In my last post I told you the importance of giving value as a key factor to implement a successful email marketing program. The other key factor is building a list of qualified subscribers who give us their permission to send them the campaigns. This is always a difficult and slow process that a lot of people want to skip. These people want to take the shortcut, and buy a third party email list or directly go to the Yellow pages to gather emails and send them promotional campaigns with no value at all. Obviously that is not a good idea, for different reasons:
- Unqualified leads
- Devalues your brand
- Disingenuous relationship with customer (what would the email say? “Hello! You don’t know me, but I bought your email…”)
Buying a contacts list wont get us anywhere. Someone with a high quality list will take care of it and tightly control that it is not abused with a lot of promotional emails. For that reason, when someone is selling you an email list (remember that he is selling it to everybody who is paying for it) 99 times out of 100 you are getting a spam list. That’s a list of addresses of people who have not agreed to receive messages like yours, or who are on a list that’s been blasted to uselessness by other mailers.
So when you see offers like 1 million addresses for 100$ you better ignore it if you don’t want to lose your money and harm the image of your company.
As someone who has purchased email lists (both for B2C and B2B) and has had success, I have to disagree with your post. If the proper planning is done (what are your goals, who is your target audience…), it can be an effective way to reach objectives.
The key to purchasing lists with success-TARGET! Understanding and finding the audience who has an interest in your product and/or service.
Once you’ve tackled that, then you have to come up with effective messaging and offers that resonate with them. A direct marketing campaign has many facets.