Comments on: Purchased & Rented Email Lists Suck

By: melanie

melanie — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:02:27 +0000

Ben, I am very interested in this topic. We lease and sell commercial real estate, and we plan on purchasing your product to manage our e-mail campaigns. These will go to both existing clients, and potential clients. Much of our list has grown organically, from within, so we don’t anticipate complaints or issues with those people (possible opt-outs, but certainly not complaints). My question is, if we have a building for lease, do you really think it’s a bad idea to buy a list from a reputable company (e.g. Dun & Bradstreet) to target businesses located near that space, to let them know its available? I imagine residential brokers do this alot. Thanks for any insight.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:59:05 +0000

@Jay – If you purchase a quality, targeted email list, then use it to send one-to-one messages to prospects (from *your* own server or CRM) about your business, then meh—I can see some value there. Still wouldn’t do it, but to each his own. As an email marketing service provider, the problem we have w/purchased lists is if you try to send a mass email to all of the recipients at once. That’s spam. To clarify, when we say that we have a price plan for 50,000 emails, that means if you have a list of 50,000 opt-in addresses, this will be the charge for uploading and managing in MailChimp. We’re not actually providing any lists (that’s against our terms of use, and more importantly, something we’re vehemently opposed to).

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:44:22 +0000

Disagree in some respect. I bought a list earlier this year and it paid for itself 100 fold. You cant throw out the idea all together of buying a list. In general, yes, buying a list of 10,000 random people will likely result in your emails being tossed into spam Heaven. However… the more specific you can get with your list and smaller coverage area, depending on your business, there is a greater possibility for you to reach people that might have heard about you or the type of service you offer but have never made contact with you and will open your mail… and thus a connection has been made. I am not in the business of selling or not selling lists… I am sure the guys that sell lists have numbers and blogs and all sorts of info to persuade you otherwise too. I guess I wont use mailchimp to send my lists..also…i noticed the mailchimp plan for 50,000 plus emails. Are these organic lists?

By: Wanna Kill Your Business? Buy An Email List | Lost in Translation

Wanna Kill Your Business? Buy An Email List | Lost in Translation — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:34:07 +0000

[...] Purchased & Rented Email Lists Suck [...]

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:41:48 +0000

Generally speaking, our spam complaint threshold is about the same or slightly more strict than the ISPs’. So about one complaint per thousand recipients is acceptable.

By: Shannon

Shannon — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:40:45 +0000

What is your spam complaint tolerance rate? My list is complete opt-in too, but I still have some folks using the “Report Spam” button.

“How do we know they’re getting all these complaints? Because AOL sends our Abuse Desk an email alert, every single time an AOL user clicks that “Report Spam” button for a campaign that came from our system. We monitor those complaints across all user accounts. If anyone exceeds a certain threshold, we send a warning, investigate the account, and take any necessary precautions to prevent blacklisting and to protect the deliverability of our system.”

By: Elliott

Elliott — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:59:10 +0000

We sell a pile-em-high, sell-em-cheap e-commerce system. Back in the days before spam was the problem it is now, shortly after the web was invented, I wrote a script to harvest email addresses from web sites with order forms but no online purchasing facilities. We then emailed them to sell them our product. We did lots of tests with different wordings and subject lines. We learnt a lot about what kinds of subject lines get opened (or did in those days)…

And the upshot of all this? Not only did we not sell any product but we got hate mail too.

These days we put a lot of effort into helping our clients avoid having their email addresses spam harvested. We’ve joined the good guys!

By: Touché

Touché — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:18:26 +0000

@purchasing email lists is not bad idea
You’re making yourself (and your company too, which you linked to) look very bad. The article above just smashed to pieces, burnt to ashes and buried on the moon the point that you’re still trying to push through.
Ignore the ignorant troll though. I replied so you don’t have to.

By: purchasing email lists is not bad idea

purchasing email lists is not bad idea — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:20:12 +0000

From the admin: I’m approving this “counterpoint” from the nameless individual, because I think it only proves my point.

No, i don’t agree purchasing email lists or rented email lists is bad idea, email marketing is booming on internet and getting better results, number of internet user is increasing and very one are having multiple emails, and they are very much interested to get any information in there inbox.

By: shahz

shahz — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:04:43 +0000

I just got across your site and I have to say, you guys are by far the best..indeed, purchsed mail lists suck and a cheap trick to spam innocent people..I bet in the test that those guys ran, the 0.3% response rates came from people who didn’t know much about the email they recieved and just clicked it because they saw it in their inbox. Count that out, and the rate will be even lower..perhaps 0% at all..Personally, I just mark the email as spam when I get something from someone I dont know..You guys are pioneers of mail system as far as I can see your system..Can’t wait to get a hold of your system one day..You have a very bright future..Keep up the good work and keep us posted with these useful posts..

Regards,
shahz