It seems an easy and profitable idea to collect lists that are prepared based on location and sectoral information. You can pay a reasonable amount of money to an outer source and have thousands of new contacts to send your campaigns; which you believe generate returns. But, does this really work for good?
Buying database has proven to be ineffective and even harmful for email marketing for some reasons.
Email Marketing is a Permission-Based Marketing Method
Before talking about the strategic misgivings of buying lists, it is important to mention the law. Email marketing is a permission-based marketing method; which means, you need to have your contacts on your lists by their consent and out of an agreement between you and your subscribers. It can be out of a web form on your web-site, a transaction made (such as online sales), from an event etc. You can see this article to learn about how to establish your own legal database.
Despite changing from country to country and state to state, there are legal consequences of sending electronic messages to the people that you did not how a legal ground to interact with. You wouldn’t want to be charged for a single marketing message. Every year, millions of dollars are paid as penalty by people who do so.
Major Email Marketing Companies Don’t Allow You (including INBOX)
No major email marketing company in anywhere in the world acts on the consideration that the more sales, the better. Technically, messages sent to illegal lists eventually harms the reputation rates of the IP addresses of the sender; in this case, the email marketing company. The lists bought from outer sources are generally ‘dirty’; that means, most of the contacts in the lists are either don’t exist or are left to decay. Therefore, emails sent to these lists receive high bounce and spam rates; which consequently decrease the reputation rates.
Furthermore, certified email marketing companies are legally bound to make sending to legally obtained contacts. No major company would risk being charged on your behalf; hence, they ask for the sources of your database, for which you need to act honestly.
The Lists Don’t Contain High-Quality Contacts
Let’s think. Would you be willing to sell your subscribers’ contact info to another party just for a small amount of money?
The more an address receives spam emails, the thicker its spam filters gets; so, your emails land in spam boxes of your contacts, as well. Therefore, keeping your contacts to yourself is a good idea. That is also what everybody does.
In the email marketing sector, certified email marketing companies care for their users’ databases. The privacy is of utmost importance for us. So, valuable contacts cannot be obtained from such platforms.
These all combined, a conclusion can be made that working and high-quality contacts are almost impossible to stay in a list on sale. If there is one, it is likely to become not-working in a short while since it will be exploited by others who buy the list, just as you do.
People in These Lists Don’t Know You
If you think that “Well, we can meet.” You are mistaken.
Let’s put yourself in the receiver’s shoes. Most probably, you receive messages from sources that you don’t know almost every day, too. Do you open them? Most probably, not. No matter how reliable the source seems or the offer looks attractive. You simply don’t trust since you didn’t give your email address to that source.
Others will think in concert with you and don’t open your emails.
Email marketing is permission-based for a reason. Everybody today, including the marketers and companies, are consumers at some point; and we are more conscious and careful in the digital world.
Your Deliverability Rate and IP Reputation Drops Significantly, Leading to a Blacklist
Since the receivers will not open your emails and most of them will mark you as spam due to the reasons mentioned above, your deliverability rate and IP reputations will drop significantly. Unless you take measures and clean-up your database, this will end up in a blacklist for you.
If you work with a certified email marketing company and somehow managed to make sending to a list from outer source, the system will automatically ban you from using their infrastructure, as well; when you are marked as a “spammer”.
You Wouldn’t Want to Be Annoying
Let’s leave the technical and legal impetus of this subject aside and concentrate on ‘marketing’ side.
If your ‘marketing’ effort becomes something irritating for your potential clients, then it begins to work against you.
Sending emails to the people who don’t know you or agreed to receive emails from you, makes you look like an irritating company. If you do so, what you do is to build prejudice for your company’s services. That’s a cruel fact about digital marketing.
There are many ways to build a clean and responsive database for your email marketing efforts. See this article to learn how to.
