Gurus,

I've been reading all of your fascinating posts.. and feel privileged to be in such good company. I'm looking forward to connecting with many of you and learning from your success.

I have a privilege of being in a place many newbie marketers starting out would envy...

In fact.. it's such a nice place to be that I would like your help in seeing how to best approach it - so I don't mess it up!

I have a list of 500,000 people who have requested a free quote for a service that we provide. We have never marketed to them once we collected that data. It's just sitting there... waiting....

I'm looking to create a compelling marketing letter to be sent via email that will remind them they came to our one of our member sites, then encourage them to sign up for our newsletter (or something along those lines that is open to your valuable input).

A few facts about the list:

- We did not buy this list - it is our own inhouse list generated from our sites
- The age of records range from yesterday to 1 year ago (we are getting 2000 of these new people every day)
- Size is approx 500,000
- 'Subscribers' were shopping for insurance at the time of request

We are launching a new brand that offers the same service they asked to be quoted on, and want to get them to sign up to our newsletter. This newsletter will have very useful information for people interested in this topic, and have a robust online presence with gobs of useful content and resources.

One thing to keep in mind: At the time of the request, these people came in from a variety of our websites and affiliate sites, so we cannot say "Hey, you came to oursite.com to get... and now we offer..."

Most will not even know our name, or even remember they came to our sites.

The advantage we have though, is that we can personalize it with their full name and date stamp, city, state, zip to prove that they came to our site, and the very minute they came.

Here are some questions I am hoping you can lend your brilliance to:

- What is the best way to begin marketing to a list this way to avoid CAN-SPAM non-compliance?

- Should the email be a long sales letter, or a brief "hello!" reminder and invite with an incentive, or other?

Thanks again for your critiques, insights, and advice.

Your fellow marketing fan,

Jeremiah
NRgizer

Hi, Jeremiah!

I think you have to send them a brief note like this:

"First name, etc.!

You recieved our mail because... etc. - [Then you invite to join your newsletter with all the benefits of subscribtion, freebies, etc]

If you don't wanna to be in our newsletter list, you can easily delet your adress from our database with this link" - and then give 'em unsubscribe link.

Also you have to remind them shortly how you kept their adresses.

This way, I believe, you can defend your mailings from "spam perception".

Yes, you can lose many adresses from your list this way, but it will be the most legitimate aproach in your case, I think.

So this is only my oppinion and the way I do it sometimes when one of my lists "getting older"... and this works well for me.