Contestant: Alex, I’ll take Bad Business Decisions for $600.
Alex Trebek: Answer: Renting an email list
Contestant: What is “How can a business increase its spam reports?”
Alex Trebek: Correct!
Are you playing games with your marketing efforts? Renting an email list could be putting your business in “Jeopardy!”
It’s true that email marketing performs better when you have a larger list. If you simply look at your current conversion rate, you’d be tempted to think that if your list was bigger, your conversion number would be bigger. But numbers alone don’t always guarantee success. It’s the quality behind those numbers that matter.
While some list providers might promise that their lists are hand picked for your target market, renting a list can cause more harm than good. Think of it as someone promising a get-rich-quick offer. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Most rented lists are filled with old or non-existent email addresses. If the addresses are good, many email providers will flag your email and send it directly to the recipient’s spam folder.
Email marketing is most effective when you have built a relationship with your audience. Renting the list takes the relationship out of the equation. When the recipient has no familiarity with you, your company or your product or services, you are just another email that came to them from out of the blue. And with the volume of emails being sent, there is a good chance they will delete your email or worse yet, mark it as spam. Too many complaints can ruin your reputation and that of your email service provider.
Email marketing is based on permission and when you rent a list, you simply don’t have permission. Almost all email service providers, including Boomerang, forbid buying email addresses to use in their systems. By buying a list, you’re risking losing your email marketing service access.
The size of your list doesn’t matter; if most recipients aren’t opening, reading or clicking through, what good does a large number do? When you build a list the organic way, you will be rewarded with a higher response rate. And that’s the real number that matters.
Remember, slow and steady, wins the race. Leave the beat-the-clock methods for television game shows.
