Permission Marketing List - Outsource or In-house?

[jameschua]

Hi everyone,

I am thinking of developing a list of consumers' email addresses for a permission marketing campaign. I am wondering if anyone can point out to me whether I should purchase these lists from third party sources, or should I create the list in-house such as by setting up a team to gather permissions from my existing or prospective customer bases. Thank you.

[pfusco]

There certainly are a lot of list brokers you could purchase a list from:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Busi...Mailing_Lists/

In my experience, purchasing an external list is a great way to prospect for new customers. But building an internal list of existing customers has worked exceptionally well for building customer loyalty programs, new product announcements, special offers an the like.

It depends on your goals for your business and what you want to accomplish with an e-mail marketing campaign -- sell more stuff to existing customers or find new customers. Have you determined what your business goals are?