Email List Rental Named MVP

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

Baseball has Ryan Howard, online marketing has email list rental. We were excited to see the release of a study by Marketing Experiments that proves the power of email list rental. They ran a test with a financial publisher that compared the conversion rates of campaigns with Yahoo! search, Google AdWords and email list rental. You can read the full study here.

My friends at the Search Insiders Summit take note: The results weren't even close.

Yahoo! and Google performed well, showing conversion rates of .79% and 1.04%, respectively.

Organic site traffic, not surprisingly, did much better -- converting 2.71% of clicks.

But it was email list rental that took the top prize with a conversion rate of 5.60%.

There are two takeaways from this study.

1. Use the tools!: If you thought email list rental would never work for you, think again. Test - and then re-test - and then test some more.
   
2. Some people don't know exactly what they want: Search is great for those who are actively seeking a particular product or service. But a well-crafted, targeted email offer can develop (and fulfill!) latent customer needs.
   

If you need ideas on where to start, email me and I'll be happy to help you out.