As a digital marketer, email marketing is a must for you. But you need a contact list first. Otherwise who would you send those emails to, right? A popular legacy method is to purchase email lists. They are easily available and cheap.
But should you be doing this? Do you really think buying a cheap list off the internet is a good way to go about your email marketing strategy? Many marketers do that, but does that mean that you should? You shouldn’t. And, here’s why.
1.Your marketing goals will always remain unreachable.
Why are you purchasing a list? To generate more leads and close more deals, right? But you’ll be having the opposite effect completely.You will be emailing a bunch of people that you don’t know. Worse even, they don’t know you either.
Do you like getting random emails from unknown people? They don’t either.
If you have a marketing strategy and goals to accomplish, rest assured you will never reach your target. Don’t think that I’m trying to discourage you. I’m not. I’m genuinely trying to help you out and prevent you from doing this mistake.
Buying lists will lead to sending emails to recipients who will ignore you for most of the time. Maybe someone will mark you as spam, and that’s when things get real serious.
It is really difficult to meet your goals if your mails keep ending up in everyone’s spam folder.
2.Your account can be shut down by email service providers.
If you are using an email service provider to send emails, you are probably on a shared IP email server. That means you share this mail server with a bunch of other companies.If you are using a purchased list, chances are, you will get marked as spam by your contacts. You will eventually get blacklisted after getting marked as spam repeatedly and have a low sender score.
Spamming other people is a punishable offense according to the law, but usually ESPs stop you way before you reach such a stage. They will block you and shut you down, because your activities are affecting other people on the same server.
In fact, many ESPs do not allow email campaigns that rely on purchased email lists.
3.You damage your own reputation.
Purchased email lists are mostly bogus. Not only do they consist of email ids of people who have not chosen to receive email from you, but it also includes defunct and fake email addresses.Such email addresses are known as spam traps. Your engagement rates fall down, negatively affecting your sender score. If your email campaign is faring badly, your score gets affected. And, your score reflects your reputation.
These email addresses might have checked a box somewhere in some distant era that said they were fine with receiving emails from affiliates, but never did they ever specify they would want emails from you.
4.Your contacts don’t know you.
When you purchase email lists, you don’t know whose email addresses you are purchasing. Neither do the people whose email addresses you are purchasing to put up on your contact list know you.I have mentioned this before, but this is something crucial when it comes to purchasing lists. Lists are usually scraped together from various sources, sometimes legit, mostly illicit.
Even if your source says that they are legit and opt-in email addresses, the thing is they did not opt-in to receive emails for you. They probably agreed to receive emails from some other company.
So, there is practically no point whatsoever to actually invest in such lists.
5.You can’t buy good email address lists.
Good email address lists cannot be bought. Purchased email address lists will always be disappointing. Email lists that can be bought are mostly bogus.One can even say that this entire business of selling and buying of email lists are nothing short of a sham. A good email list takes time to build. It requires hard work in the form of digital marketing.
You will have lure people to visit your website. Then you will have to provide them some kind of incentive so that they opt-in to receive information from you.
You can only strive for a good email address list if the email addresses in your list are okay with you sending them emails periodically.
Bottom Line
If you want to take your company forward then do not take this path. Purchasing email lists will give you nothing but pain and misery. It will turn your life to hell and will tear your company and its reputation apart.
Most of the time people purchase email lists because they are impatient. They want instant gratification in the form of success.
But success comes from being patient and working hard. There is no easy way out.
Concentrate on how you can get people to visit your site, and the rest will fall in place.