Jul 24, 2014
A Purchased List is a Dead List
Update, 8/1/14: According to the recently passed CASL, purchased lists are illegal in Canada. While they’re still technically legal in the US, they’re at odds with MailChimp’s acceptable use policy. Which means if you use them, we will shut down your account.
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As a permission-based email service provider, MailChimp doesn’t allow our users to send to purchased, rented, scraped, or stolen lists of email addresses. Why? Well, much like Lloyd Dobler, we don’t want to process anything sold or bought. It’s annoying to the humans on the other end of those purchased lists who haven’t asked to be part of your marketing.
But here’s another reason to stay away from purchased lists: They’re as good as dead. When you send to one, it’s crickets out there.
Let’s go to the historical training data from Omnivore, MailChimp’s anti-abuse system.
If we look at campaign performance versus the percentage of a mailing list that’s purchased or scraped, we find that positive engagement falls off a cliff as purchased correlation increases. Since most folks have to open an email to unsubscribe, unsubscribes die off too. The only thing that does go up? Complaints.
Stick that in your boombox and blast it. (No offense, Peter Gabriel.)
Renato
Hi, maybe there’s still some use for purchased lists, provided their subscribers have at least some affinity with your business. I’ve recently uploaded a third party list as a Custom Audience on my Facebook ads manager and had pretty good results. I think they don’t take it as spam but rather as an ad based on their interests. Thanks.
07.25.2014
Esteban
How do you measure ‘Public List Correlation’?.
07.25.2014
Alex
“And above all, it’s illegal.” — you lost your credibility here…
I understand your point regarding annoying people, but it’s not illegal as long as you abide by the CAN-SPAM Law. In Canada, things are now different. But not in the U.S. .
07.29.2014
John Coe
Is this study for B2C or B2B email lists as there is a big difference? Also, segmentation and the delivery of relevant messages and offers based on the segment can make a BIG difference. Response rates for segmented B2B emails is much better.
07.30.2014
John Garvens
I just wrote an article about this on the Garvens Media blog called “Why you should never buy email lists, especially they are cheap.”
In the post, I said:
By buying an email list, your company is paying for sex. You can’t get it on your own, so you pay someone else to give it to you. Instead of focusing on building long-term business relationships based on mutual respect and trust, you decide to walk down a dark alley in a shady neighborhood to buy some leads from a $20 hooker wearing patent leather boots.
By the way, Garvens Media uses MailChimp for every customer because of your reputation for quality and your ban on purchased lists. Keep up the good work!
07.30.2014
Lindey Scott
Hey John,
I enjoyed your post.
My company purchases email address for two publications so they can tell their advertisers that they send to X amount. I didn’t know this until after I accepted the job and ever since I have been trying to come up with ways to diminish this unnecessary expense. By the way, I am a Circulation Manger.
I have presented them with other ways to build the circulation through Internet Marketing (my Master’s degree) and I have been shot down numerous times. The company disagrees with Marketing. Period.
Do you have any suggestions that may help my situation?
Thank you,
Lindey
07.30.2014
Alida
Great post, just one thing – it’s Lloyd ‘Dobler’!
07.30.2014
John MailChimp
Good catch Alida. Thanks!
07.31.2014
Angus lynch
Absolutely agree. I’ve had dreadful experiences purchasing lists and will never do it again.
Nothing but high bounce rates, complaints, unsubscribes, and just general silence from the vast majority of recipients.
Even using warm email prospecting principles didn’t help at all. Add in the fact that their lists are impossibly expensive, and it becomes clear that list-buying is a lose-lose scenario. Lost time, lost money, lost credibility. Never again!
07.31.2014
Hashim Warren
John, unfortunately spam the way we all describe it isn’t the illegal form of spam as narrowly defined in that FTC document you linked to.
Maybe update your text around that link?
07.31.2014
Praveen
I hate unwanted emails thats why I have entered a wrong email in this comment so you dont steal it, talking about email marketing mail chimp is one of the best and most popular tools on the web today if used wisely your business will see a growth else …
08.01.2014
Jung
This is common sense but unfortunately people think they can buy their way into success with email marketing. I appreciate this article for helping put people on the right track
08.01.2014
Ardash
You would probably make a much stronger case (and not have to provide any further explanation) if you plot the “open” rate as is and change the remaining ones to action-after-open (e.g. unsubscribe-after-open rate). Isolated KPIs provide better insight.
08.01.2014
Cheryl
We are a medium sized UK Primary School with an onsite Pre School.
We provide education and wrap round care for nearly 300 children.
As a school, there is no marketing budget as such but I still have the daunting task of engaging with 200+ parents, per week.
I am always on the look out for better ways to keep parents informed and until I was introduced to the Mail Chimp some 2 years ago, my life was really stressful. Each Friday the weekly newsletters took hours to produce and print. You can imagine the number of trees we used and printer ink too!
Now, I can reach all the parents who chose to subscribe and even touch base with those hard to reach absent parents. Mail Chimp is a great concept, it provides us with a fast and reliable service. I know how many open our letters, what mail shot has had a better response and I love the fact that its FREE (many thanks to you guys). In addition it empowers parents as they have the flexibility to management their own subscription. I would be lost without you……
With the Mail Chimp, Facebook and Twitter, life is looking good.
03.03.2015
Tubby
This might be an ‘exception’ but still need advice on what to do.
My company bought another company which has an email list.
That list is an asset or perhaps now a liability if i’m not able to use it.
How can I use a list of this nature??
05.21.2015
Anna MailChimp
First remember that we can’t assume the previous company practiced good list management, so emailing this list at all is a risk in itself (residual bounces, spam traps, unsubs, complaints, etc). The best way to protect your sending reputation would be going through the full reconfirmation process: http://kb.mailchimp.com/lists/managing-subscribers/how-to-reconfirm-a-list
Beyond that, the basic idea is that you should strive to email people (1) the content they said they wanted (2) from the sender they know (3) only as frequently as what’s relevant. If any of that would be changing for these recipients, it’s appropriate to first notify them of the changes and why with the option to immediately unsubscribe.
Great question, and best of luck!
05.28.2015