BUY EMAIL LIST

BUY EMAIL LIST

Many people are intrigued by the idea of obtaining a ready-made list of email addresses they can send promotional emails to. Why wait years to slowly build up your own list of email addresses when you can piggy-back (for a price) on someone else's efforts?

While the idea seems attractive, there's a big trap waiting for anyone pursuing this course of action without care.

The important issue is how you come to obtain that bulk list of email addresses. And here we distinguish between renting a list (list rental) and buying a list.

List rental

List rental is a recognized and accepted practice in email marketing. Owners of address lists will send an email to their list on your behalf. And they charge you a fee for this service. The key point is that you never get to see the email addresses on that list. The list owner does the sending, not you.

Now there are lots of ins and outs to list rental, but for now you just need to understand that -- unlike with direct mail -- the actual address list never falls into your hands. So you pay a rental fee every time an email gets sent to the list.

Buying email list

The alternative is to buy a physical copy of a list of email addresses. After you pay the purchase price, there are no further fees to pay. You can send your promotional message as often as you like to the list.

Is it good?

If somebody does offer to sell and send you a bulk list of email addresses, 99 times out of 100 you're getting a spam list. That's a list of addresses of people who have not agreed to receive messages like yours, or who are on a list that's been blasted to uselessness by other mailers.

At best, your messages to that list just elicit a poor response. At worst, you're labeled a spammer, which has numerous practical consequences -- all of them bad -- for your brand, bottom line and ability to do business over the Internet. You can end up on a few nice blacklists.