If you’re going to embark on an email marketing campaign, you’re going to need people to email. Building an email list takes time and patience; it will take months (maybe even years) to build a list of 1,000 plus contacts who have actually opted in to receive news and information from your business.
But…
Then you get a call from a list purchasing company. They can get you 10,000 names and email addresses for people that live in your city overnight for little more than £100.
Problem solved?
Not really.
Why?
Here are just a few reasons:
List Exhaustion:
The vendor that sold you the list will resell it to anyone else they find willing to pay the price, the list isn’t exclusively yours.
As a result, nobody has any control over how many emails or even what types of emails are sent to the list.
These email addresses could be being overwhelmed with marketing collateral 10-12 times a day by others who’ve purchased the same list as you. This constant bombardment will exhaust the contacts on the list and weaken any chance of a positive response in the process.
Quality Control:
When you buy a list of contacts you are charged based on the size of the list. Unfortunately, quality rarely comes into it.
For all you know you could be sending your emails to non relevant or even closed down email addresses.
No relevance:
Even if you’re lucky enough to buy a list of 100% working email addresses, it’s still pretty unlikely that your email marketing campaign using it will yield much success. Remember that these people haven’t requested to hear from you. When one of your emails unexpectedly pops into their inbox it’s highly unlikely to be enthusiastically welcomed.
Still undecided?
If none of this has deterred you and you are still thinking about buying or renting an email list from a broker then at the very least make sure that the broker provides guarantees that the contacts on the list have actively agreed to receiving unsolicited messages by email from third parties.
As the Information Commissioners Office states, you also have a duty to make sure the addressee is given a valid address for opt-out requests (in every single message that you send them).
We’ll soon be sharing our top tips for building squeaky clean and powerful email lists, subscribe to our posts so that you don’t miss it.
1uella
2013-04-17 17:10:00
Skip Fidura had a great tip at a meeting yesterday: If you buy data and your data company doesn't ask you to send back any hard bounces, ISP complainers, unsubscribes, etc - they probably haven't asked the other people they have sold that data to, and therefore the data is probably not great.
1uella
2013-04-17 17:08:00
Thanks for this comment guys. Nice addition.
The Data Partnership
2013-04-08 13:54:00
Some valid comments, but our experience of customers using their existing databases, are that they are quite often poorly maintained and when companies embark on a marketing drive to contact existing, lapsed clients and new prospects, unless there is some pre-management and sortation of these lists, it often falls on deaf ears. If held records are not up to date, it is a waste of time and resource attempting to contact people that do not live/work at the address or telephone number recorded. We offer our clients a service which provides a full overview of their existing data set - which we audit clearly (and often at no cost) so that the accuracy and quality of their data is clear and unambiguous and explain exactly what the cost of correcting and appending will be. The upside potential can often be hugely beneficial from the first contact, especially when combined with the carbon savings of effective list management. With our own in-house call centres we are able to help companies to check and verify their own datasets with an experienced team. This provides the client with fresh fully updated in-house file to further target their campaigns too and reduce the cost and overhead of doing in-house. We love DotMailer and use it in-house, but feel it worth mentioning that all the data we supply at The Data Partnership is fully opted-in and offers companies the chance to talk to potential consumers, those who do actually want to hear about better services or business offerings. Not all data suppliers are the same thedatapartnership.com
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