17 Wrong Ways To Build An Email List

From the “Dark Side”
Professional email marketers not only avoid, but openly criticize, the following list-building ideas. Choosing any of the below solutions is the best and quickest way to lose time and money.
And we won’t even mention your reputation!
Still, it’s worthwhile to specifically state what should definitely NEVER be considered as email marketing.

• Harvest 32,433,771 email addresses from the web using email harvesting software.
• Get a quick boost of an extra 12,309,448 email addresses by grabbing emails from newsgroups, too.
• Rent a server farm in Russia and spam the heck out of the 44,743,219 email addresses you harvested in the previous two steps, asking these millions to join your legitimate newsletter. (This insidious practice is also known as “list washing”).
• Use a “viral marketing” strategy. Literally. Hire a h4rdc0r3 programmer to code an email virus. The virus should spread silently and add victims’ entire Outlook address books to your mailing list, but it shouldn’t do any serious damage (no profit in that).
• If you get busted because of the previous idea, blame it on Microsoft for creating insecure software. Send out a shocking press release. Give interviews to the press. Use the resulting free publicity to build an even bigger list.
• Pay people for signing up for your newsletter. “My newsletter is so good that I’m gonna pay you for joining it!”
• Promise to pay people for signing up. Promise to pay even more for signing up their friends, relatives and business associates. Then never send them a check. Why would you.. they’re already signed up. Next!
• Pay (or promise to pay) your potential subscribers for confirming their email address.
• Trust these Google ads and get a really huge list really fast!
• Create a fake MySpace profile. Be interesting and add nice photos. If you don’t look good enough, use a photo of someone that looks better. Add your newsletter subscription form to your profile (MySpace allows HTML code). Put the following in screaming bold red: “If you are truly a friend of mine, you’ll sign up for my newsletter, or else I will delete you and post nasty comments”. The remaining piece of the puzzle is to add friends. Download a MySpace friend bot and add thousands automatically. This is a powerful tactic. It not only builds your list, but it also makes you famous.
• Buy an opt-in permission-based list. Yes. Permission-based. The previous owner gave you the permission to mail it.
• Hassle your subscribers to sign up for your newsletter, add them to 7 other lists. After all, they already are “your” subscribers.
• Use pre-checked opt-in checkboxes in the subscription form. Surely, they should want to subscribe, so make it difficult for them not to…
• … or better yet, make it impossible not to subscribe. Simply deactivate the pre-checked opt-in box, and make it impossible to uncheck it.
• Put everyone who’s ever contacted you for any reason on your mailing list. After all, these contacts belong to you, so you have every right to mail them.
• Start a FFA (Free-For-All) links page and build a mailing list of addresses from those who added a link on that page. Don’t add their free link until they give you the addresses of their 3 friends. Then ask for 3 more. Nothing like word of mouth!
• When confirming subscriptions, offer a “free bonus” or another incentive for clicking on the confirmation address. (It’s scary, but marketers actually think that this is a good idea.)

Okay, okay. Quit writing!!!
In case it’s not crystal clear, using any of these techniques might make you and Jeremy Jaynes cellmates for the next NINE YEARS in Spam Jail!!! Believe me, this is not the kind of fame you want!
Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist