Summary
The question of whether to use purchased email lists is a recurring one in the email marketing community. While the allure of quickly expanding your reach is strong, the consensus from industry experts, experienced marketers, and official documentation overwhelmingly points to this practice being highly detrimental to email deliverability and overall business health.
Key findings
- Deliverability impact: Sending to purchased lists almost guarantees poor deliverability, with emails frequently landing in spam folders or being blocked entirely. This leads to a low email deliverability rate.
- Reputation damage: High bounce rates, spam complaints, and hitting spam traps inherent in purchased lists severely damage your sender reputation and IP address.
- Legal and compliance risks: Many purchased lists lack proper consent, violating regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM, leading to potential fines and legal issues.
- Poor ROI: Despite the upfront cost, purchased lists rarely yield positive returns due to low engagement and high unsubscribe rates, making them a poor investment.
Key considerations
- Build organically: Focus on permission-based list building through sign-up forms, content marketing, and lead magnets for sustainable growth. Mailchimp highlights reasons to never buy email lists.
- Prioritise engagement: Engaged subscribers are key to good deliverability. Purchased lists generally consist of unengaged contacts who never opted in.
- List hygiene: Regularly clean your email lists to remove inactive subscribers, bounces, and potential spam traps.
- Recovery strategy: If you have used a purchased list, understand the steps needed to recover email deliverability.
What email marketers say
Email marketers often face pressure to achieve rapid growth, which can make purchasing email lists seem like an attractive shortcut. However, those with experience in the field consistently share a strong warning against this practice, having witnessed its negative repercussions firsthand on campaigns and sender reputation.
Key opinions
- Damaged reputation: Marketers frequently report that using purchased lists immediately leads to poor domain and IP reputation. This makes it difficult to reach inboxes even with legitimate emails in the future.
- Low engagement: The contacts on purchased lists have not opted in to receive your emails, resulting in exceptionally low open and click rates, and high unsubscribe rates. Twilio elaborates on why buying email lists harms deliverability.
- Wasted resources: The time, effort, and money spent on sending to purchased lists are often wasted, as these campaigns rarely convert and can lead to account suspension by ESPs.
- Spam trap exposure: Marketers quickly learn that purchased lists are riddled with spam traps, which are designed to identify senders of unsolicited email, causing severe blocklistings.
Key considerations
- Consent is king: Focus on building a list of subscribers who have explicitly given permission to receive your emails. This ensures higher engagement and avoids compliance issues.
- Segment your audience: Even with legitimate lists, proper segmentation and personalization are crucial for maximizing engagement and avoiding emails going to spam.
- Understand the risks: Before considering a purchased list, marketers should fully grasp the risks and downsides of cold emailing to avoid severe deliverability consequences.
- Alternative acquisition: Explore legitimate strategies like content upgrades, social media promotions, and lead generation campaigns to build high-quality lists.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks notes that a common resource, a Mailchimp webpage designed to dissuade users from buying email lists, appears to have been taken down. This suggests a potential shift in Mailchimp's public-facing strategy on the topic, though their stance likely remains unchanged.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks observes that despite the original Mailchimp resource being removed, a similar unofficial page has emerged, reinforcing the consistent industry message against using purchased lists. This demonstrates the ongoing need for clear guidance on this topic.
What the experts say
Email deliverability experts universally condemn the use of purchased email lists. Their perspectives are rooted in a deep understanding of how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and anti-spam systems evaluate sending practices and sender reputation. They emphasize the long-term, often irreversible, damage that can result from such a shortcut.
Key opinions
- Catastrophic reputation harm: Experts agree that sending to purchased lists is one of the fastest ways to destroy a sender's reputation, leading to severe blocklisting and even domain blacklisting across major ISPs.
- Spam trap activation: Purchased lists are notorious for containing various types of spam traps, which are traps designed to catch spammers. Hitting these traps can immediately trigger severe penalties.
- Undermining authentication: Even with perfectly configured DMARC, SPF, and DKIM, poor sending practices with purchased lists will still lead to deliverability failure.
- Costly recovery: Recovering from the reputation damage caused by purchased lists is a lengthy and challenging process, often requiring a complete rebuild of sending practices.
Key considerations
- Long-term strategy: Experts advocate for a long-term approach to list building, focusing on quality subscribers over quantity, which is crucial for a healthy email domain reputation.
- Proactive monitoring: Regularly monitor your sending reputation and blocklist status to catch and address issues before they escalate.
- Compliance as a foundation: Adhering to anti-spam laws and respecting user consent is not just a legal requirement but a fundamental aspect of good deliverability.
- Educate stakeholders: Educate sales and marketing teams on the severe risks of purchased lists to prevent misguided attempts at quick growth.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks highlights that purchased lists almost always contain spam traps, leading to instant reputation damage. They emphasize that even a single hit can severely compromise future deliverability, making it a high-risk endeavor.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks emphasizes that high bounce rates from purchased lists signal poor quality to ISPs, thereby reducing inbox placement across all campaigns. This negative signal can take a long time to mitigate and recover from.
What the documentation says
Official documentation from major Email Service Providers, anti-spam organizations, and regulatory bodies consistently and unequivocally advises against the use of purchased email lists. Their guidelines are designed to maintain the health of the email ecosystem and protect senders from severe deliverability issues and legal penalties.
Key findings
- Terms of service violations: Most ESPs explicitly prohibit sending to purchased, rented, or scraped email lists in their terms of service. Violation typically leads to account termination.
- High complaint rates: Documentation highlights that recipients on purchased lists are highly likely to mark emails as spam, which negatively impacts your sender score and deliverability.
- Legal non-compliance: Official guidelines emphasize that lack of explicit consent from purchased list recipients can result in breaches of anti-spam laws like CAN-SPAM and GDPR, leading to significant fines.
- Ineffective marketing: Documentation often points out that purchased lists comprise unengaged or irrelevant contacts, making marketing efforts ineffective and providing a poor email deliverability rate.
Key considerations
- Adhere to ESP policies: Always review and comply with your Email Service Provider's acceptable use policy regarding list acquisition. Campaign Monitor outlines why purchased email lists are a huge no-no.
- Focus on consent: Documentation stresses the importance of obtaining clear, explicit consent from every subscriber. This is the foundation of good email marketing.
- Maintain list hygiene: Regularly clean your lists to remove invalid addresses and unengaged subscribers, as recommended by leading email documentation.
- Understand the ecosystem: Familiarise yourself with how email blacklists actually work and the impact of poor sending practices on sender reputation.
Technical article
Mailchimp documentation outlines that using purchased lists violates their terms of service, leading to account suspension. They state that such lists generate high bounce and complaint rates, which harm their network and other senders.
Technical article
Twilio documentation states that sending to purchased or rented email lists is a major cause of deliverability issues, including being blocklisted. They emphasize the importance of permission-based marketing for maintaining a healthy sending reputation.
Related resources
13 resources
Related pages
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