Can I use the mailing list from Website A to promote the launch of Website B?
A few years ago I launched a website with a friend and thousands of users signed up. After the friend left to pursue full-time employment, the website sort of just sat dormant (I lacked coding experience at the time... lesson learned).
I am now ready to launch a very similar website, aimed at precisely the same audience. It's pretty much the same thing but with a different name. Am I able to use the mailing list from the previous website and if so, how should I approach this?
If you're still the owner of Website A, you could legitimately send an email to Website A's mailing list contacts telling them about Website B, and giving them a link to sign up to Website B's mailing list.
I'm recommending this course of action for a couple of important reasons:
People usually don't read emails from organizations they don't recognize. They delete them, or skip to the end and hit the unsubscribe button. There's a critical paradox here - you're trying to use an email to introduce your contacts to the the new organization (Website B), but they're not going to read an email from Website B until they've been introduced. Your only good chance at getting them to read the email is to send it from Website A, and make sure you do a good job of introducing the new organization, Website B.
Your contacts really do care about who has their email address, and in their opinion it's not OK to put that email address on another mailing list without their permission, even if it's something they're interested in. If you drop them straight onto the new mailing list without asking, you will break their trust.
(Source: spent a couple of years working as a developer at an email marketing firm.)
This just about sums it up. Another thing to consider is how often you’ve emailed them in the past.
And how long since the last mailing. If it’s been too long, many people will still report you as spam even though you obtained their email legitimately.
If it’s been a while, be sure to tell them exactly how you got their email address to jog their memory.
If you can put a date in there even better (most services will give you access to this info)
Absolutely - the brand/name recognition is also really important to get right if you want people to read your emails.
There's been a few times in the past that I've signed up for an organization's mailing list, but because they used their public spokesperson's name as the Sender rather than the organization name that I recognize, I've just deleted the emails or unsubscribed because I honestly don't know who they are.
From my experience if you've let the list go cold then you probably won't get a ton of engagement with an email that seems 'out of the blue' to the recipient. With that said, it still doesn't hurt to send the email -- and I would definitely use it as a leverage. Just make sure you mention how the recipients might know you and what your last project was because they've likely forgotten.
It depends on the privacy policy you had on Website A when people were signing up to your website. Would your friend be ok with you sending the mail as Website A saying we know we've been dormant but we've just relaunched as Website B please check it out? Sending them a new mail as Website B saying "We were Website A check us out" would be unacceptable to me since you've now passed user data to a third party to advertise to them(even if the third party is actually you).
That said if you started the website and then just ignored it there is a large chance your users will be wondering if you're just going to do the same thing so it might be better to not associate the two.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago