Comments on: The Best Way To Kill Your Email List In 2009

By: BOB

BOB — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:37:31 +0000

An opt in list is by far the best way to emarket.
If you are going to try a purchased list, seperate messages!
You need to maintain the integrity and trust you
have with the list you have sweated building name by name.
Once people on the bought list show an interest in your product
you can put them on your preferred eclub list.

By: Startup

Startup — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:20:18 +0000

A startup without a list of customers will often find that renting an email list is an obvious choice especially if the product has universal appeal and provides substantial and provable eco friendly benefits.
In this case it is a potential benefit to many list members and will provide a benefit to the list owner as well.

By: Suz

Suz — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:04:56 +0000

While the person who recieves the unsolicited email from a rented list may not be able to put all the pieces together in order to impact the businesses responsible for giving them spam, we as marketers will suffer in the end. Communication channels are being killed by bad marketing practices. We keep trying to figure out ways to shout our message at people and they keep finding ways to get around it. I think it is an issue that will impact our careers in the long-term. We need more long term strategies and more customer focused tactics or else response rates and customer satisfaction will decline. It is an ethical issue and ethics does have a place in business (I bet this economic crisis can be traced back to unethical business practices.) Just because something works some of the time doesn't mean it is going to work in the long run. Don't keep practicing bad marketing tactics just because you see a 2% response. That means 98% did not respond and most were probably annoyed. Stop bad marketing! (Ironically my blog post today was on bad marketing tactics: Stop the Big Bad Marketing Machine)

By: Rick Hendershot

Rick Hendershot — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:28:17 +0000

I have a couple of problems with this. First, it seems like a pretty dogmatic position you are taking, which seems to be based mostly on questionable inferences from sketchy data.

For example, while it may be true that “one third of respondents… had stopped doing business with at least one company as a result of poor email marketing practices”, you cannot conclude that this is from list rental. It might be from sending irrelevant content (as you suggest), or from mailing too often, or from not mailing often enough. We just don’t know. And I suspect that is a pretty normal turnover rate for email lists anyway – even for opt-ins.

Second, you seem to be confusing who it is that is being harmed through the practice of list rental. Are you talking about the list’s originator or the company/person using a rental list? I can’t see how someone would be “harmed” by renting a reasonably targeted list – even if the return is lower than it might be from an opt-in list. Something is better than nothing. Whether it is actually worth doing is a strategic marketing question.

I also can’t see how it would harm the list originator since it is very unlikely that the recipient could or would make the connection between what they consider an email-out-of-the-blue and the original source of the list.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating using rented or co-registration lists. My experience has been almost completely negative. But most internet marketers dress this up as a kind of moral issue (“Don’t you dare use a non-opt-in list!”) when it is really nothing more than a strategic marketing decision.

By: Happy Marketer

Happy Marketer — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:37:21 +0000

I have rented lists in the past and not had much luck, but in the past year I found 2 sources where you can purchase the data outright! Which is great because like the article mentioned you are in a sense building your own database or use the list as a foundation for future sales and marketing efforts. Below are the 2 sources I use. The great thing about these companies too is that they guarantee all their records. I have checked references – nothing but positive response. I would give them a try:
ProspectDB – http://www.prospectdb.com
BigDirectories.com – http://www.bigdirectories.com