Should I Buy a List Just to Kick Off My Email Marketing?

If you are an online marketer, then you have probably heard that you can purchase email list packages, a list of email addresses that belong to people interested in your niche that you can promote your products to. And considering how profitable email marketing can be, the temptation to purchase email list packages might be pretty hard to resist. But you might want to!

When trying to build an email list, it might seem like a good idea to just buy a list and call it a day. It might be an easy way to build your list but is it a good idea? If you need an email list, there’s two available options, you can buy a list or build your own. There are several companies offering email list, however this is a rather harmful strategy. This is a result of the fact that when you choose to buy a list, you risk the value of a list. It’s better to have a smaller list consisting of quality subscribers than to have a large list that didn’t sign up.

Quality email lists are usually not the ones you can buy online. Why not? Well, can you really trust the person that is telling you that the emails they are selling you are of people genuinely interested in e.g. gardening or whatever other topic you are involved with?

Here are a few reasons not to purchase an email list to kick off your email marketing

The foundation of successful email marketing is permission marketing. Most people get annoyed when they receive unsolicited email messages, especially if the purpose of those messages is to try to sell something to them. On the other hand, when a subscriber opts in to a mailing list, they do so knowing they will be receiving email messages, some of them promotional in nature. So, in a way, they are giving an advertiser permission to make sales pitches to them.

When you purchase email list packages, the person selling them to you might promise that the leads on the list have given such permission. But there is really no way for you to know for sure. And worst yet, you may not be interested into what you have to offer. And really why go through all of that when you can learn to build list the right way, and you can learn how to for free. When it comes right down to it, you would be better off generating leads yourself. Giving in to the temptation to purchase email list packages might sound like a good idea. But, in the long run, it can do your business, and your profits, more harm than good.

Who really knows where the list came from as well as who knows how fresh the email addresses are? Email addresses can come from anywhere. They can be taken off old lists floating about, or they can come from an attendance list at a conference. Has anyone ever asked you if they can add your email to a list for the purpose of spam? Email addresses can be plucked out of the air without you even knowing it and that is straight out of Email List Building 101.

Most of the time, when you buy an email list from someone, you won’t be able to do much to check out just how legit the leads are, no matter what guarantees the seller gives you. After all, how can you be sure of how the seller got the email addresses on the list, how they made sure the leads are people who care one way or another about your niche? This is just one of the areas in which generating your own leads has an advantage. Unlike when you purchase email list packages, you know where the leads you generate yourself came from. And, if subscribers sign up for your mailing list in order to receive a free report or recourse in your niche, you know they are interested in that niche, and are more likely to buy the products you promote.

Another reason that purchased email lists do not work, is that the people you contact using these lists, do not know you, are not expecting to hear from you, have not given you, personally, permission to contact them and thus will most likely not recognize you, trust you, or click your email (if it even reaches their inbox and is not weeded out by the increasingly effective spam detectors). Furthermore, what you are doing is called ‘spamming’ and, guess what, it’s illegal!

So what happens if you buy that list and end up with who knows who on that list. You send out a message to the list and find out a lot of them bounce for various reasons. Others, in an effort of cutting down on spam, will report your email as spam to their email provider, and before you know it you are labeled the king of spam. That could cause your ISP to block your email address from ever travel the Internet again. It makes it hard to work online and build an email list with no email.

Purchasing an email list for list building does not allow you to build a relationship with your list. The people on the bought email list have no idea who you are or why you are even contacting them. The chance that more than a handful even has an interest in what you have to offer is pretty low. When the unsuspecting get that email about your offer, there is no bond and no loyalty, so the delete button gets more exercise and there is always the possibility for your email being reported as spam.

Now you have learnt things to not out purchase. Only with the right techniques, you will be able to save your time and effort in email list building and successfully build a highly responsive and profitable list.