Improving safelists response level

What is a safelist?

Jon D. Atwood the owner of Adtactics.com (first credit based safelist) are explaining on its web site:

"A safelist is a mailing list that is geared towards advertising web sites, business opportunities, and so forth. All members of a free or paid safelist agree with receive advertising e-mails from the other members. It benefits you by allowing you to advertise to a number of people via email, without having to resort to spam."

Using other words a safelist is a list of people who agreed to receive e-mails from other members of the list. The safelists are used mostly to send business related messages. This appeared as a reaction of increasing of spam phenomenon (sending messages to peoples that not agree to receive your messages, aka receiving unsolicited messages) and had a glorious period.

Soon after first appearing online in the late 90's very much safelists exists. To help members to manage multiple safelist memberships so called "safelist submitters" or "safelist blasters" were available as a software or site membership. This helped a lot of members to automate daily sending of many of ads messages combined with an automate deleting of received e-mails. But the consequence was ugly: the effectiveness of advertising using safelists dropped near zero, just because nobody was reading that ad messages any more.



Credit safelists

In 2001 Jon D. Atwood launched a different kind of safelist that rewarded members for reading e-mails. In such kind of safelist to can send e-mails members must be more active: reading others' messages a member earn several points (usually named credits) and for each point he can send a message to other member. A member which doesn't have credits cannot send any e-mail. This idea was wonderful and raise the bid the safelist advertising system.

In credit safelists each received e-mail contain a "credit link" which must be clicked to earn credits. A page from the advertiser's site is opened and to earn the credits that page must be seen for a set amount of time. Because the safelist members must spend some of their time visiting advertised Website the ads had a lot more chances to achieve its goal. This is why the quality of ads are very important in such safelists.

Today a very large number of credit safelists exists, maybe thousands, that offer free or paid membership (usually both). And because the rivalry is high a lot of credit safelist offer too much credits (monthly, as a gift or for each e-mail reading) so the level of effectiveness are low in that safelists. This behavior affects the entire credit based safelists inducing the idea that safelist advertising are useful.

If is done in the right way and on a good credit safelist an advertising campaign will have a good results. Look what are saying about safelists Soren Jordansen a very successful Internet marketer: "I'm a comfortable 6 figure earner gunning for 7 figs and it's still cost effective for me to spend an hour or two on safelists every day."




MinLevel Credit Safelist

A very large part of safelists members, traditional or credit based, do not understand an extremely important notion about this system: safelists to be functional, its' members must read e-mails. Almost each member of a safelist believe that being member has the right to send e-mails and forgot that they have in the same time the obligation to read some of received e-mails. A good improvement of safelists was done when credit safelists forced the members to start reading received e-mails.

This is why I consider that a new concept must be used: MinLevel Credit. Each member (paying or free) must monthly earn by reading e-mails a minimum amount, a Minimum Level (MinLevel) of credits, level established by safelist admins. If at the end of a month a member doesn't reach the MinLevel must be stopped to send e-mails until recoup the left. This must be done just by reading e-mails, buying credits can not help.

I am truly convinced that this measure will greatly improve the effectiveness of credit based safelist advertising campaigns.