Melissa IN Team | E-Mail, India | email addresses, email cleansing, email list, marketing emails, qualified contacts

Emails are a great way to communicate with your target audience. You can alert them about new product ranges and sales, offer special discounts to drive traffic to your website, get feedback from customers, collect data for market research and do lots more. Sending out an email is not a big challenge.

The challenge lies in having a good email list. Building a good email list takes time and buying a list instead may seem like a simpler solution. However, taking this shortcut can do more harm than good. Here are 5 reasons why you should never buy an email list.

1. You will technically be breaking the law

While there may not be a specific law against buying email lists, you may break the law by using the emails from this list. There are a number of guidelines and rules that online marketers must follow so as to maintain consumer privacy and protect their interests. Before a company can send promotional emails or newsletters to a person, they must get the customer’s willingness to receive such emails. When you build an email list, you can obtain this permission from every person on your list. But, when you buy an email list, you cannot ask for this permission without sending them at least one email. Since you haven’t got the relevant permission, your email may be categorized as spam. Did you know that according to the CASL regulations in Canada, spam email senders can be fined up to $10 million!

In some cases, the list provider may send an email with an option for a “negative opt-in” on your behalf. However, anti-spam regulations such as the CASL and GDPR do not recognize this as true permission.

2. You will probably get a poor quality list

If you had a good email list, would you sell it to your competition? No- so why do you think people will sell a good email list to you? Every good marketer knows the value of his/ her email list and will never sell it. Further, they value the trust consumer’s place with them and will not risk losing this trust by selling consumer details. Lists based on demographic profiles or other ways of targeting customers may have changed hands several times before reaching you and hence it may not have too many good customers. There’s also a high chance many of the emails on the list are no longer in use.

3. You risk harming your reputation

When you send emails to a person who hasn’t opted to receive emails from you, the emails can be marked as spam. A high bounce rate and low click-through rates can also damage your reputation as a brand. In such cases, the email service provider and ISP will have to take action. Good email service providers will no longer want to work with you and you will be blacklisted. Even campaigns that you want to send people who have opted in for your emails will no longer reach them.

4. Your engagement levels may drop

Email marketing is efficient only when it results in high engagement. This is hard enough as it is and when you buy an email list, you’re stacking the odds against you even more. Since the recipients have not actually subscribed to your emails, they will probably simply delete the emails without even opening them. This means there’s no click through to take the customers to your website. So, you decide, would you rather have a list of 500 subscribers who actually go to your website and make a purchase or have a list with 50,000 people of whom none reach your website?

5. You may lose business

Always remember that there are actual people connected to every email address. If they haven’t chosen to be emailed by you, you will come across as being untrustworthy. Instead of wanting to see what your email contains, they will delete your emails and will not want to associate with your brand. The result, even if they come across your website organically, they will not want to buy anything from it because of the bad reputation.

So, What Should You Do?

The best email list is one that is built up slowly and with the right permissions. To be effective, the email addresses must be complete and in use. For this, you will need to use email address verification. Generate good content for your emailers so that people want to sign up for the emails. You can also reach out to people through social media. Connect with them on ways your products and services can be beneficial to them and encourage them to join your mailing list. Remember, an organically built email list will always be more effective than any list you could buy.

With Melissa’s email verification, you won’t waste your budget on email addresses that don’t exist. Follow these links to read more about specific solutions for data quality, data management, and data enhancement.