Is anybody buying email lists?

Problematic, difficult, and absolutely fraught with both legal and practical complications - some readily understandable and foreseeable and others very much less so.

Very rarely indeed. Not for most people who try it, but many people learn that only "the hard way".

I'd do more than that, I think: I'd urge you to stay away from it.

By understanding the key concept of email marketing, I think. Here it is: what makes it work is normally the existence of a trust-based relationship between the list-owner and subscribers: the fact that the subscribers voluntarily opted in to be on the list-owner's emailing list, because s/he was the person from whom they wanted to hear.

That doesn't exist, when you've bought the list.

That's among the reasons why no autoresponder service will allow you to upload a bought list and use it. (You can do it yourself, with a self-hosted one, but then it will be your own ISP and ESP service, your own hosting account, your own domain-name registration and so on, whose security you're putting in jeopardy if recipients hit the "spam" button in their email client software.

Email marketing is permission based, or it's nothing.

This very short, recent thread explains: http://www.warriorforum.com/email-ma...marketing.html

By becoming the person to whose list the potential customers choose to subscribe because you're the person from whom they want to receive email.

If you want a quick orientation in "the basics of email marketing" which will help you to understand why buying email lists is such a bad idea (I confess I'm astonished to find myself offering this to someone advertising a coaching service which apparently includes list-building?!?! ), these 6 threads will doubtless help you. Between them, they cover all the basics.

What are the essential things to know about list building?

Lists: How Long to Presell - Averages

Website or squeeze page

Where to get reports to give away on opt in page?

Autoresponders vs. Broadcasts

Sick of Emails Not Being Opened?

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i would rather buy solo ads and ad swap that go for buying email lists.

Hey Matt,

Hope you're doing well.

I actually have bought an email list in the past. I don't think buying email lists is bad, but how you use them will determine if it is bad or not.

There are many people who like to take the spammy approach and just send out tons and tons of clickbank offers while hoping for sales. . . this is NOT how I do it.

When I purchased a list, I first sent out a contact email without a link to attempt to establish a relationship with the lead and also, to get their PERMISSION to offer them a solution to the problem that they may be having.

Although I no longer buy email lists, I do not see anything wrong with it as long as you make contact with your prospects and attempt to start a GENUINE relationship with them that could very well turn into a partnership and them becoming a lifelong customer.

Hope this is helpful!

-Josh

buying is not good, you cant make money with it.

The money will always be in the relationship with the list.

Buying a list is a very cold approach, and one that
could get you in hot water with the ISP's.

Just don't do it.

I've used listjoe.com before and got some good responses.

I agree on the posts above. I can't seem to find something on email marketing. Solo ads would be great.

Actually, I love to building my own email list rather than buying from someone else. I can focus on my niche and the email marketing campaign will be more effective.

Hi Matt, When you buy Email lists off venders you will not find them targeted to your niche. The best way really is get a good solo ad provider & work on that.
Plus you can get them targeted to you niche.

I'd like to know more about that too!

@Matt Poc I'm just shaking my head a bit at these never-ever-email responses. To the shagrin of others, yes, buying the right list and sending the right offer using the right approach in the right (small) quantity (with follow-up) can be a very successful way to get leads and customers online. Unfortunately, I know how this subject is such a sore spot on this forum so I'm a bit reluctant to share details of the "how." I just wanted you to know that it is possible.

In my opinion you would be much better served by building your own list using various methods(FB, solo ads, etc.)

If you buy a email list, that thing could be a ticking time bomb. Old emails, spam traps... the list goes on.

I know it sounds appealing, especially to people starting out. But my opinion is to stay far away from lists like that. You will be better served building your own list (Not to mention the experience you get from it... you will be able to do it over and over again).

Hi Matt

This is a complicated question (believe it or not).

For many marketers, renting or buying an email list is taboo. They call it spam – which I guess it is because you would be using email to reach people who don’t know you and have never asked you to send them emails.

All of the major email service providers (Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, aWeber, etc.) prohibit the use of third party lists (because the spam reports will go toward them).

