Renting Email Lists – Never Say Never?
By Anna Johnson on September 25th, 2008I’ve always said that I’d never rent an email list. I’ve just heard too many horror stories of minuscule conversion rates… wasted money… and spam complaints. But an article in MarketingSherpa has made me rethink… I’m not sold, but I won’t say ‘never’…
MarketingSherpa provides marketers with 5 mistakes to avoid and 10 questions to ask when considering using a rented email list. Check out the article below (free account required). My major take-outs are that, when deciding whether or not to rent a list, you are wise to:
- Pay more for a quality list i.e. one that is highly targeted and which contains recently acquired leads;
- Ensure the list is fresh. As a rule of thumb, email lists decay at the rate of 2.5 percent per month. So if you have a list of 1,000 emails that were acquired a month ago, around 25 of those email addresses will no longer work.
- Don’t overbuy a list. Buying a huge list almost guarantees that you’ll end up paying for large numbers of people who won’t constitute your target market and won’t respond to your email. A typical response rate for a quality list is 1-2 percent, so you’ll probably be better off buying fewer names and achieving that kind of response rate, than renting a much larger list and getting a fraction of that response rate.
- Buy a ‘multi-channel list’ – one where you get names, emails, phone numbers and postal addresses – rather than an email-only list. A multi-channel list tend to be of much higher quality and to generate a much higher response rate, even as high as 5-10 percent.
- Ensure the list includes only people who opted in (and ideally confirmed their subscription).
