We know how enticing it can be when someone offers you the perfect email list at an amazing price. It may seem too good to be true…that is because it is. We do not recommend purchasing an email list EVER. Here are 5 GOOD reasons to save your money and not buy a list.
1. Quality Emails Are Not For Sale
It’s the perfect list full of people from your target market. You think, what a great way to get my product in front of a new audience! The problem…how can you make sure these emails are legitimate? How can you verify that they are in your demographic? Short answer, YOU CAN’T. Even if you try to use a clean list service, you can’t weed out the spam trap emails that IP providers use to identify spam. If you send to even one of the spam trap emails, you can put your IP reputation at risk causing your website to be blacklisted and emails with your web address in them to be blocked. Not good and not worth it.
2. You Will Be A Spammer
A purchased list is full of people who have NOT opted in to receive messages from you. The recipient, who may have otherwise been interested in hearing from you, will see your email as spam. Not good and not worth it.
3. You Will Be Damaged
When you choose to send to a purchased list of emails the damage can be worse than just spending your advertising dollars in a bad place. It can hurt your email deliverability across all aspects of your email marketing, not just the purchased list, but to those people that opted into receiving your emails as well. When an ISP sees that you have sent an email with an 80% bounce rate or a high spam rate, your web address, your IP address and your email service provider (ESP) all get flagged. This can hurt the reputation of your website and your ESP can freeze your account forcing you to find another provider. Not good and not worth it.
4. Poor Response Rate
They don’t work anyway. Whether you are trying to add to an already existing email list OR you are trying to build a list from scratch, you will not get the response rate that you are hoping for with a purchased list. People that don’t ask to receive messages from you, don’t want to see an email from you in their inbox. You will be spending money with little to no return. Not good and not worth it.
5. You Are In Violation of the CAN-SPAM Act
Last but not least…according to the CAN-SPAM Act, a US law that regulates commercial emails, sending unsolicited emails is against the law. The people on the purchased list did not ask for information from your company (opt-in) and do not know your company. Any email communication from you would be considered unsolicited. Unsolicited emails = spam. You are not a spammer and don’t want to be considered one. It can hurt the reputation of your business and you could be facing legal action. Not good and not worth it.
What you want to do is grow your list organically. To learn about how to grow your list the right way, read our “Recommended ways to grow your email list” blog coming soon!
Happy Emailing 🙂
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