One of many challenges faced by email marketers is list growth. It is a long, slow, thankless process and many people can be tempted by shortcuts such as purchasing lists of email addresses. Unfortunately, the bottom line is that email list acquisition is ineffective and can cost you your hard earned sender reputation with the ISPs.
There are two different methods of list acquisition, rental and purchase.
List rental is the more legitimate of the two methods. It involves paying a fee to a list owner or agency for them to broadcast your campaign to their database. You don’t actually receive the data, only the people that click through and shop or register with you.
While list rental is often legitimate, it is often very costly with fees up to £200.00 per thousand email addresses broadcast. Also it has the potential to yield very poor return on investment. If a company is renting their list on a weekly basis, then it is highly unlikely that they will be generating good revenues from every campaign.
List purchase would be where you pay a fee to obtain a database that you can then send unlimited emails to with no recurring fees. Any owner of a good quality list that generates high returns is extremely unlikely to want to sell it on. Any sold lists generally will be of poor quality and lack the requisite permissions for re-sale.
It would be advised to avoid list rental due to the high investment with potentially low return. List purchase can affect your sender reputation by having you added to blacklists, business reputation and even see you receiving fines from the Information Commissioner.
