Thinking about purchasing an emails list? Think twice! You might have this great offer arriving at your inbox, or saw an ad on a variety of marketing themed facebook groups, and those deals always seem like a bargain. Nope, it is not! At least not for the buyer! In this piece of content, I will try to explain why you should NEVER, I repeat NEVER, purchase an email list from anyone!
The quality of the list
You can’t really trust the people that are selling email lists, they are not a trustworthy type of people. They might promise you the moon, that the list is full of hot leads, ready to buy your product! Unfortunately, there is a very high chance that it is packed with multiple issues, like:
Invalid email addresses that either never was real, no longer exist or are abandoned.
Incomplete information – wrong, mistyped names of contacts or companies.
Illegally harvested emails addresses from the web.
Even if 90%of the data is correct, even the remaining 10% can impact your business badly!
Spam alert
Once you bought this “seemed like a great deal” email list, be prepared to be labeled as a spammer! To understand why first ask yourself a question. Do you enjoy receiving content that you didn’t ask for? I believe the answer is no. Therefore don’t expect that anyone from your paid list will happily convert into paying customer. Chances are that your recipients will delete your emails, or even worse – mark your emails as spam. This will ruin your reputation and email deliverability.
The email service provider will say ‘no likely’!
Most of email service providers, that you would like to use for your email campaigns, do not allow to send to bought lists. They are taking good care of their reputation, and as soon as they find out – your account will be blocked, while your credits will be terminated. You might send via smaller players, but your deliverability might be low, due to their approach to sender reputation.
Your list is not a ‘virgin’!
Believe me, you are not the first buyer of this list, it’s more likely that you are 10 000+ person that thought ‘what an awesome deal I am getting here, I will make lots of $$$ out of this list’. Ha ha ha – soon you will find out how silly of you it was. Those leads are feeling exhausted, used and pissed off! They might be getting hundreds of emails weekly or even daily, and those messages might be going straight to the bin. They are also more likely to report you as spam, and I don’t blame them – they just have enough of it.
Reputation, REPUTATION, REPUTATIOOOON!
Each email domain has a reputation that can be scored by the senders’ email behavior. Therefore it’s so crucial to take great care of it, by looking into who you send emails to, and how did you source the contact. That is why using a bought email list is very risky. Old or unused emails of such list could be also a spam trap! When emails are sent to them, it is a clear indicator is spamming and will end up on a blacklist. Even if your list is free of spam traps, you still might get a high number of bounce backs, and spam complaints. Those two factors will destroy your sender reputation, and make it even harder for your engaged recipients to receive your content.
The legal abuser, yep, that’s your new nickname
GDPR, GDPR and one more time GDPR! Oh and CAN-SPAM ACT! Rings a bell, isn’t? Yep, if you are sending campaigns to people that never agreed to receive any form of communication from you, you are breaking the law! You could face high finance penalties, as well as destroying your reputation as a company- it could only take a couple of reviews, post or tweets to show your potential customers that you are not trustworthy.
Good luck with verification…
You might think, that once you have a purchased the list, you might as well run it through email verifier, so you will get rid of invalid emails, and at last, save your reputation. Wrong again! Good players of email verification market will clearly state in their ANTI-SPAM policy, that by submitting your list via their system, you declare that it wasn’t purchased. Bouncer, of course, is one of them. And you do not want to mess with Winston (based on true story) – he will immediately terminate your account. Sure, you will find a couple of verifiers that will allow you to run your list via their app, but that’s just bad! Check how they stand on the privacy of your data 😉
I think the conclusion is quite clear – build your email list in a decent, legal and honest way and it will pay off! On how to do it you can read in one of our previous
Izabela is a leading contributor to the Bouncer’s blog. She is inspired to help companies all around the world to get emails into their recipients’ inboxes
