How purchasing an email list, and using it, can destroy your marketing.

How purchasing an email list, and using it, can destroy your marketing.

We've all been there, we've wanted to purchase an email list in order to send out massive amounts of emails to potential customers to come in and purchase something from out website. But is that always a good idea, or should you be avoiding it like a plague?

A lot of the people who are purchasing email lists are new to email marketing or maybe their genuine list is beginning to die out and they need to refresh but don't want to do the hard work to boost it themselves. Either way, should you be purchasing a list from someone you don't know?

If you can afford a 100,000 email list for $500 then you should probably put that money into something better to build your list naturally. You can help generate traffic through PPC campaigns and SEO which will definitely increase your subscribers list if you're doing it right and optimizing for email captures.

Think of how your "customers" are going to see your emails. Do you think they're going to say "Oh Boy! This company I've never heard of has sent me an email! Let me open it and click all the links!" or do you think they're just going to mark it as spam and delete it into the depths of hell? If you said the hell answer, you're absolutely right.

Most people don't want garbage piling up in their inbox so they will just spam and delete anything that they didn't sign up for. Even if they did sign up for something, they possibly didn't remember and they spammed and deleted it which is never good for you. But that flaw in email marketing is for an entirely different discussion lol. Even if the person you're emailing didn't mark your email as spam, do you really think they're going to open it and actually click through to any of your websites? Probably not.

Some of the risks of buying email lists:

1. Breaking the Law:
In the USA we have CAN-SPAM which basically goes over what you can and can't do when it comes to emailing someone. It goes over how you can collect emails and how you can send newsletters and other emails out to your list. If you're caught breaking these laws, you can sometimes get a pretty steep fine from the government for spamming the hell out of everyone you could.

2. You can't use your lists on third party services
If you're buying an email list and thinking you can just upload it into mailchimp, aweber or constant contact... Well, you should think twice about that. You'll most likely just get your account banned because of all the spam complaints coming in, and that's the end of your journey with the specific email company you wanted to use. Some people will think "I can buy a list and send it out at least once through mailchimp! I don't care if I get banned, I'll get 100,000 emails inboxed!" but that's not the case because the emails don't all go out at once, they go out in waves. For a 100,000 list there will probably be 50 to 100 different waves that get sent out, and you'll likely get banned after the first wave.

If you do end up getting banned, you won't be getting your money back because you broke the TOS set forth by the service.

3. Spam, Unsubscribes and Garbage Open Rates
People will usually not open an email if they don't notice the sender. For this same reason, people will do what they can to unsubscribe from your mailing list, and if they can't they will just mark you as spam which will hurt your account or server.




Personalizing an email will increase your open rates, but even then, you will get a lot of spam complaints because the person didn't sign up to receive emails from you. They will open the email because they will see their name and think "Maybe I did sign up for this" and when the see your email content along with your website they will quickly know that they did not and in turn mark you as a spammer.

Another down side of purchasing a list is that you won't really know anything about the people in it. You won't know their personalities or even what their websites are about, if they have one. Because of this, you can't really personalize an email for anyone in your list. Instead you'll have to make a general marketing email, which never converts well because they are seen as spammy almost immediately. Even if you get this general email passed the filters, you won't see much of a success rate because the people reading it will hate what it's about and unsubscribe.

You may not be the best at building an email list, but it's definitely a thing you should focus on. Some people may be able to build their lists by 1,000 or more a day and you've never had that kind of success, but you can get there if you just keep pushing. It takes time to learn all the best practices when it comes to email marketing so I would suggest that you read up on everything you can and be on the safe side.



In Conclusion:
You should start capturing legitimate emails from your visitors as soon as your website is set up and avoid buying an email list from anyone. You need to set up capture forms that are linked to mailchimp, constant contact or aweber and have those third party services manage your email sending. If you're doing everything right, you won't have a problem sending out newsletters



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Thanks!
Razzy