The Risks of Buying Email Lists: What You Need to Know

why you should not buy an email list

You need an email list right away, and if you can get them for a pretty cheap price, that’s pretty cool, too, but there is a reason why you should wait to buy an email list. 

This is not only about the loss of money spent but also about legal problems, financial penalties and reputational losses. The latter can harm and destroy the positive image of your company overnight.

Buying an email list and marketing to customers is never a good idea. They are less valuable than you think. Sending mass emails to cold leads can negatively and negatively affect your business.

In this blog article, I’ll explain why buying an email list is a bad decision. And how badly it can affect your business.

First, let’s talk about related definitions on the email list.

What is an Opt-In Email List?

Have you heard of the words like opt-in, subscribe and unsubscribe?

The opt-in email list contains persons who:

  • Customers who have lately, or have used, your goods or services;
  • Agree to receive email updates directly from you;
  • Already signed up or registered using an online registration form on your company website, landing page or social media accounts.

What is Opt Out Email List?

The Opt-Out list is a collection of email addresses that do not subscribe to newsletters. These data are collected in a variety of ways. For example, buying from units specializing in illegal data sales, collecting information on websites, scraping emails…etc

It is clear from this that the people on this opt-out list have no notion of who you are. And they have no need, no interest in your business.

In addition, as you may not know, mailbox providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail do not consider lists purchased or scanned online at all to be legal. They call it a spam / unsolicited bulk email.

How Are Email Lists Acquired? 

To understand why using email marketing based on bought email lists is a terrible idea, you must first grasp how it works, how it’s acquired and how it conflicts with the guidelines of email marketing.

Many individuals regularly acquire email lists from third-party sources — often known as list brokers. These people will sell the email list they already have. These vendors always guarantee their listings.

Some providers even claim to sell reputable email lists to niche groups. Regrettably, buyers still expect such an email list to have a high delivery rate.

There are numerous tales of individuals whom this email list has deceived on the Internet. This is junk information that is gathered and acquired from many different sources. You might be cautious of anybody when they can’t show evidence of how effectively such listings will operate.

How Do I Get A List Of Email Subscribers?

There are three methods to help you get your email list:

1. Purchase an Email List: Based on demographic and psychographic information, you work with a list provider to find and get a list of names and email addresses.

2. Rent an Email List: You also work with a list provider. You define a segment of email senders but never own the list. You have to work with your provider to send your email since you cannot view the recipients’ email addresses.

3. Build a Double Confirmation Email List: A list of people who voluntarily give you their email addresses through a form or in person so you can email them. They can choose several types of email content they want to receive and email notifications when new blog posts are published.

Have you ever intended to buy or rent an email list at a very cheap price and the number of hundreds of thousands of emails? That’s an impressive number. This number of Emails can be an extremely valuable resource for your Sales and Marketing activities but the negative aspect of doing such actions is huge.

How Much Does A Mailing List Cost Per Thousand?

The price of an email list varies across suppliers. The more focused the list (or said to be successful), the more pricey it will be.

Based on industry data, you may spend between $5 – $60 per thousand emails for a B2C list. 

And $10 – $1000 per thousand emails for the B2B list. Of course, you can still purchase inexpensive listings on eBay or elsewhere…

Why Build An Email List?

The most apparent reason you should build your email list is to optimize consumer reach and bring in revenue for your business, yet it is crucial to remember that your email list is your property.

In case you want to boost your business. A high-quality email list might raise the total worth of your firm. 

In addition, a quality email list may produce extra revenue for your business. You have the chance to sell ad space in your email or send sponsored emails (promotional emails) on behalf of partners. Individuals need advertising. 

Read our guide on how to affiliate with email marketing.

Developing an email list isn’t just about constructing a marketing funnel, it’s about generating entire value for your firm.

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Purchase An Email List.

You need an email list right away. And if you can get them for a pretty cheap price, that’s cool.

However, sending interactive emails to a rental/purchased email list and need to understand their concerns about your products/services can cause them more trouble than customers. Need.

So why buying email lists is considered a marketing mistake? Read on

1.  You will be violating the regulations governed by GDPR.

Most email marketers are legally required to allow recipients to opt out of emails they no longer want to receive.

This must be possible for those contacts to do right in the email message. A European data protection law called  General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an operation regulation that took effect in May 2018, doubles the opt-ins of this connection. And purchased email lists need to be revised.

GDPR corrects many aspects of digital marketers’ use of customer data across Europe — on the website, in mass media, and via email.

The GDPR protects your receivers if they reside in Europe. Therefore you don’t even need to operate there to be subject to the legislation.

There needs to be more than an opt-out option in your email template in light of GDPR’s existing control over all email contacts across Europe. This means that you must have their express permission before sending any emails to your contacts.

In this case, the checkbox means the individual must click the unchecked email subscription before seeing it on your site.

