<i>&gt;Think of your Web site or newsletter as a trade show booth.</i>
<i>&gt;If you stand there and hand out $5 bills for everybody who</i>
<i>&gt;is willing to be on a mailing list, you'll end up with a</i>
<i>&gt;very large, very useless mailing list.</i>
Hi everyone,
Things have been a little quieter around here lately -- must be all
of the L-Tryptophan in the Christmas turkey. I have a question for the group
which relates directly to the discussion surrounding outbound marketing
strategies and focused E-mail newsletters. Once one has established a very
large, very topical mailing list, how does one go about proving this claim
to a potential advertiser?
Counting hits on a page is not rocket science. There are numerous
third party auditors that will track and verify traffic claims. It's also
difficult to fraudulently inflate hit counts (notice I didn't say
impossible), especially when a sponsor requests to see a weekly log file.
Things change significantly when the medium used to disseminate information
is E-mail. Without giving away the E-mail addresses, how does one prove the
claimed size of a mailing list? For that matter, how does one prove that the
names were voluntarily surrendered because of an interest in the topic, as
opposed to being vaccumed-up at websites and newsgroups? And finally, how
does one go about convincing an advertiser that the mail was actually
delivered? -- there is no kind of "registered E-mail" (hmmmm...me thinks
there's an idea brewing) that I can recall.
I will name my first born after the person who can truly guide me
through these perplexing postulations ;^). I will continue to provide my
readers with weekly reviews of the hottest Windows 95 shareware, sponsors or
not, but it would be nice if I could sell a little advertising space on the
newsletter at some point. These are questions that I believe "Internet
savvy" E-vertisers (trademarked? anyone? anyone?) will pose -- I just want
to be prepared.
First post of 1996 -- Happy New Year! Peace and prosperity to you and yours!
Lance Jones.
In-Touch: Win95 Edition
<a href="<a href="http://www.islandnet.com/~sword/win95.html">http://www.islandnet.com/~sword/win95.html</a>">http://www.islandnet.com/~sword/win95.html</a>
sword@islandnet.com
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