Hello! My name is Mark Austin (forum admin), and I'd like to extend to you a warm welcome to our friendly online community! If you haven't had a chance to join our forum yet, why not register now so you can take full advantage of all this forum has to offer? And, of course, we'd love to get to know you better, so why not share some of your experiences with us? Oh, after you login, this annoying message will disappear forever! Click here to register now!

kindof

Jr. Member
Offline

Offline

Joined December 01, 2008
Forum Posts: 48

The Safelist Experiment

« on: March 23, 2009, 05:15:00 AM »

Go Up

Most seasoned internet marketers consider safelist advertising a complete waste of time. Even those who don't share this opinion suggest that safelists should be used only as a source of leads. Their advice is to forget everything else and concentrate on building a list by giving away a freebie in exchange for an email address.

Well, against all the advice and my own personal opinion, I've decided to test a group of safelists to see if I could effectively sell anything through them.

Here's exactly what was done.

The Products

I've selected two products for this test. Since advertising and traffic is a highly appealing subject, I've chosen Steven Wagenheim's “Crap Advertising Methods” as one of the products.

The original salespage certainly can't be considered a copywriting masterpiece but no major changes were made to it. I am far from a professional copywriter, so I'd better not touch it...

The second product was “Bum Marketing Blitz”, a report that exposes an interesting 30-day action plan to succeed in Bum Marketing. It came with the famous “150-A-Day report” as a bonus and I included the ¨8-Minute Article Writer” as an additional bonus. This salesletter isn't either anything very special that converts each and every visitor into a buyer...

The Price

The basic idea was to sell both products at a very low price and show the buyer a One-Time Offer before he/she downloaded the product. This OTO comprised Private Label Rights and Master Resale Rights for the original product plus a few other valuable reports.
So I set the price of $2.50 for “Crap Advertising Methods” and $5 for “Bum Marketing Blitz”. The One-Time Offer for both products was set at $12.90.

The Safelists

The following safelists were used on this test: Active Safelist, Ad Tactics, Cash4Usafelist, Global Safelist, Got Safelist, Guaranteed Results, ListDotCom, Newage Marketing, Optinlister, Safelist Pro, Supra Safelist.
Note: I regret I have not tracked the results of each safelist individually, I should have done it. But I will when I repeat this experiment in the future.

The results

I wrote four different email ads with six different subject lines, to avoid too much repetition and have more people click on the ads. I'd like to emphasize that I'm no expert copywriter so I use a little script that does the ad writing.

Anyway, the first mailing went out on June 3rd and I sistematically emailed at the intervals allowed by my membership level or the credits I had on each safelist.

Here are the results I obtained through the 28th of June (24 days of advertising):

I've estimated that approximately 780 thousand emails were sent during the 24-day period, which resulted in 767 clicks ( about 0,1% *) as follows:

Crap Advertising Methods: 479 hits. Results: 10 sales of the basic product and 3 OTO sales.

Bum Marketing Blitz: 288 hits. Results: 3 sales of the basic product and 1 OTO sale.

By analyzing the above figures one can see that on both cases the conversion rate was approximately 2%, which is excellent considering that the salespages aren't of the highest quality...

Another interesting information is that sales spread along the week as follows: Monday - 3; Wednesday - 6; Thursday - 2; Friday - 1; Saturday - 2; Sunday - 3. The amount of sales that occurred on Wednesday somehow goes against the well spread belief that weekend advertising is more effective.

* Two factors directly influence the clickthru rate: email deliverability issues and the quality of the ad (subject line and content). Ex: I've estimated that 780 thousand emails were sent but it's impossible to know how many of them were really delivered.

Conclusion

People may say it's a poor financial result for such a lot of work. Some will say I won't become a millionaire selling $2.50 products and a $12.90 OTO... Others will suggest that sales only occurred because they were low-priced items.

No matter what anyone says, here's what I've concluded:

1. Even though safelist advertising is less responsive now than it was years ago, people keep clicking on the ads; so it is still a valid advertising option, specially when you are on a low budget.

2. Members of safelists do buy, if offered the right product.( By that I mean something they are really interested in, at the right price.)

I know...I probably could have added 100s of subscribers to my list from the 767 hits if I gave away a free report. Who knows? But then I would have never known that it is possible to sell through safelists.


	Logged

Ari
How To Turn A $17 PLR Product Into $2.4K
1000 Instant Commission Products

Jim Burney

Sr Member

Offline

Joined July 27, 2008
Location: Runcorn UK
Forum Posts: 3,733
Age: 63

Peace of Mind is Yours by Right

	Author	Topic: The Safelist Experiment (Read 3700 times)
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Related Topics
	Subject	Started by	Replies	Views	Last post
	Ultimate Safelist Survival Other	Howard Roper	6	1886	September 04, 2009, 05:51:18 PM by rrd257r
	Very Powerful SafeList (38 Million email boxes) at a Very Affordable Price-$10 « 1 2 » Special Offers Forum	Howard Roper	32	5014	September 23, 2010, 02:39:05 PM by Donald