Buying an email list is bad for your business

At Moskito Design we’re not an Email Service Provider (or ESP―think Mailchimp, Mailup or Aweber), but we design and develop newsletters for clients to send out through ESPs. And every now and then a client presents us a situation like this:

You’re a small to medium business. You’ve heard about the amazing benefits of email marketing, and you want to get your email marketing efforts in gear. In fact, you’ve even got an amazing offer to push. The only problem is that for one reason or another you haven’t built up an email list to send it to. What do you do?

Buy one. I mean, a few hundred euros and you’ll have 20-30,000 receptive inboxes to send to, right?

Wrong. Buying a list, whatever the price, just isn’t worth the money, price and the damaged reputation you may suffer when you get labeled a spammer. Why will this happen?

To understand this, it’s important to consider the kinds of email addresses you’ll be getting on your list. Many of the addresses on your list are:

Scraped or harvested

Harvested addresses are those pulled from web pages by robots. If a website specifically forbids this, as many do, then harvesting their addresses is illegal. If not, you’ll probably end up with a high proportion of generic info@ or hello@ addresses. If you’re a small-medium business using an Email Service Provider, you’ll be blocked from bulk sending to such addresses (and in any case they’ll never convert).

Closed

People change their email address all the time. What you get with a bought list may be massive numbers of closed, no-longer-functioning email address. Emails sent to closed addresses will bounce. In theory, you could pay another service to clean a list like this (they’ll check if the accounts are active or not), but then you’re talking about even more money spent.

Spam traps

There are a number of different spam traps, but suffice to say these are fake or unused email addresses that have been converted by spam monitoring agencies into traps to catch spammers. Getting caught in a spam trap may result your other email sendouts getting labeled as spam.

Not really opt-in

Almost every list peddler claims to sell lists that are 100% opt-in, meaning people have actually said (by opting in) that they want to receive deals and promotional material. But while the people on the list may have opted in to something, they haven’t opted-in to receive offers or information from your company. And in many cases the opt-in is not actually explicit―there’s no box to click―but merely a statement buried somewhere in the terms and conditions of the site. If a recipient didn’t explicitly ask to receive marketing emails from you, they’re more likely to mark your email as spam.

Already over-spammed

You’re not getting a unique, untried list. The list you buy will have been sold and resold to anybody who’s willing to cough up the money for it. Which means that any real addresses on there will most likely already have received countless spam mails from a variety of senders. This drastically reduces the likelihood of anybody converting on your email (even if they go searching for it in their spam box).

But what if you’re still willing to risk it? I mean, statistically speaking, the bigger the list is the more chance there is that some of the addresses are legit. And for the low cost of a bought list, even a small number of conversions would be worth the money, right? Wrong again.

Unfortunately, the real cost of buying a list is the blow to your reputation.

Most major Email Service Providers like Mailchimp or Aweber explicitly forbid the use of bought lists. If they suspect you of using a bought list―and it will be pretty easy to tell from the high rate of undelivered mail―you will have your account shut down and you will be labeled a spammer.

And even if you send from your own domain, your sender score may plummet, and it will be harder to get any future mail in the intended inbox. This creates a negative feedback loop in which the lower your Sender Score goes, the more email gets blocked by Internet Service Providers, which in turn means your Sender Score lowers even more, and you may get blacklisted as a spammer. If you’re sending from your own proprietary domain, this could spell disaster for your business. Only time and more money spent on reputation maintenance will help you get your reputation back in order.

The fact is that nobody who has a legitimate, high-performing email list is going to sell it to you for relative pennies.

If you’re a legitimate business trying to build a reputation and an email list, the best thing to do is start building your own list today.