And when you buy your email list, the people on it aren’t given this option — you’re not complying with GDPR before you send your first email.

2.  Email marketing services will not send emails to unknown email lists.

If you currently use Email marketing software, you will find reliable companies to ensure you use email opt-in lists. 

Email delivery is a common problem for ESPs using shared IP addresses that don’t require users to utilize email opt-in lists. Why so? One customer’s bad email address list can harm other customers’ traffic on that shared IP address.

3.  Potential email lists won’t sell

If it’s a bought email list, its email addresses have been deemed unresponsive or ineligible for outreach marketing.

While purchased email addresses may have been valuable at times, they may have been spammed.

4.  You will access customers like a spammer.

“spam” is only used to describe people who post news and send messages blatantly without knowing whether the recipient needs to read them. For customers, spam content or objects often bring a very uncomfortable feeling, and the rate they open to read your email is 0%.

You may assume that your marketing emails are well-written and full of useful information, but to receivers on unconnected lists, you are simply another unfamiliar firm in their inbox. This will lead customers to unsubscribe or even mark spam for all emails from your company’s domain.

5.  A 99% inbox rate is a scam.

Any email marketing expert knows that: Email must be sent from a server. In order to send an email, this software must connect to the server. They usually use public servers to send mail. 

In doing so, your email is very likely to fall into the Spam folder. In the worst-case scenario: Your email address will be at risk of falling into Gmail’s Blocklist….

Factors that determine where your email is in the recipient’s inbox:

  • Outgoing email server (Domain, IP address, configuration)
  • Email address
  • Email subject and body (Contains many keywords related to spam; Malicious links or image and text ratio…)
  • Email sending frequency
  • Each Webmail has its own spam filter

Because of the above reasons, it is never possible to guarantee the inbox rate is 99%. Even the largest email service provider in the world cannot guarantee this. So it would be best if you were careful with such advertisements.

6.  You will harm your email traffic and IP address.

Did you know there are organizations devoted to combating spam emails? They set up something called a honeypot, which is a seeded email address that, when harvested and emailed, identifies the sender as spam.

As a result, the email address that goes into the spam trap stops returning the hard bounce and instead accepts the message or reports the sender as spam.

If you buy a list, you have no way to confirm how often those email addresses are sent, whether the email addresses on that list have been dropped due to a hard bounce to prevent identifying you as spam, or from where those email addresses came into existence.

Are you prepared to put your email traffic in danger and the reputation of your IP address and your company in?

7.   Company recognition seriously drowns.

If you are a reputable company and business and you choose to buy data to reach customers and get bad reviews, now what is affected is not only the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign in particular or Digital. Marketing in general but also the name and reputation of your business.

Imagine, for example, that you Googled your company’s name and found out that four of the results on the first page were angry complaints from customers who had received many unsolicited emails from them. Dear. Is that what you really want?

Remember, in today’s digital age, just a few negative tweets can cause significant PR problems.

A company’s online reputation is critical, and you don’t want to invest a lot of time and money on reputation management only to be buried in search results.s.

8.  Your Email Service Provider May Penalize 

Purchasing an email list not only jeopardizes your traffic and brand image but may also jeopardize your email account.

Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook do not want to be linked with accounts that their receivers routinely mark as spam. Email service providers like AWeber will immediately close your account if they suspect you are sending unwanted content.

How Do You Get Quality Data Without Buying An Email List?

Buying and selling email lists is one of many ways to get customer information. To have quality email customer data, you can apply the following methods:

1.  Collect emails from your website.

Create a registration form on the website for customers to fill in their email and agree to receive information updates from your business. This is one of the effective ways to help you get a quality email list. 

People visiting your website and agreeing to provide an email mean they have a genuine interest in your product. This list is obviously much better quality than buying pre-made email lists.

2.  Create product incentive programs to get customer information.

The condition given to enjoy the promotion is to provide clear personal information, which email is mandatory information. This is an effective way to create a list of potential customers.

3.  Collect email data from customer calls.

Many people are applying this way to get customer email addresses. Customer care staff, and telesales staff, with their ingenuity, will be the ones to help you get the customer’s email address. That customers agree to provide information through these calls means they agree to receive information from your business.

With the reasons indicated above and the effective data collection methods provided, I hope that you will have successful email advertising campaigns as expected. Don’t spend money on buying customer email lists only to receive a failed email marketing campaign in return!

Read our full guide on how to collect customers’ emails easily. 

Conclusion.

An email database is a list of email addresses of potential recipients. Although buying such a list seems like an interesting and profitable decision, in practice, it turns out to be a huge mistake and a trap for novice marketers.

Now that you know the reasons why buying such a list is a mistake, you can start building your base. White and legal methods

The email addresses collected in this way will be of more value to your business than the ones you buy.

Thank you for reading to the end!