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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Organizational security and doxxing

The security risks of organizational doxxing. 
These are risks every email marketer needs to understand. As collectors of data they are a major target for hackers and other bad people. Even worse, many marketers don’t collect valid data and risk implicating the wrong people if their data is ever stolen. I have repeatedly talked about incidents where people get mail not intended for them. I’ve talked about this before, in a number of posts talking about misdirected email. Consumerist, as well, has documented many incidents of companies mailing the wrong person with PII. Many of these stories end with the company not allowing the recipient to remove the address on the account because the user can’t prove they own the account.
I generally focus on the benefits to the company to verify addresses. There are definite deliverability advantages to making sure email address belongs to the account owner. But there’s also the PR benefits of not revealing PII attached to the wrong email address. With Ashley Madison nearly every article mentioned that the email address was never confirmed. But how many other companies don’t verify email addresses and risk losing personally damaging data belonging to non customers.
Data verification is so important. So very, very important. We’ve gone beyond the point where any big sender should just believe that the addresses users give them are accurate. They need to do it for their own business reasons and they need to do it to prevent incorrect PII from being leaked and shared.

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Purchased lists and ESPs: 9 months later

It was about 8 months ago I published a list of ESPs that prohibit the use of purchased lists. There have been a number of interesting responses to that post.
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ESPs wanted to be added to the list
The first iteration of the list was crowdsourced from different ESP representatives. They shared the info they had with each other. With their permission, I put it together into a post and published it here. Since then, I’ve had a trickle of ESPs asking to be added to the list. I’m happy to add any ESP. The only requirement is a privacy policy (or AUP) that states no purchased lists.
People reference the list regularly
I’ve had a lot of ESP deliverability folks send thanks for writing this post. They tell me they reference it regularly when dealing with clients. It’s also been listed as “one of the best blog posts of 2015” by Pardot.
Some 2016 predictions build on the post
I’ve read multiple future predictions that talk about how the era of purchased lists is over. I don’t think they’re wrong. I think that purchased lists are going to be deliverability nightmares on an internet where users wanting a mail is a prime factor in inbox deliverability. They’re already difficult to deliver, but it’s going to get worse.
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Not everyone thinks this is a good post. In fact, I just recently got an comment about how wrong I was, and… well, I’ll just share it because I don’t think my summary of it will do it any justice.

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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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