Consumers are asking to receive emails and marketers are applying lessons from search.

For the past six months or so, email list rentals have been enjoying a strong comeback as a lead generation and customer acquisition tool. Advertisers who were mailing pre-CAN-SPAM (the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003) are back in full force, while newcomers enter the email marketing space at break-neck speed. It’s my belief that there are three key drivers behind this trend:

• Most of the bad actors are gone. I’m not talking about spammers. I’m speaking of the middle tier of questionable vendors who blurred the lines. This tier seems to have shrunk dramatically this year. As a result, marketers and consumers now both have a much easier time distinguishing between the guys in the white hats and those in the black hats without those pesky grays in the way.
  
  
• Email list managers haven’t exactly been asleep at the switch. The bar for a responsive prospect email list is incredibly high given the maze of deliverability issues, higher churn rates and so on. Your list is either performing better than it has in years or it has a big fork stuck in it. The nice thing here is that email campaigns are quick and cheap to test.
  
  
• Search Saturation. Prices are on the rise, inventory is drying up (why do you think Gmail was created?) and ROI is declining. Meanwhile email prices have remained at a seven-year low. It should be noted, however, that search marketers who want to bring some of their experience to email and list managers should be prepared.

However, another key driver makes the above points seem minuscule in the grand scheme of Internet media things: consumers have not stopped joining third-party email lists. More to the point, tens of thousands of people join third-party email lists everyday, without incentive, and are asking to receive relevant offers. What better way to grow your housefile than to recruit people who you already know are comfortable interacting through email? This shining beacon of hope for the channel allows me to sleep through the night.

Learning from search

Getting back to search some of the important lessons marketers learned from search are now ingrained in the way online media is purchased in general. The most important lesson: You don’t assume relevance, you ask for it.

You see, direct marketers had this old theory that if they knew enough about your age, household income, gender, etc., they could determine what offer is best for you. Sounds a bit arrogant nowadays doesn’t it? On the Internet, people tell you what they are looking for, thank you very much, rather than you telling them. In other words, keywords have risen as the Internet’s best answer to determining relevance, and they no longer apply only to search.

Self-selected keywords don’t merely point to relevance: they are relevance.

Smart third-party list builders such as MSNBC have known this and have built their lists based upon popular keywords. I’ll bet you a free campaign their lists are more responsive than any general compiled list made up from data here, there and everywhere (a.k.a. Frankenstein lists). Using keywords in order to build better lists -- whether for customer acquisition or retention -- is not rocket science. It’s simply a product of how Internet marketing has evolved.

Email certainly won’t replace search but the two channels are coming together in interesting ways.

Get on the phone

Yes, list rentals are definitely back and performing well. You can thank the consumer who votes for email by pressing the submit button. So put in a call to that list manager you knew way back when. I’ll bet you his phone is either busy (keep trying if it is) or disconnected. And don’t forget to ask him for a list of available keywords.

And if anyone wants an updated version of my Email List Rental Checklist, please just send me an email.

Michael Mayor is president of NetCreations, the customer acquisition and data division of Return Path The Email Performance Company. He is a 19-year veteran of direct marketing and a recognized pioneer of email marketing. Mayor joined NetCreation's as one of the company's first employees in 1998, and played a key role in helping to build the largest email list management company in the industry today. He has also pioneered many of the email marketing industry's standards and best practices. Mayor is a leading advocate of privacy and is a frequent speaker at industry functions.