What is Herculist?

Herculist is a Safelist that currently boasts close to 40,000 members. It's an online mailer (as are all Safelists of course) and can be run via a submitter. You can join for free to take a look, but the restrictions on free members are severe, and you do not get a good feel for what it can do without subscribing. There are several levels of membership, some monthly and some annual. The annual payment does make the monthly average fee much more attractive.

There is a significant bonus when you join!

You are offered a lifetime membership in some bonus leads, called Smart List. This is really a Safelist where you get the leads to mail to. In fairness to Herculist, their offer needs to be evaluated across both sets of tools.

Herculist is pretty much globally reckoned to be one of the best Safelists around.

Let's find out.

The Test

In order to be able to carry out as accurate a comparison as possible, I use the same ad for the same program for all tests. The ad that I use does produce results for me, but more importantly, gives a level playing field to all the programs that I test.

Unfortunately, I have not (until very recently) had my own site to test. The advantage of having control of your own site is that you can add code to it to get more meaningful data from the Ad Tracking software that is used to generate your stats. We can get an idea from affiliate programs however (such as was used on this test) as to the number of Click Thru's (users clicking on your ad links) that have been generated.

I subscribe to the Gold Membership, which allows me to mail to the entire database, every 24 hours. There is an agreement of honour with Smart List, that you don't mail to the list more than twice a week. This cannot be enforced of course, because you have control of the leads, but I have stuck to my end of the bargain, and mailed to these leads twice a week. There is usually around 2000 leads to mail to.

Here is a summary of clicks attained for the period 1st June 2004 to 30th June 2004.

I think that this is fairly self explanatory. Herculist is included in the results for the Safelists pages. Just as a point of reference, unique clicks indicate single clicks for any one IP address or individual. So if someone clicks on the ad link twice, the click would only be recorded once. Raw clicks indicate the total number of clicks that an ad link has received for a given period, including duplications.

So, this tells us that the ad I have used does perform, so let's look a little deeper at the detail for the Safelists pages.

Bearing in mind that volume is the name of the game with Safelists, I rarely track individual lists. In fact I will only usually track a list if I have to pay a significant amount for it (a rare occurrence). By and large, the 'Paid' and 'Free' Safelists referred to above, refer to the Submitters that I use to mass mail Safelists. That being said, and looking at the results as a whole, the results are significant.

Let's dig deeper into the 'Paid Safelists' campaign.

Herculist outperforms the two paid submitters together. When you add the Smart List result, the results are even more striking.

Summary

All in all, the results from Herculist indicate that it is a worthwhile tool. It is easy to set up, and use. It allows customisation in your message, whereby you can apply a users name to a message. This can improve results (I don't always do this). Coupled with the use of Smart List (which you cannot ignore), Herculist is a very worthwhile investment.

N.B. Please note that Smart List requires a group mailer to use the leads.