Period Three Blog » The perils of buying email lists

Feb042009

The perils of buying email lists

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

It never fails, we always come across someone who just doesn’t quite get the “permission” part in “permission marketing”. What the heck does “opt-in” mean anyways? Well here’s a pretty long article that kind of dissects the issue at hand. Here’s my walk through:

Although permission-based marketing clearly is the best practice, a huge market apparently exists for e-mail addresses compiled by others. A Google search for “email lists” brings up 3.1 million results containing that exact phrase. A significant number have to be those of third-party compilers.

Yes, there are plenty of places you can buy a list of email addresses from, don’t do it. YOU WILL GET IN TROUBLE!

Yet buying e-mail addresses is risky, and not just for the possible loss of the money spent on them. Mailing to a purchased list can destroy a firm’s e-mail reputation as well as the chances of getting all its e-mail delivered.

Yep, never buy a list.

Spamhaus maintains a list of mailers it deems to be spammers, against which a sizable percentage of inbox providers check incoming e-mail to determine whether to block it as spam. A listing on Spamhaus can cause a marketer to have serious deliverability issues.

Absolutely, never buy a list.

Moreover, e-mail inbox providers like Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft convert abandoned e-mail addresses into spam traps. A firm that hits enough of them will be dubbed a spammer — or at least a very sloppy mailer who wastefully consumes others’ bandwidth by sending to garbage addresses. And it will be blocked.

Just don’t buy a list.

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The perils of buying email lists

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