A safelist is a group of people who have agreed to send and receive email messages from one another. The fact that everyone agree to receive these emails makes it safe to send them. All safelists today are opt-in meaning people choose to receive your messages.
This means they can also opt-out and choose not to receive your messages at anytime The main benefit of opt-in safelists means you can get your message out to thousands of people everyday without being accused of spamming.
In the early days of email marketing safelists were abused which created a black eye for safelists as a form of marketing. Safelists have overcome the weakness of the earlier system. Today safelists are generally operated from a web site. If you wish to send your message to other members of the safelist you will have to go to the web site and post your message there. This ensures that someone personally sends the message. The frequency of sending message is regulated so that members do not overload other members.
As members of the safelist you can be reasonably certain that your message will be delivered where intended. You do not have to worry about spam complaints. Your messages are delivered without "send to" address - the recipient of your message will not be able to send instant reply to you by hitting reply button.
You will get your messages from the safelist and not directly from other members. Since you are interested in getting your message delivered to other members you will ensure that your in-box is not full and you receive the messages sent to you. But how many of them you will read is another matter.
You may receive hundreds of messages every day. This will depend upon the number safelists you have joined, their policy and the number of members they have. It is unlikely that you will read or even open all the messages.
Safelist marketing is really a game of numbers. You may not be able to read all your messages, but you will possibly see some of them. Likewise you can expect other members to read just a few of the messages they receive. The more the number of recipients you have, the more you are likely to reach the persons interested in your offer.
Many people have reported substantial success with safelist marketing. If you seriously wish to benefit from this source, you have to be consistent. You can join several safelists and send messages every day in rotation to these safelists. It is important to keep up this schedule, send message to several hundred or thousand recipients a day, and let the number work out its magic.There are free as well as paid safelist services. The paid services will give you some advantage over a free service, such as higher frequency of posting, composing your message in HTML etc. You can join safelists as a free member, analyses the results you are getting from each safelist and then decide to upgrade in the safelists which are giving better results.
The thing about safelists is they have been around for a long time and appear to actually be thriving. Why is that? Could it be that if done properly safelists actually work. If you decide to use safelists as a e-mail marketing method work it hard for awhile and make up your own mind if it is working for you. Be consistent for a period of time and watch your traffic numbers.