But there is a large segment of the business and sales population who use email lists unapologetically. They don’t see what the big deal is. Email is cheap so why not connect with people by email. If I get a spam complaint, so be it. It is just a numbers game.

I think this is an evolving issue. Even if you oppose it, you see so many people doing it, you wonder why bother follow the ethical rules? How many of us go over the posted speed limit because everyone is doing it?

The appeal of course is price. Email is cheap, pretty much free. However, the cost of an email list is often double the cost of the same direct mail list. List companies set their email list pricing higher to protect their direct mail lists.

Most of the companies selling email lists are simply brokers of demographic lists (often from the same original source). Demographic lists are never the best lists for any form of direct marketing.

Some of those companies will release the list to you leaving you to find your own server to send out the emails. Other companies are more protective of their lists and will only rent you the list if they deploy the email.

If you want something better than a demographic lists, find a publication that targets your audience and contact them about using their email lists. Not all of them will be open to it, but some will. These lists are better because they contain people who have actually subscribed to the publication. These publications will almost always require you to send your email through them.

Hope this helps.

Stay away from it ,it could leads you to big troubles, there are so many possibilities to build your own list very affordable ways. Have you tried solo ads ?
It`s a lot better option if you want to spend some money on it than purchasing a list from someone.

Once you gather your own list you can then offer someone to exchange solo ads so you both will build some more subscribers for free if you are in same niche.

To be honest, I'd say that it all depends on WHY someone is selling their list.

When I was really into website flipping, I'd essentially buy lists. But that's as part of the website, and I'd check out the list, see how "clean" it is (i.e. check it for bounces, and get an idea of response rate), and then I'd sell on the clean list.

But if someone is selling lists for a living, you need to ask yourself:

Where did they get the list?
Why are they selling it if it is profitable?
How many people are they selling this same list to?

And that's why I'd only buy a list as part of a website sale, because at least I can see a legitimate motive.

I'm sure there are other reasons.

E.g. I'm selling solo ads to lists of weight loss product buyers. I COULD just send them my own promotions, which would be way more profitable. But I'm not in the weight loss niche. But as soon as I do find a worthwhile product to sell, I'm gonna stop selling solos.

It's basically the same thing. You need to ask why someone would be selling a list, for a "one-time" hit, when they could be sending them multiple promotions for years to come.

Is it a terrible list? Are they selling it to loads of people? Is it even their list?

If you do it right, you can have massive success in it. The key is to research, research, research. Don't just throw your money at the first list you come across.



-Ed

I never bought a list, but what I'd suggest would be to start building your own.

As for buying a list, I'd ask the list owner to let me test it first. If the list is good, he shouldn't have any problem with that.

As someone says above, it's tricky. Be careful if you don't want to end with a few thousand unresponsive subscribers hitting spam all day long.

Take care,
Franck

Hi,

Has anyone used Add Blast? There seem to be a few companies that allow you to email once a day to their HUGE list.

Obviously, you would have to direct them to your landing page (they opt in, so not spamming) where you offer incentives for them to sign up. Follow that up with helpful emails with free gifts and after a few emails to them, start recommending products they could purchase.

I really look forward to hearing anyone's thoughts on this.


Thanks - Daniel

Just go the old fashioned way and build a list. Bought lists are not permission based and usually means trouble.

I've had success buying lists and profiting from them. You need to mail them and gather the openers/clickers. Then move those to a good IP or email service and that is your money list.

Don`t buy the lists, there are many ways to build list quite fast like for example buying media or solo ads if you want to see your list growing fast, If you can wait , there are also free methods, a lots of them.

If you lists will not be double opt-in aweber, getresponse and any other TOP service will ban your account very fast.

I would suggest you to build your own list from the beginning, once you have some subscribers you can use ad swaps in same niche to make your list grow for free.

Buying a list has too many legal complications. Try running a solo ad, it's essentially the same thing without the risk of legal issues imo.

I don't buy any email lists at all for email marketing. I advertise my opportunities in lists that are already established. What I mean is I do ezine advertising with solo ad providers whose list already is receptive to receiving home biz offers. The only times I have considered or compiled lists of phone numbers is when I have done postcard marketing in the mail, or I have done phone broadcasting.

