Catch of the day

How third-party,opt-in lists are like hand-crafted pies

By Jenifer Joyce, Director of List Acquisition (and Closet Pie Master)

When I’m not developing relationships with the most pre-eminent list owners in the US, I bake. Specifically I bake hand-crafted pies, sometimes spending hours on a single one, shaping, molding, grating, mixing, and forming the finest ingredients into delectable wonders. I worry over each one of my pies like children. I know what has gone into each one, but you still never know how they’ll behave until they arrive, or how they will be received by others.

Which is a lot like email list marketing.

That’s quite a leap, I know, but I marry my passions like crème frache on a blueberry pie. But here’s what I’ve learned:

List Marketing Lessons from a Pie Master

Fresh, fresh fresh. When I use fresh ingredients, the results are ten-fold over using off-brand ingredients. The same is what marketers are finding with great lists. Working with the best and freshest lists can produce amazing results. List owners, play this up by taking a little time to freshen your list monthly or even weekly-you’ll be surprised how much more enthusiastic the reception is when you send them out into the world.

Choose an expert, not an amateur. Of course technique comes into play, and in this metaphor, that resides in the hands of the marketer in crafting the message: Is it the right headline? The right image? Tone? Font? Offer? From a carefully constructed pie to a hand-crafted list marketing campaign, trust an expert, whose going to prepare the final product carefully and with attention to detail.

Find your focus group. With pies and with marketing, it’s best to start small. Is your campaign a crowd-pleaser or a marketing offer only a mother could love? You don’t know until you test it out! That’s why the best bakers – scratch that – marketers know that it is important to test and experiment with small groups before going live with a message to a wider audience. And ultimately, while the proof might be in the pie or postal offer, it doesn’t ensure that the taster will like it. Keep testing until you find the list recipient who’s craving what you’ve got to offer!

Genuine Ingredients. In cooking as in list hunting, it’s all in the ingredients! And much like cooking, you need to look very carefully at the fine print when choosing your list ingredients! Even though Tennis Magazine may sound roughly the same as Tennis Lovers Masterfile, there’s a world of difference, as we’ve mentioned here. It’s the same reason why you choose Challenge unsalted butter over the “other butter,” even though the latter might be half or even the fourth of a price. The bottom line is, no matter how deceptively good knock-offs might look, why pay at all for something that’s going to ultimately leave you dissatisfied with the results?

The Sniff Test: Marketfish helps you mold a masterpiece

Once you’ve nailed down the basics, it’s time to give your product the sniff test. You’ve done your due diligence, but how do you know that the list is good? Unlike in baking, you can’t sniff, touch or taste the list in advance. That’s where Marketfish comes in. First, we only work with top brands, like Pennwell, Mixx and Advanstar (who are akin to King Arthur Flour and Cook’s Choice Real Vanilla in the publishing world). Then we give all of our lists on the Marketfish platform the “sniff” test, working in concert with list owners to constantly update the lists with the freshest names. If that weren’t enough, we record all campaigns that are sent to our lists so that both our list owners and our marketers know how well they have performed in aggregate. We keep track of the good, the bad and the unsavory and expose it all to marketers within the platform.

So when you approach your next campaign, check out the Marketfish platform to scratch, sniff and poke at the very best ingredients available to create campaigns that will have customers for life clamoring for the recipe! And frankly, it’s a heck of a lot better than Mrs. Smith’s from the frozen food case (shudder.)

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