaff. (Please note we are providing tips only to email marketers who send opt-in email and we are not endorsing or recommending spamming.) 

Based on recent split testing using valid email broadcast services that we manage, we’ve been able to determine that yahoo.com and other related email hosts are perhaps more restrictive right now in accepting email.

In addition, there is the very real question of intended use in that we feel it is likely that prospects who request information using a “temporary” email account are likely to not really be interested in receiving a response – even though the “prospect” requested information and this was validated.

A simple fix for many email marketers who are not “professionals” might be to take Yahoo.com and similar email addresses out of their main list. Based on your own experience, you may wish to toss them out or send to these addresses in a different fashion.

Handling overly restrictive domains

Given that you have decided to eliminate prospects from your email campaigns that specified a yahoo.com domain, a quick list of email domains managed by yahoo.com is available by simply accessing yahoo.com and attempting sot sign in. The sign-in page presents a drop-down list of all domains managed by Yahoo. Simple.

Managing your lists

At some point in time, you may want to invest in some software that makes it easy to manage your data. Various contact management programs make it simple to manipulate data, filter data, etc. If you don’t want to invest in software, you might find that you can use Excel. If you don’t have excel and don’t’ want to buy, it check out the open source version that’s included in the free open office software suite.

Assuming you’re going to use an Excel-like spreadsheet to work with your list, it will simply be a matter of copying the column that contains the email addresses and pasting in a copy and using that copy by splitting the column into two text fields using the Data feature on the menu (in Excel). Note, you’ll want to insert two blank target fields to contain the two split fields. You’ll split on the ‘@’ sign and second formerly blank column will contain only the domains of each email address. Then, its just a matter of sorting by the domains.

Then you can use the save-as function to save your worksheet in whatever format you need.

Most of the time, a file in CSV format cab be easily imported into most programs.