The decision to rent email lists can be one of the single best moves an online marketer could ever make. However, it can also be one of its most expensive. Without first having an understanding of how these leads were generated, nurtured and in many cases beaten into submission via email, it’s hard to know if your investment really will yield any tangible ROI. So what makes a rental effective in this case?

Let’s start by defining the difference between a lead capture page or landing page as it is often called and a list rental vs buying an optin list. A landing page is typically designed to offer something of value free to a visitor. For instance, a travel blog might offer a free eBook or free report or some other neat giveaway that can only be offered once the visitor has filled out an easy to complete survey. A typical landing page might have a submit button for the reader to save the information on their browser for later use. In this case, a lead capture form is not required.

Now let’s look at this example from a different perspective. Let’s say that you are trying to build a large list of subscribers to share this episode with. Instead of having to create a landing page or some form to capture visitors, you can instead set up an episode feed on Twitter to do just that. This will work in conjunction with whatever online marketing strategy you’re already using to build your list, build the email list and get people to optin to your list. Here’s why…

There are two important factors here that we haven’t discussed yet. The first one being the obvious fact that you’ll need Twitter to send out the tweet and the second factor is that you’ll also need to have some sort of link to your website (we’ll talk about that in a second). You could also very easily just email people the link to the tweet or your website. But why would you want to do it any other way?

Well, if you’re doing it the traditional way, you are missing out on a lot of potential traffic. People are used to sites such as Facebook which allows them to broadcast to the whole world and so you really aren’t reaching many of your target market. But by having a Twitter account you are able to broadcast to the whole world and pretty much anyone will see your tweet (provided they’ve picked up your feed). If you have an email list, on the other hand, you will only be able to send out your message to the people on your list.

So how can you use this to your advantage? Well, since most people who have Twitter accounts have subscriptions to various online golf magazines, you can definitely use this to your advantage. The easiest way to go about renting out an email list is to tell people to forward your tweet on to their friends. This way they can see your tweet, read it, and maybe even act on it.

Another way to use this is by getting access to the Fitbit site and getting access to their API. You then simply have to configure your Twitter account so that every time you tweet something on Twitter, it will actually land on the Fitbit page. If you have an email list, you can set it up so that anyone who signs up for your list will automatically receive your tweet on their news feed – perfect for a fitbit email list rental!

The key here is that you need to make sure that your tweet actually makes sense and is worth spreading around. Don’t simply send random links to random websites; you should make sure that you’re giving people information that they’ll find useful or that’s of interest to them. That said, if you do this properly you might just end up turning your followers into your own paid list! That would be cool, wouldn’t it?