Hello Matt,

What you need is a autoresponder, then a free offer such as a ebook with good info in it that relates to your niche you want to promote. Then you need to make a squeeze page for that ebook and make it very enticing. The traffic part of it is buying solo ads that also relates to your niche.

The free offer does not have to be a ebook can be a video or whatever as long it adds value for someone so they opt-in and become a subscriber of yours. Put yourself in there place and offer them what they want. Make money niche would be a good niche to consider but the niche you choose is up to you.

Buying a email list I believe is throwing away your money.

There are tonnes of people who sell lists out there, once you have a list the issue is actually mailing it succesfully.

1). You setup your own self hosted setup and then manage and run the reputation, warm the IP's up (hardly any SMTP providers like IM stuff)

2). You import the leads into a well known AR

BUT you need to make sure you double check the list and get it professionally cleaned so that you actually do inbox and won't face a tonne of other problems too.

Ive purchased many lists in the past from fellow marketers and companies and it does work!

Lewis

Good leads exist.
I sell offline and online exclusive IM leads
contact me and I can help you.

Buying an email list is probably one of the worse decisions you can make when marketing online. You do not want to be sending unsolicited emails to people who never opted in to your opt in form. Just a terrible idea, and also a big waste of money. Build a list from scratch through free and paid advertisement.

Don't buy email list ,Build it .

Quite a few people commenting in this thread who have clearly never purchased lists, don't know how to properly approach purchased leads, don't know how to mail purchased or rented lists, etc....

Find a reputable data vendor. Find a reputable data cleaner/scrubber. Get a decent mail setup. Have a proper "warm up" sequence in place for the leads and have a plan to promote either your services or others. There is gold in them hills, I promise.

Most people are just too scared to learn how to do this properly and go with the tried and true answer of, "Don't do it. It isn't worth it.", of course without having any proper experience with it themselves.

I would stay away from it and just use click banking ad swaps and solo ads.

Don't waste your money ..; Stay away from this unless it is a legit and well well known list with a clean opt-in and opt-out process.

But in 99.9% of the cases, stay away from this.

From my experience there is no point of buying list. Avarage Open Rate in case you will buy a list is about 12% but a conversion rate is often less than 1%.
It's a waste of money, unfortunately. How high was your conversion rate when you used a bought list?

Never buy emails from another user. They probably have either been over saturated already or the list may be over sold to others, meaning that the subscribers are getting spammed multiple times. Build your own list, be patient, and gain good customer relations with those subscribers.

A lot have marketers have mentioned here a very good point. If you buy a list you do not have any sort of relationship with that list. Which will most likely lead to a very unresponsive or even spam complaint list.

We all want a shortcut, but you gotta put in the work to build a nice responsive list.

its not legal to trade on email lists. but most of the junk i got in my personal email i never subscribe to them .. that mean our email add been sold every where.

lol same nonsense responses just like I outlined in my original posts

Typical for this forum unfortunately.

I highly recommend NO. Not just because it is not allowed to sell, but it doesn't work anyway. If it work, the seller will know how to use it

Buying lists are fine if you know what you are getting into.

From bought lists with aprox 40000 emails costing around $500. Excluding email software costs I've. Made around $10000 from it.

I bought email list from somewhere but do not find it so useful even though I bought it from a good agent. I do not think so buying data will help or one can use their own old data instead of buying from other companies.

So,
A lot of you are saying that building is much better than buying. Fair enough.
The thing is that I got hold of an entire database of 50k+ names, addresses, dob's, for "free" - basically I have to split the profit with the "seller". Everyone on the list has one common interest and it can be broken down to age groups.

Does anyone have a good idea on how to profit from the above without being flagged for spam?
Obviously I want to make the most out of it - sending out 50,000 individual e-mails is not very productive (or it could be, depending on the conversion)

I'm open to any new ideas as there are not many out there to chose from.
Cheers.

Lol these threads are going on since July, I doubt the author is even going through this now. Its filled with great info though!

