MaineBusiness.com

Should You Purchase an Email Mailing List?

In the "real world" buying lists of prospects is an age old tactic to reach new customers and make more sales. But does it work in our brave new world of email and electronic communication?

Do a Google search on "buy email lists" (as I just did) and you'll pull up about 141 million results. Many of them make claims of "fresh opt-in email lists" or your ability to "buy targeted email lists" either for B2B or B2C.

However, I would have real concerns about how they acquire these opt-in lists. How did these people opt-in? How can they opt-in to receive email messages from you when they've never heard of you?

Maybe they signed up for some service on a Web site and forgot to uncheck the "receive targeted emails from our partners" box. Maybe they agreed to receive emails from businesses in return for getting free movie tickets or being entered in a drawing for a free iPod nano.

Is this your best prospect?

The up side of a purchased list is that it can quickly drive a lot of traffic to your Web site or online offering...assuming it's a compelling offer and the list you bought is high-quality.

The down side of a purchased list is the ill-will and spam reports you might generate from the hundreds or thousands of people you've angered. As you might know, people get a bit crazy when it comes to spam. Is this how you want people to think about your company?

At flyte we've made a decision not to work with purchased lists. If clients want to buy a list we wish them well, but we won't help them. The Email Service Providers we recommend for email marketing, such as Constant Contact, won't allow bought lists on their service...they know these lists create too many spam reports to be worthwhile.

The best mailing list you can have is the one you create yourself. There are lots of legitimate, sustainable tactics that will drive traffic to your site where you can create a compelling argument for people to subscribe to a newsletter or mailing list.

Better to develop a high-quality list of 10 people who buy than to buy a list of 10,000 who just hit the "Spam Report" button.

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