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E-Alert!
Whenever possible, also secure your client's E-mail address and permission to communicate information and offers of
value and importance to him. Find other businesses and Web site owners who have significant E-mail addresses of
their clients and permission to communicate with them and work out host-beneficiary relationships to E-mail or E-mail
link to you Web site, too.
One of the biggest overlooked uses of E-mail is to drive people to call your offices or order or client service lines.
Once You Have a List, Now What?
Even if the rental income from letting other direct-marketers use your mailing list does little more than pay the
computer service bill for the year, you're still ahead of the game. After all, you have to computerize your mailing list
anyway. The only additional costs you'll incur in order to rent your mailing list to others are the running charges
involved in producing the list and the commission to the list manager or broker for placing the rental order.
Lists are marketed through mailing-list brokers. There are five different categories of list people:
List owner: somebody like yourself or your company who owns a mailing list that has been built for marketing their
own products and services.
List broker: a middleman who represents the list owner to sell rentals of the list for a 20 percent commission.
List user: the company that rents somebody else's mailing list for the purpose of sending out its promotional mailings.
List manager: a firm that undertakes the promotion and sale of your mailing list to other brokers. The firm may be
involved in computer services and can also handle the computerization and maintenance of your list. It may also
function as list broker and list compiler on a fee or percentage basis.
List compiler: a firm that builds mailing lists from raw sources. Its sources can be mail-order response, business
directories, or telephone books. This company owns the list that it may market itself or it may market through list
brokers-or both.
How do you generate income from your mailing list? You can rent your list. Exchange lists. Joint-venture lists.
Reverse host-beneficiary or work out insert deals you put into your own marketing or packages. You can simply create
a mailing piece giving details about your list, mail it to the list brokers (whose names are readily available out of Direct
Mail List Rates and Data) and sit back and wait for the orders to come in. The broker will bill the renter on your behalf,
and when he receives payment from his client he will remit it to you less a commission of 20 percent.
The broker takes no liability for collection of the bill. When he gets paid, you get paid. If he doesn't get paid, it is your
problem. Thus, it is important that you exercise credit approval on his client and do not hesitate to ask for cash up front
if you doubt the credit worth of his client. Most brokers are reputable and will remit to you after they've been paid.
Caution: List brokers are frequently slow in paying for rentals. They blame it on the fact that their client didn't pay
them, but we have documented dozens of cases where the broker has taken weeks after he has been paid by his client to
remit to the list owner.
Another way to rent your client or prospect list is to put it in the hands of a mailing-list manager. Either you can
furnish him with the list and he'll do all the work for you or you can simply send him raw data (inquiries, orders, etc.)
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and he'll computerize and maintain your list for you. Obviously, he'll charge you for his computer time. If you send
him your disc, he'll charge you the running costs for producing labels. Or you can retain your lists and he'll send you
orders that you can produce and ship.
If you don't have time to devote to selling your mailing lists, you can put the list into the hands of a list manager. The
list manager normally gets 10 percent in addition to what the broker already gets (20 percent) plus charges for his
computer time at his cost or on a fixed schedule of fees.
The list manager takes the headaches out of running your list business-he handles all selling effort, inquiries, the
furnishing of accounts, the producing of orders, billing, and collecting. You won't get paid much earlier from the list
manager (in fact, probably an additional few days will be added for the processing in his office), but you'll be able to
break into the list business much more rapidly.
Most mailing lists are rented for one-time use. Most rentals begin as test mailings for five thousand or ten thousand
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