Email Marketing Help

I've been looking into scraping emails of local businesses and sending out mass emails possibly using my own hostgator email or a service like mandrill or amazon. I've done some research and it seems like its a big gray area because the emails are publicly displayed on directories and what not. I've found gigs that supply millions of emails and others that will provide a few in a specific region. If I emailed them all individually, why is that ok? Anyone do this and have success selling SEO or web design? If not, do you have any advice, recommendations or suggestions about it? Thanks a ton in advance!!

-MJ

Scraping lots of email addresses and sending them a "sales letter" is spam. You probably don't like spam, you probably don't read spam, don't contribute to the spam problem.

Legitimate places that sell large lists of email addresses probably legitimately collected the addresses and probably had some fine print that notified the email address owner that they are going to sell/share their contact info to partners and related companies. Even if the list seller says it's ok to contact all of the email addresses, services like Aweber and MailChimp usually don't allow purchased lists into their system.

Nobody can stop you from collecting email addresses and sending your sales letters on an individual basis. It is on a much smaller scale and it will take more time/energy to send each email, but it is still spam. You will get away with this "small scale spam" for a while, but once Yahoo or Gmail starts to get complaints, your email account may get shut down (or they may never shut you down).

Other options of reaching these companies: cold call them, send them something via postal mail, visit in person and try to sell.

yea i plan to purchase the list just to have access to the phone numbers and what not for cold calling and possible direct mail and maybe very personalized emails. Would it be bad to possibly due bulk but in volumes of a few thousand over a month or so?

You should check out interspire's email marketing software, it may be your best shot. And make sure your emails are can-spam compliant if you're scraping them; it's probably better too just purchase a list though (just in case).

Never do this. Start to build a landing page and offer some free tips to address your targeted customers problems once they subscribe your newsletter. You need time to build a business,
and people need trust before they start purchasing some services or a product from you. So try to give first, once your potential customers trust you, they will buy.

try flyer/letterbox drop to local area businesses
create 3 x versions of the sales copy,
do test run with each flyer
measure, and do wider run of the winning (best response) flyer

Sounds good, thanks for the responses guys!