Buy an email list. Yes or not?

5 min read

Adestra and Ascend have conducted a survey, which results showed that a half of marketing professionals consider the enriching contact data quality to be their most important issue. Now we see how difficult is creating a really strong and valuable email list, with enough data to help you attractive emails, personalized and engaging. It can take months to build a good database for your company. That’s why you might want to find the quickest way and to buy an email list. Shortcuts save time and effort, right? However, they can cause disastrous consequences, to harm your business. In what way?

We can compare an email list with Internet gold. Mine it, do it right, leverage its opportunities and you will succeed. However, you need more than a few bucks to buy it from vendors. They may promise you the Earth, but there are several reasons why you should never listen to them.

Selling email addresses is actually illegally

First, buying an email list may be against the law, depending on your country. Even if buying is not, using it is definitely against. Yeah, it seems we have the “free” internet and modern marketing world calls for desperate measures, but there are strict rules, consumer protections and guidelines. All over the world there are regulations protecting inboxes, such as GDPR in Europe, CAN-SPAM in the US of CASL in Canada. They are needed to protect consumers. There regulations require marketers to send any emails only with permission. And the buying of an email list does not suggest you’ve obtained that.

Own base of email addresses is always more profitable

This point is obvious. Just think, if you have an email list that performs, would you sell it, or maybe rent? Besides, all professionals know that consumer loyalty depends on trust, so it is very stupid for them to sell contacts, especially without consent. All marketers want to keep these leads to themselves. If you need some lists that are based on some promises of targeting, you should be especially wary, as they’ve changed a lot of times. Don’t even expect that you’ll have good customers from them. It doesn’t matter what methods the compiler of this email list used, people will still view your messages as spam.

To buy an email list it’s a risk to the reputation

All the risk from the first two points is a no-brainer, but the situation is much more complicated. A huge part of your reputation depends on how customers cooperate with your messages. They can flag them as spam and it’s not good for you. Also, if your click-through rates drop and your bounce rates are too high, your reputation will suffer. After that, you can not expect a successful collaboration with some reputable services. Don’t buy email lists, it is a lose-lose case.

Deliverability tends to zero

As an email marketer, your sender reputation speaks for you. There might be people who will promise you to keep your reputation safe. However, better safe than sorry. Momentary desire to get something quick and easy cost you future opportunities to expand your business interacting with customers.

Once you’ve got to blacklist, it is extremely different to engage clients, especially prospects in a significant relationship. That’s because your message no longer reach their inboxes, even after mail validation. Losing deliverability can be a great blow to your company.

It is untrustworthy

Do you like strangers who come in your inbox and try to sell you something? Surely you don’t. You’d prefer to hit the delete button with any doubts. Your customers act in the same way. They total control over their email space and even consider it their private space. You don’t have the right to be rude, to be intrusive. Prospects won’t welcome your business in their online sanctuary if they don’t remember signing up for your promotions. They never asked to receive your newsletters, so you can expect for some resentment. You’ll definitely lose your customers before you’ve even got them. Even email address list verification won’t help you in such situation.

These leads are the most expensive

If you’ve read this article and still going to buy and check email list valid, just do “the math”. These leads will be the most expensive you’ve ever purchased.

You should to factor in:

• the total number of messages you send;
• the % that will actually reach the inbox;
• the % that will land in Spam;
• a low open rate;
• the click-through rate

All these risks can’t be worth it. Maybe this thing worked yesterday, but now it doesn’t. That’s why you must adapt to new approaches of digital marketing.

So what should you do?

We’re sure you are wondering: what now? We have several actionable tips that will help you create your own email list!

Plan your data collection;

• Create cool content;
• Engage your prospects;
• Use software to verify email addresses;
• Use SMM;
• Get creative;
• Host an online webinar or a Q&A session;
• Opt-in everywhere;
• Leverage networking.

As your email list grows, so grows the risk of data decay. One day your true list can become as useless as a purchased one. So you should keep neat. Use free email address validation web service to get rid of all bad signups. Abuse of misspelled messages, catch-all, spam traps impact your sender reputation. Focus on growing a performing database!