Why You Should Shun Purchasing Email Lists

Marketing has become a mainstay part of business. Email marketing has grown exponentially for the past couple of years. Companies try to reach out to their potential customers with their services and products through email market campaign. In order to do this, they require a bulky email list to reach the maximum number of targeted customers.

1.Quality and Consent Concerns
2.Legal and Compliance Risks
3.Deliverability Damage
4.ROI and Business Impact
5.Better Alternatives

Quality and Consent Concerns

Purchased email lists often come with significant quality and consent issues:

Email Addresses of Low Quality

Email addresses obtained from trade fairs, online form filling etc. are usually forged email addresses. When asked, many people give away false email addresses mostly to prevent flooding of their genuine inboxes with such commercial emails.

When you buy an email list, you probably buy numerous defunct and unused email addresses.

A list seller has to make his business so he will certainly not be selling the list to merely you but to various other buyers. The list bought by you must have been bought by other vendors and businesses as well.

These companies would also be emailing the recipients whose email addresses are listed in the purchased list. It may happen that the companies or people who have bought this list have already landed in the recipients' mailboxes before your landing. And your landing time can turn out to be the recipient's threshold limit of reading and dealing with unwanted commercial emails. As a result the recipient is more likely to ignore your email and report it as spam. So the purchase list does guarantee poor deliverability.

Recipients on Purchase List May Not Know You

Be careful while buying a list from a vendor that is termed as opt-in. How can the term 'opt-in' imply to be given to others? The name says all.

If the customers have opted to receive email from the vendor, you are by no means entitled to send emails to them for a simple reason that they haven't opted to receive email from you yet.

And since there is no positive nexus with the customers they may either mark your email as SPAM or delete it.

Legal and Compliance Risks

Using purchased email lists can expose you to significant legal and compliance risks:

Could Get You Blacklisted

Purchased list usage implies non compliance to the ISP and email client guidelines.

How Lists Are Created

Experienced marketers are aware that purchased email list is not only illegally procured and web scrapped breaching federal CAN-SPAM laws, but also created by websites that do swap email addresses or download user's address book.

In each of these cases, the purchased lists often generate really high hard bounces and get flagged as spam by recipients. Consequently, you will soon be noticed by ISP filters, getting blocked or blacklisted for sure; and instead of reaching customer's inbox, you will reside in his spam folder.

Spam Traps & Honey-Pots

Certain Email service providers take aid from organizations that combat email SPAM. These organizations plant spam traps or honey-pots so that the dubious list sellers can carry out their unethical practices by collecting these email addresses. Your purchased lists can contain such spam traps or defunct email addresses that may land you to a terrific destination (email blacklist), finding it difficult to come back on track.

The brand will lose its sheen. Thereon, it is definitely going to hamper your delivery results as you risked your company's reputation and rebuilding it would be consuming your resources heavily.

B2B Alert: Many corporate domains use spam reporting services that identify emails from blacklisted entities and block them. Now that rings an alarm for B2B companies!

Usage of Purchased Lists Banned by Reputed Email Marketing Vendors

Reputable companies, using email marketing software, will always assert on opt-in list usage and disallow usage of purchased list. You might have to use an illegitimate service already on blacklist block lists if at all you have to use the Purchase list.

And sharing IPs with blacklisted senders is bound to get ill reputation to your company and misplaced landing in customers' mailboxes.

Deliverability Damage

Purchased email lists can severely damage your email deliverability:

Drop in Your Sender Score

Purchased lists possibly have high hard bounces and spam reports, inflicting disorder on your sender score (Score tracked by Return Path that rates the reputation of outgoing email server IP address on a scale of 0-100).

Impact: Dip in your sender score would surely and severely lower your chances of landing in recipient's inboxes despite your so called non-spam inbox optimized future emails.

ROI and Business Impact

The use of purchased email lists can have a detrimental impact on your ROI and business:

Low Response Rate

How does it feel receiving an email in inbox from an unknown company? It's irksome, isn't it? Similarly, it can irk the recipients, who haven't opted in to receive email from you. Surely you don't want to be one of a kind.

A Word of Caution

If at all you feel the need to send emails to non opt-in recipients because you believe that your products or services are apt for them, then your email should carry some weighted content and provide value, not interrupt them with a barrage of marketing messages and risk your relationship with potential customers and in turn your business. But this might be a short term win.

Permission-based emails will carry out the campaigning more effectively than those on purchased lists.

Better Alternatives

There are better and more effective ways to build your email list:

Generating an opt-in/permission-based/subscribed email list

This kind of email list comprises either of following:

Customers who have joined recently
People who have opted, chosen and agreed to receive emails directly from you
Subscribed/signed up through an online sign-up form on your website or your landing page

The Right Way Forward

Build your list organically through opt-in subscribers
Focus on quality over quantity
Provide value to earn and maintain trust
Use permission-based marketing practices
Protect your sender reputation at all costs

Key Takeaway

Purchasing email lists may seem like a shortcut to reach more customers, but it's a path that leads to damaged reputation, poor deliverability, and ultimately, failed campaigns. Build your list the right way—with permission, trust, and value.

Shun Purchasing email list

Why Not To Purchase Email Lists

Companies Need Email Lists

Ways to Procure Email Lists