Buying Email Lists: A Recipe for Disaster

A good mailing list helps you promote your brand effectively, so one might think that buying an email list is a sure way to boost your business. However, this is a very bad idea, even if it may seem enticing in the short term. You'll definitely run into legal and technical issues with purchased email lists, so you should avoid them. A healthier alternative is building an organic email list to interact with engaged customers.

This article will explain why buying email lists is not advisable and outline the recommended practices for building your own list.

Email lists for marketing

An email list is a collection of email addresses you send messages to. The owners of these email addresses willingly give their contacts to you and agree to receive regular promotional emails. For instance, if you run a clothing store, you can email subscribers about hot sales and new product arrivals.

Building a mailing list from scratch can be challenging, and some marketers consider buying or trading existing lists to bypass this challenge. However, this deceptively easy option eventually leads to terrible consequences.

The pitfalls of purchased email lists

Buying email lists is a terrible idea for several reasons:

1. Shady practices

The practice of gathering and selling email lists is already dubious. Most firms that sell email lists use shady practices, such as harvesting emails on the web or even buying information from hackers.

Purchasing an email list and sending messages to it involves you in these shady practices. Sending marketing emails without permission from recipients constitutes spam, which most countries penalize severely. For example, the United States CAN-SPAM Act imposes fines of up to $51,744 per individual spam email. Canada, Australia, and many other countries impose similar financial penalties for sending unsolicited emails.

Unsolicited emails also violate the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and violators can be fined up to €20 million or 4% of their annual global turnover, whichever is higher. This high penalty is enough reason to avoid purchasing email lists.

2. Poor return on investment

Purchased mailing lists have a poor ROI for an obvious reason: you’ll be messaging people who indicated no interest in your product. They didn’t give you their email address, meaning they won’t be receptive to your messages. A significant percentage of recipients will unsubscribe or report you for spam.

You'll likely never recoup the funds you’ve spent on a mailing list.

3. Bad reputation

Buying email lists will harm your domain and IP reputation. If people continually report your unwanted emails as spam, your domain and IP will likely be added to a blocklist. Being on a blocklist means all messages from your domain will be automatically bounced back, even if they contain important information.

Many mailbox services and anti-spam software providers also have spam traps, i.e., email addresses that don’t belong to real people but are instead created to detect spammers. These spam traps are posted on public websites but hidden inside the code. Email list sellers then scrape these websites, unknowingly adding spam traps to their list. If you send messages to spam traps, email service providers will detect it and blacklist you.

Effective alternative: Building your own list

Buying email lists for marketing is not an option. The effective alternative is to build your own audience. Nurturing your list is better for these reasons:

1. Increased engagement

Maintaining your own mailing list means interacting with the perfect audience for your products. People who willingly add their email addresses to your list have signaled that they like your content and want to receive further messages from you. You’ll get higher engagement and conversion rates when you market your products to this audience.

In contrast, sending emails to purchased lists doesn’t result in meaningful engagement. You’re far more likely to get a spam complaint than a paying customer.

2. Long-term customer relationships

Genuinely interested subscribers become long-term customers if you keep promoting your products and services to them. Every addition to your organic email list represents someone who might stick with your brand in the long term and lead to recurring sales. Even if you pause your efforts to get new subscribers, promoting products to your existing loyal audience will likely yield solid results.

Strategies for organic list growth

You’ve learned why building an organic mailing list is the best choice. Now, let’s examine the strategies for growing organic email lists:

1. Write informative content

Your website’s quality determines whether a visitor is willing to subscribe to get more content. Hence, you must provide valuable content that readers enjoy enough to add their email addresses to your list.

Your articles should be informative and factual. Dive deep into the topic and answer the user’s query. If the article is getting too long, use images or videos to illustrate your point.

The ideal way to write informative content is to find out what your target audience is searching for and publish posts that answer their questions. Let’s say you’re targeting fitness-inclined people in the United States. Tools like Google Trends or Semrush will help you research relevant queries from this audience.

To demonstrate, we ran a Google Trends query to see the most popular keywords in the Beauty & Fitness niche over the past 12 months (up to June 2024). We found that "nails," "tattoo," "perfume," "face," and "shampoo" were the leading search queries over the past year. Hence, if you run a fitness blog for a U.S. audience, focusing on these topics will yield more organic traffic.

We also queried Google Trends to see which keywords were rising sharply in the Beauty & Fitness niche and got the following results. As shown, “Sephora,” “Muscle,” and “Job” were among the fastest-growing search topics in this niche. It’ll be wise to publish posts related to these topics to take advantage of their growing popularity.

Trends change rapidly, so you can’t just research once and call it a day. You must constantly monitor search trends and adapt to the rapid changes in your niche, focusing on new topics that grow in popularity.

Blog posts aren’t the only type of informative content. You can also host webinars with your audience to interact with them directly and discuss relevant topics. Likewise, you can write e-books filled with accurate, relevant information. The more valuable your content is, the more traffic you’ll attract, and some readers will sign up on your mailing list form to receive more content in their inboxes.

2. Use lead magnets

A lead magnet is a marketing term for a free item you give away in exchange for contact details. In this case, you can offer a gift to every person who subscribes to your email list. Many news sites and blogs do this creatively, where their articles are locked behind a paywall, but users can subscribe to unlock the paywall. It can also be a trial subscription, consultation, virtual item, discount, or anything that entices someone to sign up for your mailing list.

You should combine a lead magnet with an effective landing page that will attract new subscribers. The landing page should have a compelling headline, high-quality imagery, a call-to-action button, and an opt-in form for the visitor to add their email address to your list.

Landing page headlines should be precise in what you offer, e.g., "20% discount," "free article," "free item," etc. The idea is to state your value proposition concisely so that the visitor knows what they’re getting. Vague headlines confuse readers and reduce the chances of converting them to subscribers.

The email sign-up form should be well-designed and match other visual elements on your website. It should be easy to spot and have a clear call-to-action button like “Subscribe now,” “Join our mailing list,” “Become a subscriber,” etc.

3. Social media promotion

Social media is an effective way to garner more email subscribers. You can promote your mailing list on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other popular platforms, encouraging followers to subscribe to your email list. The key is providing valuable social media content that will make people want more from you. People who like your social media content can subscribe to your mailing list and help you build a more engaged audience.

4. Use a reliable email service provider

No matter how fine-tuned your email list growth strategy is, it’s futile if you choose an unreliable email service provider (ESP). You need an ESP that makes it easy to manage your mailing lists and delivers your emails promptly.

Choose a reputable ESP with no history of shady practices. The platform should be reliable, easy to use, and cost-effective. Luckily, you have that in UniOne, the email delivery system you can always rely on. We provide a cost-effective API to send transactional and marketing emails and build productive relationships with your audience. Check out our email marketing platform today.

Conclusion

Buying email lists is a big no-no. Instead, focus on building an organic list of highly engaged subscribers. We’ve outlined why buying email lists is never advisable and why building organic lists is the best option. We’ve also explained how to build email lists for marketing from legitimate sources. Follow our tips to boost your email marketing prowess.