List building is one of the best ways to run your online business. Just be careful... treat your list with respect. I have a list of 10k and if you play your cards right they would be worth around $1 a month EACH... You can do the math

I can elaborate a bit further on buying lists, as that is mainly all I have done for many many years.

I buy co-reg lists, because you can acquire huge lists cheap.

You will need your own servers, mail software and get IPs that you can ideally change out on a monthly basis if needed. This is because the potential for you IPs to become blocked, black listed, sbl'd exist and if this happens, you will need to swap them out. However, in some cases none of this matters. There are some domains that you can mail to that even if the IPs are blacklisted, sbl'd, etc... they will still accept the mail.

To lessen the chance of this happening, you can use data cleaners like impressionwise.com that will remove known complainers, traps, etc...

Most likely the majority of your mail is going to go in the junk folder. So response is not that great. This is why having a huge list is important...compensate for the lower response.

You want to send affiliate offers that have mass appeal. This will generate the highest response rate/$$$ possible, along with opens and clickers. Which you will want to collect all your opens and clickers.

You can then mail the opens/clickers and they will generate a much higher response/$$$ then your overall list, which you still continue to send to, to keep pulling out more opens/clicks. There are times I will send an offer that I know is probably only going to break even, because it's known to generate above average opens/clicks.

Obviously with all of this, you need to be can-spam compliant.

The above is a complete business in it's self and highly profitable. It's even possible to automate almost the whole thing. The only work I do at all is when I set up a new server or need to make a change to it. When I add a new offer or remove one. When I pull the new opens/clicks off the server and add them to the list. Other than this, everything runs 24/7 all on it's own.

If you want to take it even further, you can also start sending the opens/clicks to squeeze pages and opting them in to as many lists possible and then start sending to them on IPs that will inbox. Which becomes a completely new revenue stream. This is where all your skills as an email marketer come into play. Where with the co-reg your not trying to build relationships, create autoresponders, etc, etc, etc... all your doing is pounding out affiliate offers 24/7 to generate $$$, opens and clicks.

Building email list is taking too much time. But you can try to buy list from some guy who already has the list.
Thanks

Buying email is not better than build manually

LOL come on man don't you sell an awesome training course or WSO on list building? LOL

Maybe you are just trying to get some convo going.. i can tell you that if you have not tried buying a list you are not missing anything.

Even if your autoresponder lets you upload the list they will most likely scrub it removing over half the leads for being bad quality. and there is no way to buy a list without getting a bunch of fake or wrong emails. and even if you did buy them and were allowed to email them they would not know who you are and most likely treat you like spam.

The only real way is to cultivate a list from scratch.. but i think you knew that already... LOL

also I know of a way to get co-registration subscribers for .35 cents a piece - considering most SOLO ADS are 35 cents PER CLICK or higher, then getting a subscriber for only 35 cents is a STEAL! the best part about these co-reg leads is that they specifically subscribed to your offer - its not a blind co-reg where they dont know they subscribed to you - but one where the user must choose to subscribe to your offer.

The act of buying co-reg lists in itself, is not list building in the way everyone here looks at list building.

The way you really need to look at is... that it allows you to have your own cost effective (non targeted) traffic source. It's then comes down to how to best monetize / segment it.

Big mistake to buy email lists. First of, sending unsollicited emails is considered spamming. Spamming is illegal in many places. You run the risk of getting your website or business blacklisted as spam. If you are running affiliate programs, you run the risk of getting banned from those affiliate programs.
Bottom line: if you plan on running a successful and respected business, do NOT engage in spamming.

One note regarding spamming... with co-reg there is typically a statement that you will receive offers from 3rd parties. Granted some people don't realize this and cry spam or worse you have people that request info just so they can complain because anything other than double optin to them is spam. But your not spamming.

You get the list cleaned and set up and use your own mailing infrastructure and you will have little problems. It does take money to do, but it is very profitable. I typically make my money back on a list in under a week (I'm also cheap and refuse to pay outrageous prices). From that point on, my only cost is my infrastructure overhead.

