Building your email marketing list organically from scratch is the surest way to get high-quality email subscribers who will eventually convert into long-term customers.
But because this process takes a lot of time and effort, many marketers opt to purchase email lists instead. While this may seem like a quicker and easier way to get lots of contacts to promote your business to at once, it comes with numerous consequences.
For instance, the people whose names and email addresses you’re buying have never heard about you or your business before, so they won’t be able to recognize your brand name in their inbox.
As a result, most of them are likely to mark your emails as spam. And when your emails are repeatedly marked as spam, email service providers (ESPs) such as Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail will start diverting your emails to the spam folders of your recipients automatically. This means that none of your purchased contacts will see your emails at all.
Here are 6 more reasons why you should never buy an email list:
1. You Risk Losing People’s Trust and Future Business
This is one of the dangers of buying an email list. When you send numerous unsolicited emails to people who don’t know you, it gives them a negative first impression of your brand.
This can make them avoid your business altogether because they don’t trust you and don’t like your marketing tactics.
2. You Won’t Have Exclusive Rights to Those Contacts
Another reason why you should never buy an email list is that you won’t get exclusive rights to those contacts. That’s because companies selling email lists make their cash by selling the same names and email addresses over and over again.
Because of this, there’s a high chance that the contacts you’re buying won’t open or read your emails because of the huge number of marketing messages they receive from different brands daily.
3. You Won’t Receive Qualified Contacts
A qualified contact refers to a person who’s already acquainted with your business and is interested in knowing more about your products or services. Such a person is more likely to convert into a long-term paying customer, even if it’s not immediately.
When you purchase an email list from vendors, you may be lucky to find a few people who are interested in your business. However, the majority of the people on purchased lists know nothing about your brand, which makes them unqualified as prospects. According to Hubspot, good email address lists aren’t for sale. In other words, email addresses that are for sale have already been considered unresponsive or unqualified for marketing campaigns. Consequently, you won’t be able to use reputable email marketing services to send emails to lists you’ve purchased.
4. Purchased Email Lists Have High Bounce Rates
When you buy an email list, most of the emails you send are also likely to bounce. This is mainly because many purchased lists contain email addresses that are old, so there’s a high possibility that some of them may be inactive by the time you’re buying them.
Another thing that contributes to the high bounce rate is that such email lists are sold to different marketers repeatedly. This means that the contacts on those lists are already overwhelmed by the high number of emails they receive daily. This can force them to delete their email addresses altogether.
5. Your Engagement Rate Will Plummet
User engagement is crucial in email marketing. You need the contacts you’re emailing to not only open your emails but also read through your email content and take the specific action you want them to take, such as clicking through to your website to read your latest post or buy your latest product.
However, when you buy an email list, your engagement rate is likely to take a hit because the contacts you’re emailing didn’t opt into your email list willingly, and neither did they ask to hear from you. So, they’re less likely to open or engage with your emails.
6. Your Email Deliverability Rate & Sender Reputation Will Suffer
Deliverability refers to the rate at which the emails you’re sending land in the inboxes of your subscribers as opposed to the spam folders.
When you send emails to purchased contacts who are not familiar with your business, most of them are likely to mark your emails as spam, meaning that the subsequent emails you send will go straight to their spam folders, thereby lowering your email deliverability rate.
And when your deliverability rate starts to decline, the sender reputation you have with email service providers (ESPs) and internet service providers (ISPs) will also suffer.
How to Grow Your Email List Organically
Now that you understand the repercussions of buying an email list, you must be wondering how you can start growing your list organically. Here are a few proven ways of building a high-quality email list from scratch:
1. Identify Your Target Audience
The first step when you want to grow your email list organically from scratch is to identify your target audience. In other words, who are you targeting with your product or service?
If you sell mattresses, for instance, your customers will include college students looking for affordable mattresses to start their college life, elderly people looking for good mattresses to ease their back pains while sleeping, newly married couples looking for durable and comfortable mattresses to start their marriage life, and so on.
All these people are your target audience, so it’s important that you segment them based on things like gender, age, geographic location, and job status, and then tailor your email campaigns to suit each segment.
Make sure you’re asking your website visitors the right questions in the signup forms to get the right data from them.
2. Create Great Content
Once you’ve identified and segmented your target audience, it’s time to create awesome content that will make them want to subscribe to your email list willingly.
Content creation can be anything from articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos, webinars, and so on that provides advice or actionable tips to to your audience.
When you take the time to produce well-researched, unique, relevant, and useful content, your website visitors will be more than willing to subscribe to your email list so that they can be the first person to know when you post new content.
3. Create Valuable Lead Magnets for Each Segment of Your Target Audience
Another way to build your email list organically is by creating valuable lead magnets for your target audience.
Some people won’t give you their email addresses freely unless you give them something valuable in return. This is why you need lead magnets that are valuable enough to entice them to subscribe to your list.
However, since you have different segments within your target audience, you need to create different lead magnets that appeal to each of them. Here are some lead magnets you can create if you run a mattress selling business:
- A detailed guide explaining to customers the features and benefits of the different types of mattresses you sell.
- An illustrated guide showing your audience what their sleeping position says about them.
- A video showing people the right way to sleep to avoid waking up with back pain.
The more relevant, valuable, and personalized your lead magnets are, the more your target audience will opt into your list willingly.
4. Personalize Each Email Campaign
Email personalization is also crucial in building a high-quality email list. Your email subscribers want to receive content that’s not only relevant and useful to them, but personal too.
Because of this, you need to ensure that every email you send is as personal as possible to appeal to specific segments within your audience and increase your engagement rate.
One easy way to personalize your email campaigns is by addressing your subscribers by their names in the email subject lines and including email content that they’re interested in reading.
You should be able to get the names of each of your subscribers from the data you collect during signup.
5. Provide Multiple Opportunities for People to Subscribe
Lastly, you can’t rely on your website alone if you want more people to subscribe to your email list organically. There are numerous other ways you can use to drive more signups, including:
- Adding a form that asks people to subscribe to your email list on your Facebook page.
- Creating a subscribe landing page and promoting it on different social media channels through paid ads.
- Design popups that prompt your customers to subscribe to your list anytime they purchase on your site.
Wrapping Up
Buying an email list may seem like a nice shortcut to getting numerous email subscribers at once, but in the long term, it will get your emails flagged as spam, damage your brand reputation and decrease your email deliverability rate significantly.
It’s, therefore, much better to invest your time and resources in building a list of subscribers who are genuinely interested in your business and are more likely to buy from you down the line. The tips discussed above will come in handy as you build your email list organically.