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Do You Want To Join A Safelist?

By Vickie J. Scanlon





Do you really want to join a safelist? Or do you know what this advertising vehicle is? And finally, is their any benefits to being in a safelist? All good questions that I try to answer.

Safelists have been around for a long time. At one time they seemed to offer some, a convenient way to advertise. However, is this true today? I answer the above questions, and let you be the judge.




What Is A Safelist

A safelist is a form of email marketing and advertising. In its simpliest of terms, it is a group of people that agree to opt-in to receive marketing emails from each other. Now this is the important part. ALL members can email the other members in the list sometimes once a week, or as frequently as once a day. It sounds like spam, you might say. No, because when you sign up to participate in the safelist, you have to agree, that yes, you are opting-in to this program and you will not send it to the spam file.

This does sound interesting doesn't it? I'm sure there are some of you thinking, "Hm-m, this could help me with my website or product that I am selling." Whoa. Before you get to excited, stop for a moment, and let me explain what is really happening in a safelist.

For simplicity sake, I will take one individual that has joined the safelist. This individual sends an email trying to sell you his product of kitchen utensils. More than likely, you're not interested in buying utensils. You in turn, will be trying to sell this guy your designer pens. Do you see a trend here. If not let me explain. 

To put it bluntly, this is not a targeted list. Most of the individuals are not interested in buying your product or service, but are only interested in having you buy their product or service. In either case, sales are not going to abound. And, in most cases, any company that has a brand that they want to protect is not going to allow you to use this type of advertising vehicle. And if you do, you won't be in the program long.

Hopefully, I've convinced you that a safelist is not going to get you the target market you need and want for your product. However, if for some unknown reason you still feel that it could possibly help your business, cut your loses and try a free safelist. 


Different Types of Safelists

What type of safelists are out on the Internet? From what I can see, there are still three different types of safelists:

1. Free - If it is a free safelist, you may find that you are limited to how often you can send out emails. the owner of the safelist is probably making money from advertisements that it attaches to each email, that each member sends.
2. Paid - You have to give the safelist the money to belong. They claim that with the paid list you have more control over your list. After you've spent the $30+, you may feel that those claims were well, not true.
3. Credit based - How does a credit based safelist work? There are several ways you can earn credit. 1) You can receive credits by referring other individuals to become a member of the safelist (Safelist is gaining more members and an opportunity to make sales for itself), or; 2) by clicking on certain links within an email that is sent either by the owner of the safelist, or other members. Thus, if you have 1 credit, you can send 1 member an email. 


Though this is my opinion, I personally do not feel that a safelist works, and may cause you more grief than it is worth. In my early days, when I was Internet-naive, I thought I was going to see great rewards from a safelist. Nope. Didn't happen. What I did receive was a whole bunch of emails from people selling me everything from ebooks to paid programs that they wanted me to join, that did not even interest me. In fact, I found myself deleting emails, just so that it wouldn't overload my email box.