We provide this service as a method of sending email notices to opt-in e-mail addresses for our customers and customers of RUSHweb Solutions, a web site application development and hosting company.  We do not take responsibility for the results of your emailing or the reliability of any list that you have or may purchase from a brokerage firm.  We simply provide a service to send out mass emailing notifications and track their effectiveness and success.  

An Opt-In email list is a list of email addresses from users that have asked to be notified about certain events or updates, either by saying yes in a survey, checking a box on some online form, or simply subscribing via a sign-up form. This last option will provide you with the best results, since these people have taken the time to specifically asked for your information. Your success rate with these lists will be scattered and unpredictable. If you have a 2% click-thru or response rate to your email list you are succeeding in your efforts. Anything above that is awesome and should be bragged about. We all get so much junk email these days that it's difficult to catch our attention. Sending your mass emailings on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays between the hours of 11am and 2pm tend to be the most effective. Monday mornings are never a good time because email boxes are typically full from the weekend and it could easily be passed up. And Fridays is a risky day because many people are thinking about the weekend and will put off whatever you're asking them to take a look at until Monday.

Again, these are simply our suggestions and are by no means promoting any type of guaranteed success.

SPAM: is basically any email that is sent out to anyone who hasn't agreed to receive email. Those buying, selling, renting and using opt-in email lists walk a fine line between valid and welcome promotion and illegal and unwanted "spam". For example, when you sign up for a domain name at Network Solutions, you hastily click through a "terms and conditions" page that gives them the right to market to your email address indefinitely, and to sell that email address to others. You've "opted-in" to the lists of spammers - whoever can pay for the list from Network Solutions (their prices are hefty).

Anti-Spam: - If we find out that customers using our system are sending out emails to non-opt-in lists, their account will be locked and they will no longer be authorized to use EmailCustomers.com for this purpose.

Make very, very sure that you actually get what you order.

Brokers, especially, tend to think that whatever they have that is SIMILAR to what you want, IS what you want. They have even been known to fudge the way they write up sales contracts to reflect what you want, not what they have. Here are some preliminary questions to ask:

• Where do they get their names and email addresses?
• How old are they?
• How do they keep the list current (double-opt-in lists are the best, but much more expensive)?
• How are names taken off the list?
• What sort of guarantee do they offer (most will not offer one)?

Make sure that exactly what you order is specifically stated on the contract. Hope for the best, but have a plan in case you get the worst possible result - no result at all from the mailing.

That said -- some sales offers just don't work. So be prepared to use different parts of the same list to test your offers, so you can find one that works well for you.

EmailCustomers.com is setup to allow you to import a purchased opt-in list or an existing list that you may already have from your customer base.  The following definitions are just an FYI in case you decide to rent a list from a list broker.

CPA: Note: There's another definition of CPA, which means "Cost Per Acquisition" -- which is a method of paying for emails sent out based on results, the "Cost Per Acquisition" of a client or sale for you. How that works: A company agrees to send out x number of emails for you, and you then pay them based on a rate of $X per customer you get or sale you make. There are very few email list brokers who will allow you to pay on a CPA basis. Most of them want you to buy their lists on a "CPM" basis.

CPM: means Cost Per M (where M = one thousand) emails, and that's what list brokers will usually try to sell you. For example, sending out 100,000 emails at a CPM of $40/M would cost you $4,000. On a CPM basis they get paid for sending out emails on your behalf, whether or not you make any sales from those emails.

CPC: means Cost Per Click thru. When the email goes out, it will have a link for people to click -- some webpage for them to visit to get more info or to sign up or whatever. For a mailing sent out on a CPC basis, you pay for every click thru to that target URL, whether they buy anything or not.