Avoid buying email marketing lists

Even if buying email lists may sound like an easy way for you to win new subscribers and develop your business, it’s actually a very bad practice. Your email marketing strategy should be based on having a list of contacts who have clearly demonstrated their interest in your brand and campaigns.

First – despite how tempting purchasing, borrowing or copying mailing lists might seem – it will drastically hurt your engagement rates, including your email open rates. Because recipients don’t like receiving unsolicited emails, there are great chances that they will unsubscribe, ignore or delete your messages, or even mark them as spam. Not only you will damage the performance of your emails, but you will also hurt your reputation and the email deliverability of your future messages.

Also, you need to know that this practice is not compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR states that, to contact an individual, you need explicit consent from them. Most of the time, individuals whose email addresses are on a purchased email list have not explicitly agreed for your company to contact them and, therefore, you would be breaking GDPR regulations by doing so. Also note that most of the Email Service Providers (ESPs) ban this practice in their sending policy, and that going against the policy will lead to your emails being blocked.

How to get a GDPR-compliant email contact list

Purchasing email lists is not compliant with the GDPR – it’s a spammer technique. Here’s other few things to remember under GDPR: 

• Write a clear and concise consent message while collecting email addresses. Consent message needs to be easily understandable to individuals. 

• Store the consent, which should include: the data subject who gave the consent, when the consent was obtained, and the specific purpose for which the consent was given.

• Consider using privacy dashboards to make it easy for individuals to update their consent preference. Any consent withdrawal requests should be processed and records kept.