Trust the list broker

Over the years I’ve worked with companies who admit to me that they’ve purchased data at one point or another. Let’s face it, as bad a practice as it is, people and companies still think they can succeed in email marketing with purchased lists.
As part of the cleanup process, I start to ask questions about the list. Who did you buy it from? How were the addressees collected? Are these addresses shared with others? What did the seller tell you about the list.
Thief.
Clients are rarely able to tell me about where the addresses are collected or if they’re shared.
It’s amazing to me how many companies choose to outsource the creation of such a valuable asset. They don’t know anything about it, but it’s a huge asset and so important they won’t let go when it doesn’t work.
Some of it is the sunk cost fallacy. But I think in some cases my clients don’t really believe the person who sold them the list wasn’t truthful. They really believe there is value in the list, if they can only unlock it.
Companies selling lists don’t really have any incentive to spend time or money making sure they have permission or that the lists are good. That’s just expense to them and returns no value. The value is in the number of addresses they can sell, not in the number of responsive addresses.
How many companies buy a list and immediately take it to a list cleansing service? Why should they? Shouldn’t the company SELLING the list make sure they’re selling deliverable addresses? Shouldn’t the seller spend the money for verification?
The very fact that so many companies believe they need to clean a purchased list speaks to the horrible quality of purchased lists. And, yet, companies are addicted to the idea of purchasing lists. They trust that the addresses are collected in a permission based manner. They believe when sellers tell them the addresses are good and valid – even when they see that 10 or 20 or 30% of the list is cleaned off by the list services.
List sellers won’t do the cleaning because they know they’re not providing the product. It’s a con and it’s a swindle and yet marketers still think they’re getting something of value from list sellers. And they still discover purchased lists are horrible in terms of deliverability and performance.

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Buying lists costs more than just money

ShadyGuyWebsiteI’ve been talking to a lot of companies recently who are dealing with some major delivery challenges probably related to their practice of purchasing lists and then sending advertising to every address on the list. They assure me that their businesses would be non-viable if they didn’t purchase lists and it has to be that way.
Maybe that’s true, maybe it is more cost effective to purchase lists and send mail to them. I know, though, that their delivery is pretty bad. And that a lot of the addresses they buy never see their email. And that they risk losing their ESP, or they risk being SBLed, or they risk being blocked at Gmail, or they risk bulk foldering at Hotmail. There are a lot of risks to using purchased lists.
The reality is it’s only getting harder to mail to purchased lists and it’s getting more expensive to mail purchased lists. Paying for the list is a small part of the cost of using them.
Other costs incurred by companies using purchased lists include:
1) Having multiple ESPs. There are certainly legitimate reasons for companies to use different ESPs but there is a cost associated with it. Not only do they have to pay for duplicate services, but they spend a lot of employee time moving lists and recipients around to see who might have the better delivery today.
2) Multiple domains and brand new websites for every send. Landing pages are good marketing and are normal. But some ISPs track the IPs of the landing sites, and those IPs can get their own poor reputation. To get around it, senders using purchased lists often have to create new websites on new IPs for every send.
3) Complicated sending schedules. Sending schedules aren’t dictated by internal needs, they’re dictated by what ISP is blocking their IPs or domains (or even ESP) right now.
All of these costs are hidden, though. The only cost on the actual bottom line is the money they spend for the addresses themselves and that’s peanuts. Because, fundamentally, the folks selling addresses have no incentive to take any care in collecting or verifying the data. In fact, any verification they do only cuts into their profit, as buyers won’t actually pay for the verification and data hygiene and it also reduces the size of the lists they can sell.
And, no, data hygiene companies that look for traps and bounces and “bad addresses” don’t take a bad list and make it good. They just take a bad list and make it a little less bad. If the recipients don’t want the mail, all the hygiene in the world isn’t going to get that message into the inbox.
Outsourcing address collection to list selling companies is more expensive than it looks on paper. That doesn’t stop anyone from building a business around purchased lists, though.

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July 2015: The Month in Email

Once again, we reviewed some of the ways brands are trying (or might try) to improve engagement with customers. LinkedIn, who frequently top lists of unwanted-but-legitimate email, announced that they’ll be sending less mail. Josh wrote about giving subscribers options for both the type and frequency of messages, and about setting expectations for new subscribers. In each case, it’s about respecting that customers really want to engage with brands in the email channel, but don’t want the permission they’ve granted to be abused. I also wrote a brief post following up on our June discussion on purchased lists, and as you’d predict, I continue to discourage companies from mailing to these recipients.

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December 2015: The month in email

Happy 2016! We enjoyed a bit of a break over the holidays and hope you did too. Here’s our December wrap up – look for a year-end post later this week, as well as our predictions for the year ahead. I got a bit of a head start on those predictions in my post at the beginning of December on email security and other important issues that I think will dominate the email landscape in 2016.
DMARC will continue to be a big story in 2016, and we’re starting to see more emphasis on DMARC alignment as a significant component of delivery decisions. I wrote a bit more on delivery decisions and delivery improvement here.
December in the world of email is all about the holidays, and this year was no exception. We saw the usual mix of retailers creating thoughtful experiences (a nice unsubscribe workflow) and demonstrating not-so-great practices (purchased list fails). We took a deeper look at the impacts and hidden costs of list purchasing – as much as companies want to expand their reach, purchased lists rarely offer real ROI. And on the unsubscribe front, if you missed our discussion and update on unroll.me unsubs, you may want to take a look.
Steve wrote a detailed post looking at what happens when you click on a link, and how you can investigate the path of a clickthrough in a message, which is useful when you’re trying to prevent phishing, fraud, and other spam. In other malicious email news, the CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown.
In other industry news, some new information for both ESPs and recipients interested in feedback loops and a somewhat humorous look at the hot-button issues that divide our ranks in the world of email marketing. Please share any we may have missed, or any other topics you’d like us to address.

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