To Buy or Not to Buy an Email List for Sale

Considering how easy it is to get your hands on an email list for sale it’s quite tempting to go down that road for many individuals and businesses. However, if you don’t know by now than it’s time to figure it out: buying an email list can have serious consequences in terms of the effectiveness of your campaign, the reputation of your company and your standing with Uncle Sam.

Before you make the leap and acquire an email list for sale, consider these points.

• Reason to buy: You quickly get a huge email list.
• Reason not to buy: Having a large permission based email marketing list is one thing, but purchasing a large list is a completely different story. Yes, you have your hands on tons of email addresses, but how many of them are even active? More importantly, how many of them are even remotely interested in any of the products or services that you’re offering? But make it even simpler on yourself, how many unsolicited emails from unknown sources do you respond positively to?

• Reason to buy: People think all emails are SPAM anyway.
• Reason not to buy: This is a misconception, because highly targeted permission based email marketing lists are not mistaken for SPAM. It’s your job as the person in charge of your email campaigns to ensure that your messages are received by interested parties that can recognize you and your messages.

• Reason to buy: There’s no other effective way to build an email list.
• Reason not to buy: It’s true, there are hardly any other ways to gather email addresses besides using an email list for sale. Besides acquiring targeted prospects from your website by offering tips, coupons, promotions, guides, reviews and other useful content, from your physical storefront, from conferences and tradeshows, from local community events, from your colleagues and their acquaintances… and anywhere else you can think of. Besides all of those, you’re right, there is no other way.

• Reason to buy: Time is money, and purchasing an email list for sale is better than spending the time to build a list.
• Reason not to buy: Sure, time absolutely is money. But you know what else equals money? Money! As in, if your massive, untargeted and uninterested email list doesn’t buy anything, you made no money. As in, a small, highly qualified list of prospects can easily be converted into customers and sales, putting money straight into your pocket. Which sounds better to you?

This isn’t even touching on the legality or morality of the issue. Putting all of these hefty matters aside, it still hardly makes sense to purchase an email list for sale. Permission based email marketing is the only way to safely and effectively conduct your email campaigns, and that’s the bottom line.

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