Buying an email list: A case study
Should you buy a list of email addresses?
In the last 13+ years of doing this, the conversation about whether to buy an email list, or how to use one that’s already been bought, comes up fairly often.
Now, I’m go to start by saying that if you’ve not yet bought it, DON’T.DO.IT.
And then in a moment I’m going to share two little case studies that illustrate why from two very different perspectives.
So why shouldn’t you buy an email list?
Well. Here are just a few of the reasons (there are more).
Despite any claims made by the seller, I have never yet seen one that wasn’t out of date and full of invalid email addresses.
Unless those invalid emails are identified and pulled out before that email list goes anywhere near Mailchimp, it often causes an Omnivore account warning and instructions to take the data back out again, and your account goes on a radar for questionable inactivity which becomes a pain.
And if you are fortunate enough to get past Omnivore and actually send an email to the purchased list, you’ll find that people do not respond well to unsolicited emails. Engagement is always incredibly low. You’ll get a high bounce rate, a high unsubscribe rate (very likely well above the tolerated level) and abuse reports, all of which will damage your sender reputation, potentially cause blacklisting, and affect your future emails reaching inboxes.
An email address is never just going to be on the list that YOU have purchased. Multitudes of other businesses (legitimate or otherwise) have bought the same list. And that means everyone on that list is getting umpteen emails from people they’ve never heard of. So they’re a) sick of it and b) ignoring them all. Your (hopefully) well-constructed email that has taken time and energy to prepare WILL be lost among the other rubbish.
And the elephant in the room is of course GDPR. You do not have the permission of the people on that list to hold or use their contact details. The only time this is not in question is if they are business email addresses and already in the public domain. And that still doesn’t make it right.
Little case study #1 - Buying data and what happened next
A relatively new client of mine, a fairly large non-profit but not necessarily a household name, bought a list recently (before we were working together) of 103,000 business contacts in the public domain.
They asked me to help with sending a short campaign series to them with the goal of inviting them to subscribe to their main mailing list, using the incentive of a very high quality and relevant lead magnet.
First-off, I gave them general advice around it not being a good idea and to manage their expectations. But that if they were going to do it, it should be in a certain way to minimise damage and maximise return.
Second-off, I advised that the list had to be validated before it could go anywhere near Mailchimp.
Of the 103k contacts on the email list they bought, here are the results of the validation:
26k didn’t even have an email address
Over 75k weren’t valid. These included oodles that just no longer exist. Others were spam-traps, others were known abuse reporters, lots didn’t belong to a person and were simply shared mailboxes e.g. accounts@ sales@ office@.
By the time we’d removed all of those, we were left with a list of workable email list 35k-ish (from the 103k records they’d actually paid for).
I advised a different approach to capturing and processing unsubscribers to avoid triggering the 0.3% threshold.
We sent a carefully crafted multivariate campaign, initially to a sample of 3x3,000 contacts. The CTA was to complete a simple form which led to them getting a VERY good and relevant e-book that was perfect for the target audience, and also added them to the client’s newsletter (again, very relevant for the target audience).
After making some tweaks to the submission form to reduce drop-off at that point, we sent the “winning” combination to the remaining 26k+ contacts and have since sent a further email, with a short but clear introduction of who the organisation is (which gave marginally better results).
Of the 35,000+ people who received the emails, here are the results so far:
50 submissions (people who downloaded of the ebook and subscribed). Yes 50. Out of 35,000.
4.1% unsubscribe rate. The tolerated industry level is 0.3%. VERY fortunately, the vast majority of those unsubscribers had used our workaround process, meaning that their unsubscribe was actually seen by the ISPs as a “positive click” (helping their sender reputation), and the official unsubscribe link only produced 0.3%.
So by the time we’d taken into account the cost of the original list, the time taken to validate the list, the cost per head of the emails that were left, the time spent on doing the whole campaign, the increase in Mailchimp fees etc etc, was 50 conversions worth it?
If they’d been selling a high value product and these were sales averaging over x maybe yes, but in this case (as in the majority), no. It doesn’t take a genius to see the answer to that.
And had we not validated the data and used the unsubscribe workaround, not only would this campaign not have generated results, but it would actually have caused damage to their sender reputation and possibly blacklisting, which could have issues for them across all of their email comms for a long time.
Little case study #2 - Being on a list that is sold
Much to my delight, despite being very small fry in the grand scheme of things I also appear to be on a list of data that is being merrily sold to companies offering websites, SEO services, business loans, energy switching, and ironically, selling lists of email addresses.
In the last 7 days, I have received 53 unsolicited emails from people and companies I have never heard of offering similar services. I move every single one to my spam folder without even looking at it. If they catch me at a bad moment I also report them. Most of them are broadly the same, if there are any that aren’t I haven’t bothered to look to find out. I don’t notice their well-crafted (or otherwise) subject lines or what the email says. They are all annoying. They will NEVER lead me to buy something.
Even if I was about to go out in the torrential rain and dark to buy a bottle of wine after a very long day, if a stranger knocked on the door as I was putting my raincoat on trying to sell me wine, I’d still say no and go to the little Tescos. Wouldn’t you?
The fact is, I don’t know them and my brain is programmed to not trust strangers, let alone annoying ones. And especially if I’ve just had 52 other strangers knock on my door in the last week trying to sell me something. No matter how nice, decent and genuine person #53 is and how wonderful their wine is, they’re likely to be told to bugger off and have the door soundly slammed in their face.
I suppose this all comes back to the message I harp on about regularly - behind every single email address is a real person. Try not to irritate them.
So the (multilingual) answer to whether you should buy an email contact list is…
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