What’s the deal with eBay and email list growth?

Posted by in Email Marketing tips | 4 comments

Recently a representative from Aweber.com (my favorite bulk email management service) contacted me and asked me what the deal was with eBay’s email policy.

Specifically they wanted to know what users could and couldn’t do as eBay sellers to grow a mailing list of customers and prospects.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter very long, and especially if you’ve read my SilentSalesMachine.com book then you know that there is tremendous potential for growing your customer mailing list and eBay is a great way to go about doing it.

but…

There are rules.

I thought you might enjoy the response I sent back to Aweber when they asked me to give them my thoughts and insight:

Here are my thoughts on eBay’s email list growth potential:

Welcome to the gray murky waters of eBay email marketing policy…enjoy the swim…it’s much of what I do for a living so you’ve come to the right guy.

There are a lot of ways to draw email leads from eBay and while some of them do rely on taking a liberal interpretation of the policies, others do not require anything ‘black hat’ or even ‘gray hat’.

First example – eBay “classified ads”

Opt-in boxes are not allowed in auction listings and eBay enforces this policy about 60% of the time. This is what I consider a “clear and enforced” policy.

BUT, you will find MANY opt-in boxes in the eBay classified ads. The ads appear right along side the other auction style listings when customers search eBay making them quite powerful as a marketing tool, but the ads just aren’t all that well known yet so they are seldom used. The policies re: classified ads on eBay are very unclear (i.e. virtually non-existent).

I’ve actually argued face to face with the director of trust and safety at eBay who SAW IT MY WAY in the end and agreed that no policy violation is occurring and that additional policies are needed regarding sellers putting opt-in boxes into classified ads.  The entire purpose of the ads after all is to “generate multiple leads” in eBay’s own words. The bad news is that approximately half of the eBay policy enforcement department disagrees with the other half on what the policy actually is on this point. It’s a fact though that you’ll see several classified ads using this tactic at any given time on eBay and it is quite rare that eBay will pull one of these ads down. That’s ‘gray hat’ eBay. It’s textbook ‘unclear policy’ with ‘infrequent enforcement’.

Do a Google search on the term “ebay classified ads” to see my top ranked YouTube video on the subject. It’s generated a lot of good customer discussion for me.

Next there’s the eBay ‘about me’ page:

I’ve personally had an opt-in box on my eBay ‘about me’ page for 4 years.

My account is VERY high profile and eBay has never said a word to me about it…even though many in the eBay policy department see it as a ‘no-no’ based on the barely related policies listed on this policy page:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-aboutme.html

I think you would benefit from a read of my best seller at SilentSalesMachine.com. There are dozens of ideas in there that would help answer your questions beyond what I have time to lay out here. Here’s the link:

http://www.silentsalesmachine.com/

A couple ‘white hat’ creative ideas that my readers have used successfully:

Currently you are clearly allowed to include an email address in your eBay listings.  It’s quite simple to make your email address really stand out with a bold or bright font and this can benefit you in a couple ways. First, if you host your own email on your own niche website then you’ll get residual traffic from eBay (because when someone sees the email address jim@WeLoveDogs.com some people will go visit WeLoveDogs.com out of curiosity).

Next, it is quite possible to use an email autoresponder service such as aweber.com and directly attach it to the email address that you include in your auctions. This will automatically generate an email invitation to everyone that sends you an inquiry.

RE: Youtube…

Another strategy is to link off of eBay to your YouTube account.

This is a slightly gray area, but you are allowed to put YouTube videos in your auctions and eBay has NEVER forced sellers to embed them versus linking to them off of eBay. Once a shopper is off of eBay you can expose them to a squeeze page or an auto-response email address such as cesnewsletter@aweber.com.

There are literally dozens of such ideas that I’ve grown an entire community of creative thinkers around (but we aren’t just about eBay) at MySilentTeam.com.

If you have any questions about any terms or strategies listed here please drop me a comment by using the link below this article and we’ll do our best to help you out.

Also – if you use twitter please retweet this article by clicking the green retweet button above.

  • http://www.cashgeneratingsites.com Julie

    This article made me laugh. I first started growing my online business several years ago WHILE I was an eBay Stores/PowerSeller phone support person. I made it my mission to fully understand the myriad ways I could use eBay to my advantage without breaking the rules. Now, I work exclusively online and my husband works in eBay customer support. We have many lively discussions about what I CAN or can't do with my listings – and while he is good at his job, I can almost always quote chapter and verse that makes it clear I can keep using eBay for what it works best at – an advertising medium to bring in new customers. I sell a lot of physical good on eBay, but since they take so much of my profits, I use it mostly to attract customers to my own web site and it works great for that as long as you follow the rules.

  • Ana-Maria

    Thanks for your great ideas Jim. I have a question though.

    I have started to list physical goods on eBay. Sometimes the goods don't sell but what I get is a lot of spam from users who see my email address on eBay and start spamming. Any ideas on what to do with this?

    [[reply from Jim]]: I suggest you get an aweber account and set up one of your lists (you can have unlimited lists) JUST for handling each niche market you sell into on eBay. By doing this all of your customers will get a friendly automatic reply (that you set up) when they email you and they will be invited to join your mailing list for that niche market. You can have the customer support emails forwarded to you as well so you can support the questions your customers have even if they elect not to join your list. TIP: When setting up lists on aweber.com the email address that you are going to send people to is based simply on the list name. For example if you list name is "JimsDogHouses" the email associated with it automatically becomes JimsDogHouses@aweber.com. It's that simple. ADVANCED TIP: If you have a website with email set up you can forward all email to aweber and it will still work great using the email forwarding feature available on most email providers. For example, I could forward all email sent to jim@jimsdoghouses.com to jimsdoghouses@aweber.com and I'll still get the same functionality from aweber, AND I'll get the added benefit of exposure for my website JimsDogHouses.com in my auction listings. Long answer…but that's good info!

  • http://blast-off-network.net Darrin

    I'm still confused. Are we allowed to use opt in boxes on classified ads? I'm about to start my first ad and don't want to get booted.

    [reply from Jim]: I honestly don't know. It's one of those questions that you are likely to get entirely different answers to when asking eBay. The fact is though there are hundreds of classified ads up right now with opt-in boxes in them. I've yet to hear of anyone being shut down for doing it either.

  • http://blast-off-network.net Darrin

    Great thanks for the info. Think I'll try a couple without and get the hang of it then try it with it and see.