But the reality is that this isn't for most people.

I am not a big fan of buying info off of internet or some guy, but if you desperately need it then approach the companies who do this and are more reliable. Please do not go towards Fiver and other similar crappy services.

If you get a list that is made up of people who want product x and you offer them product x then you wont get many complaints.

I made over $250k from the last list I bought, and 1/3 of that went to the guy who I bought the list from.

I am always looking for lists, so PM me if anyone has any that are investment (alternatives/stock markets/real estate) related.

Hello,

Most of our clients use purchased lists and we are providing them advise on how to do that correctly.

Most people dont know how to approach such leads in correct way.

First of all, dont buy aged data. Anything above 1 year old must have lot of bad addresses .

2ndly, we clean all data against our own scrub list that we have gathered over years. This cleans any bounces, traps complainers.

Next, be very careful about how you draft an email. Dont piss off people, be gentle, tell them why you are approaching them and give them option to opt out

Finally, keep an eye on complaints. A complaint rate of 0.1% is considered high. Stay under that radar and you will be just fine.

Before you buy any email list, you need to pay attention to the following:

1. Will you be getting direct email address or is it just generic, such as info@ or office@?
2. Same principle will apply for the phone numbers
3. How frequent is the database updated?
4. What is the bounce rate?
5. What happens if you find an invalid contact, will they get replaced?
6. Apart from person name, emails and phone numbers, what other fields are available?
7. Can you export the entire database in XL or you are only allowed to send email campaigns? Actually, you need to pay attention here, because if you cannot download the list in XL, it does not make sense to go ahead with the purchase.
8. Always ask for a demo or sample. A live demo will be better, as you can see in real time what this database is all about.

Bellow I have listed top three competitors:

1. GlobalDatabase - covers 195 countries, 42 industries. They will provide you with a direct email address and a phone numbers of you target audience and you can export the entire list in XL, at no extra cost. Requires a 12 months subscription.

2. Hoovers - they have been in business for many years, owns a database of 85 mil companies. You have limits in terms of data download and they will provide you with a direct email address only for USA. For the other countries, you will have a generic email, such as info@ or office@

3. Zoominfo - overall, a decent business directory. It provides direct contact details for companies in UK, USA, Australia and Canada only.

Yes, Lots of email list source available in market, But only few source provide genuine list.

Must ask for approx delivery rate before buy email list.

High delivery rate is very good for email marketing.

Why would you purchase a email list unless you know what is in the list No good having a diet website and purchase a list that has 50K people and only 10% want a diet Now if you can purchase a 10K diet list that would be better I have purchase lists in the past but never sold a dam thing Keep away Robert

I would rather build a list than buying one. Most lists for sales are not responding to cold email. You need time to make it hot. If you have the resources then you may try.

Buying lists are fine, if you are getting fresh email list.

Fresh email list is very good for email marketing. I am getting different countries fresh email list and getting good leads from the list.

pay attention to spam, because you don't have permission to write them

If you have money to build your list and want to avoid spam and scams, I would suggest solo ads as well. I saw this blog post about the most trustworthy solo ad sellers of 2016 (top ten) Traffic Tutor: Top 10 Trustworthy Solo Ad Sellers
I hope the info helps. Aaron Bradley on there gives a free 50 clicks if you refer someone and feel free to say I sent you if you choose him, but there are 9 others. I highly recommend the number one, she has good reviews off the charts, though she is a little pricier. Any of these can send you real people and you can have them optin on your page and promote to them legally. This may be a cheaper option as well. Hope it helps

Make sure the leads are fresh, up to date (preferable up to the last week or day before) and that you have full data (name, address, postal code, phone, email, etc). Without all of these 3 you could just be buying a spreadsheet that's been spammed hundreds of time already, plus if the data is full of blacklisted emails, you'll end up burning your server in minutes.
We can supply fresh email data if you need, targeted by geo and demographic, all users are 99% verified and fresh up until the day before, we also run offers on data and sending systems, ping if you need more info

Depends how many times was this list sold...
I am not fan of buying or selling list