Purchasing Mailing Lists

When you are faced with aggressive sales targets and dwindling lead generation performance, purchasing an email contact list can seem like a tempting quick fix to gain new contacts and disseminate your message. In reality, however, this practice could be the death of your credibility. These are the 8 dangers of using purchased email lists and why it may harm—rather than help—your business.

1. People don’t want to hear from you

What’s worse than an unsolicited cold call that interrupts your day? Two words: Unsolicited email (also known as spam). Blasting out thousands of emails can have a damaging effect on your brand. The vast majority of contacts on purchased email lists will have no idea who you are, what your company does or how you got their contact information. This is not a good way to make a first impression.

Email marketing companies will stretch the truth by telling you that these contacts have “opted in” to receiving emails, but this is also not the case. Some of the contacts might have opted in to the email list provider’s terms of service, and by doing so, unknowingly signed up to receive promotional emails from any customer of the email service provider. Other email addresses that are for sale through list providers have been collected by automated web crawlers that scrape tens of thousands of websites searching for contact information. Shady, right? Attempting to start a business relationship by spamming someone is an uphill battle, to say the least.

2. The data isn't as accurate as they say it is

Email list providers promise reliable contact information and high deliverability, but unfortunately, this is rarely the case. The reality is that purchased lists are chock full of bad data and out-of-date information. As soon as contact information is uploaded to an email list service, the data begins to become outdated—contacts get a new role within the organization, or leave the company, and companies close shop, or get acquired. This is know as email list churn. You can expect to lose more than ⅓ of your email list every year!

Any inaccuracies in your data will cause the recipient to immediately question your credibility. For example, if a contact record in your email list has the name of a holding company instead of the public company name, it will be blatantly obvious that you sent out a mass email. The same applies for any custom field that you use—there will be problems.

Don't waste your time and money chasing poor quality contacts, or even worse, contacts that don't exist. Instead, invest in marketing activities that establish your organization as an industry thought leader, build trust with your website visitors and that convert website visitors into opt-in email subscribers.

3. False personalization

With most email services, you have the ability to use custom fields like first name, last name, job title, or company name in your emails campaigns. In cases where you have an established relationship with the email recipients, it is appropriate to use some level of email personalization—but this practice can be dangerous when you are working with a purchased list. When you buy an email list, you have not earned the right to know these people's contact information. You have not established any sort of relationship, and you certainly have not established a sense of trust.

Tailored one-to-one marketing can be an amazingly productive thing—just be careful that you're not doing it prematurely. Receiving an unsolicited email is like starting a conversation with a stranger on the the bus. How would you react if complete stranger knew your name, what you do for a living, and your email address? Needless to say, you would be a bit wary of that person.

4. You are likely violating the terms of service

Any reputable ESP (email service provider) will clearly outline these two items in their terms of service:

1. You won’t use purchased, rented, or third-party lists of email addresses.

Why would an ESP care about the ethics of your email activity? When you send mass emails through an email service provider, the email is routed through a common IP address associated with the ESP. If too many of the ESPs customers are sending poor quality emails, it can have a damaging affective on all of that service provider's customers' email deliverability. It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch.

5. Reduces email deliverability

For many businesses, email is the primary—and often only—channel of communication with their customers, members, and partners. What happens if your email doesn't end up in your intended recipient's inbox? They don’t receive their invoice, their password reset notification, or your latest, greatest product announcement.

Email primarily ends up in one of three places: successfully delivered to the inbox, routed to the junk or spam folder, or caught by an email service provider (ESP) gateway, preventing it from being delivered at all. If your email is being blocked by an ESP, you won't receive a bounce notification or error message.

Email deliverability can become a major problem, yet most organization don’t think about it until they have a crisis on their hands. Deliverability all comes down to sending reputation. ESPs monitor your email activity for a number of signals that contribute to your sending reputation. These signals include:

Sending relevant, properly formatted emails

Patterns in the volume of email you are sending

Number of times your emails are marked as junk or spam

Email bounce rates

If you purchase an email list and begin sending an unusually high volume of email, there is a good chance your activity might raise some red flags. If your sudden increase in email volume isn't enough to alert your ESP to your suspicious email behaviour, the high bounce rates and number of unsubscribes could be the nail in your coffin. If your email activity causes your ISP to flag your account, it can have seriously damaging effects on future email deliverability—in fact, in some cases, it could completely block your ability to communicate via email.