by Jonathan Paston

After a week of chasing a 10,000 strong Lead-Gen list to opt-in to my Aweber autoresponder list I feel it is about time to update you on progress with this experiment in whether Lead-Gen lists are worthwhile.

There are a surprising, well to me anyway, number of undeliverables. 4,403 to be precise. That means that 44% of this, bought-in, list contains email addresses which are either incorrectly typed in, have an expired account or a mailbox that is overflowing. Is this typical? I don’t know the answer to that. I suspect it may be.

In addition I have had about 100 spam blocker messages. These are from mailboxes which have chosen to protect themselves from SPAM by requesting that the originator identifies himself/herself by typing in series of letters and numbers that show that you are a human being instead of a spambot.

I completely understand this precaution - I use one myself. The one I use, Vanquish, handles such requests automatically and works like a dream. I wouldn’t be without it. (You can find out more about Vanquish by clicking here).

I have diligently replied to all these blocked messages to see what happens. It takes time to do this, time that I guess most marketers don’t have. It is another factor to take into account together with the undeliverables, though the percentage is tiny.

Unsubscribes have so far also been a tiny percentage - 27 in actual numbers. This might be because my emails have been non-threatening (I haven’t included a ’sales’ link) or because people think that sending an Unsubscribe message just confirms the fact that they are reading my emails!

So out of the 5,570 remaining addresses how many have taken up my free gift offer?  12, yes twelve. This is underwhelming to say the least. Either I’ve got my messages completely screwed up or my emails are just falling into a Junk mail folder or being deleted.

I’ll just have to try harder. There’s a way to go in this experiment yet. I’ll keep you posted.

By the way if you are wondering what the purpose of this experiment is, it all hinges, indirectly, around The 2020 Challenge, the progress of which you may like to follow. Just click Challenge in the menu bar.