It is great to be able to send commercial emails to people you do not know, but are they effective? That depends.

Everybody who is on these lists, also known as safe lists, knows that they will be receiving emails from other members. This is possible because that is one of the conditions of their “safe list” membership.

And those who join these lists are willing to agree to this condition because they themselves want to send out their own commercial emails to the others on the list.

With a traditional safe list, everyone is sending emails to each other but no one is reading them!

It gets worse when some savvy members sign up for the membership using a free or less-frequently-used account to store the useless emails they will never bother to open and read.

To counter this weakness, I like using what is known as a “credit-based” list. That means that in order to generate credits for sending emails, the reader must open the email and click on a link contained within the email to get their credits. That clickable link should take the viewer to your website, preferably a lead capture page that allows you to build your own mailing list.

Credit based lists are great when you do not have your own list and can be used to build your own list of opt-in subscribers.

I have posted elsewhere on this blog my recommended credit based list builders I like using and suggest you use them to get visitors to your website and begin building your own list.