In order to find out which is best to use in your marketing campaign - Text Ad Exchanges or Safelists - and why, you need to lay down the facts (best usage, pros and cons, etc) for both advertising methods and then decide which one is best for you. You may need also to take into consideration your time and financial investment involved in choosing between the two advertising methods.
What is Safelist and its pros and cons?
A safelist is an email list membership which you can join, enabling you to send your email offers to all the other members. There are two types of membership: free and paid safelist.
Advantages of Safelist:
- Registration using double opt-in method. This ensures that a member sends his/her personal posts and not an autoresponder. Your message will get to your intended recipients without spamming them.
- You can send your email to one, ten or thousand safelist members. Even a small percentage of thousand ensures good amount of traffic to your website/blog.
- A good place to test your ads before investing in other methods of advertising.
- Generally free safelist pays commissions for referrals while paid safelist offers higher commissions
- Low membership fees for joining paid safelist, send emails more frequently, offers ad tracking services, and post personalized messages.
- The frequency of sending messages is regulated, so that members are not overloaded with too many messages or spam.
- Email addresses are maintained carefully to avoid bouncing resulting in a safelist membership of valid email addresses only.
Disadvantages of Safelist:
- Receive thousands of email offers to read and is time consuming.
- Because safelist is affected by the numbers game, there is a possibility that only a small percentage will respond or even read your offer. You might think that you have written your best ads in your message and still get ignored.
- Since you don’t know the profiles of your recipients, they might not be interested in your offer.
- You need to join several safelist memberships and invest vast amount of time reading offers and posting messages every day to attract customers/prospects and get results.
Safelists can be a very effective way of promoting your SFI business online. The key is, choose safelists that are targeted to get the most out of your every effort. For example, if you're targeting homeowners, avoid safelists that have mostly businessmen and marketers for members. To ensure an effective campaign, advertise only to people whom you think will be interested.
Text Ad Exchange
Members view ads and receive credit points and use them for their own advertising purposes. You can send your email to one of the members’ list in a Text Ad Exchange site and in return they’ll get credits for reading your ad.
The main benefit of Text Ad Exchange (TAE) is you’ll need to pre-enroll before its launching to get a higher level of membership at no cost. This special offer will run until the site reaches a certain number of members before raising the price of membership.
Signing up in the early stage will give lots of free advertising and top level commissions for referring new members who upgrade to premium level of memberships or advertising at a later date.
TAE generates a lot of emails depending on the number of members joined, so it is recommended not to use your personal email address in your membership.
Usually TAE sites have built in business builder, which allows you to promote your SFI business and there are list of other exchanges for you to join and add your referral links. When you promote your link and get referrals you’re also building your text ad exchange downlines at the same time.
To benefit in this method, you’ll need to increase membership activity in your Text Ad Exchange. This will require your creativity in designing your strategies that will bring results.
TAE could be an effective method to market your SFI business if employed correctly. There is work involved in planning and executing a successful marketing plan.
Every marketing tool has its pros and cons. Only you can find out and decide which one is best for you. Give safelist and TAE a try for a while to see how it works one at a time. Pursue the one that you find beneficial. You can get around the cons of each method and benefit a great deal from the pros.
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