[freudling]

Anyone have experience with using large email lists for advertising. I need to get some quality emails for marketing, but people want hundreds of dollars for their lists on the web. Anywhere to get them free or any suggestions if I do buy a mailing list?

[Doofy]

Advice?

Yep. Don't do it - it's spamming.

[Yose]

It's been my experience the best lists cost some $$$. I don't know what your target is but the last one a charity I work with purchased gave them 2 or 3 mailings to roughly 5000 names. These were all people interested in receiving material from random a charity, and with the financial position/desire to help out.
(it's not spamming if they requested it).

According to AFP (association of fundraising professions) most direct mail/give campaigns are doing well if they break even after all administration costs… the list we had used generated the charity a good amount over costs… so I feel it's worth putting down the money for them.

[Mastrap]

Good lists cost money. There's no way around this.
By 'good' I mean lists that are actually guaranteed to be kosher, where everybody has opted in (not just not opted out) to receive marketing messages covering a particular topic. You also need to make sure that proper unsubscribe options are included.

Beware of lists sold by individuals online - anything that offers lists for under $1/name is most likely illegal. Spamming is one of the quickest possible way to not only have your ISP and domain host blacklist you but to actually kill your business - I am assuming that you're not selling knock-off Viagra from a basement in Russia.

We tried email marketing, with mixed success. IIRC we paid in the region of $200 for 100 names.

[freudling]

I have about 700 emails. But there are lists of 15000+ emails where people have OPTED IN to receive info that could be of interest to their business. Magazines sell this stuff, so buying a list like that and sending them emails is not spamming. Think about it this way, we get junk mail in our physical mailboxes all the time. The companies that do this are spamming us really. I did not opt IN to receive their junk mail, but I get it anyway. With these lists, the people opted in so I am not worried about spamming. I just want to obtain a good place to find these lists.

[Mastrap]

True. But a list like that, from a magazine, will set you back several thousands of $$$.

[torsoboy]

When our business was first starting and we needed a spamming list to get the word out to photographers we did it the old fashioned way (cheap) way... manually went through all of the online photographer directories that we could find and copied the emails by hand to a text document. We got about 12,000 email adresses that way. It would have taken me forever to do, but my partner's wife was *very* fast at it.

[Mastrap]

^ Don't take that the wrong way but I would strongly advice against a similar strategy. It only takes a couple of complaints and you can get fired from your web host and worse, your domain can get added to spam blacklists. And if that happens, if you're a legitimate business, you're pretty much ****ed.

[Rumor]

Try one of those annoying flash ads that pop over the screen. Place them on a few forums, so people have to click it to get the information for the forum admins.