How to monetize a 100k person email list.

BitcoinPirate · Jul 16, 2019

Hey guys, this is my first post here. I was working on my younger brother with this and he posted here often, but sadly he passed away a few months ago due to an overdose. I'm not great with tor or the deep web and always had him to help me with that sort of stuff.

So I recently acquired a 100k person email list specified with a certain interest where there is a large industry. It is furthermore broken down geographically so one could target different regions, which would be really advantageous for utilizing the list.

My question is how or where do I sell this list, and is this a legally gray area? From research it looks like lists go for 10-15 cents per name as long as they're legitimate, and depending on how detailed the targettng is.

I'm tempted to sell an ebook or something related to the industry, but the easiest thing to do would be to sell to local businesses in the specific locations of the list.

I don't want to get in any trouble if this isn't allowed though, and any amount of money over say 1k I could get from the list would be great.

BitcoinPirate · Jul 17, 2019

PaintedBlack · Jul 17, 2019

Hello, sorry about your brother.
Can you be certain it's a unique list? As in - not found elsewhere on the web? If it can be found anywhere else that pretty much destroys your potential profit, even if it's in some .zip or whatever.
Do you know how the list was generated? Were there opt-ins or scraped?

I know you might not want to reveal the exact niche they were gathered from, but is it a highly competitive one? (business/marketing/beauty and fitness/you get the idea)
If you know that those people opted into giving the emails to someone (and know who) you will have a much easier time selling. It's blackhat but the buyer can pose as the origin of opt-ins and use them for email marketing.
Thought the list must be quality-checked first. I haven't read anything on email marketing in a year so I forgot how it's done and who can do it for you, but dead/fake/spammy/unresponsive emails have to be cut out.
It's too dangerous for any buyer to interact with all of them and have 50% of emails ending in a spam folder, and therefore the mailing service would make the legitimate 50% of emails ALSO end up in spam, instead of going to potential leads.
If I were you I'd try to make personal use of these emails by narrowing the list down to only emails I can profit from. This can be done by sending them some 'general' email and funneling the number of responders down email after email until you get a list of people with potential buyer's incentive. You'd also know a lot more about them and how to better pitch them something.

BitcoinPirate · Jul 17, 2019

PaintedBlack said:
Hello, sorry about your brother.
Can you be certain it's a unique list? As in - not found elsewhere on the web? If it can be found anywhere else that pretty much destroys your potential profit, even if it's in some .zip or whatever.
Do you know how the list was generated? Were there opt-ins or scraped?

I know you might not want to reveal the exact niche they were gathered from, but is it a highly competitive one? (business/marketing/beauty and fitness/you get the idea)
If you know that those people opted into giving the emails to someone (and know who) you will have a much easier time selling. It's blackhat but the buyer can pose as the origin of opt-ins and use them for email marketing.
Thought the list must be quality-checked first. I haven't read anything on email marketing in a year so I forgot how it's done and who can do it for you, but dead/fake/spammy/unresponsive emails have to be cut out.
It's too dangerous for any buyer to interact with all of them and have 50% of emails ending in a spam folder, and therefore the mailing service would make the legitimate 50% of emails ALSO end up in spam, instead of going to potential leads.
If I were you I'd try to make personal use of these emails by narrowing the list down to only emails I can profit from. This can be done by sending them some 'general' email and funneling the number of responders down email after email until you get a list of people with potential buyer's incentive. You'd also know a lot more about them and how to better pitch them something.

Hey thanks for the advice. It's not found on the web and the list was opt-in as well. The niche is pet owners, so probably not as competitive as the ones you listed but still fairly decent.

For narrowing down the list, would I use something like mailchimp to test the emails? I was just worried if a lot of the addresses are unresponsive I'll be marked as spam like you said.

PaintedBlack · Jul 17, 2019

Hello!
I heard MailChimp has been in the dumpster for the past year or two. Sadly, I'm far from an expert in email marketing so I'll leave the email service recommendation to someone more knowledgable.

With pet owners there's plenty of products to be advertised, though pets are a peculiar niche. See, the funny thing is that the product set (and the type of article/page, for example) you send a pet owner to should be for his type of pet. And since we live in crazy times people keep dozens of different categories of species as pets. I'd try to segment the list into categories while narrowing it down. Again, not an expert in email marketing, content is more of my side.

There's probably some email wizard here that can advise you how to potentially set up some tracking and divide the list into categories based on what type of content the visitors consume. As for that content itself, well here we have some neat options. Newsletters with different stuff for different pets (this would work great with tracking) and quizzes or polls inside articles could divide the list.

brownrider · Jul 17, 2019

Hi. I've done some email marketing in the past but not in Pets and I mostly use my own smtp server, so I don't know much bout mailchimp and co.

But here's what I'll add. You should probably set up a blog/YT channel on pets, and send links to the list. (You should probably break them into different categories and send in batches, to avoid spam box)

Run some tests on the list, start by sending articles about dogs, you can also share viral videos, health tips and basically information useful to dog owners. Do the same for cats, and other animals. You should see stats in your dashboard if you use mailchimp. But u can use link shortners like bitly as well.

Note the links for each pets. After a few rounds, you should have an idea of those who own or like which pets. You can also go deeper by grouping those who clicked more on funny videos, health tips etc. Create new lists based on interests and click rates. And you'll have a more defined list which you can sell or market.

Note, using shortened links, you wont be able to know which exact emails belong to a category. That's why I also suggested breaking then into smaller lists. So you can have something like List A with 30% click rate for dogs, which is pretty high. You get the drift? But maybe with mailchimp and co, you can have better analysis.

And my deepest condolences on your brother's demise. Stay strong chief.

How to monetize a 100k person email list.

BitcoinPirate

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