Email proves again and again that it’s a strong platform to engage customers and potential leads. Even with the deluge of social media options, email still has the best response rates. Every online marketers want to get a bigger audience and some of them will opt to buy mass email list instead of building one. Yes, people nowadays are looking for the easy and fastest way when marketing their products and we know that to get a database with over a million email addresses is not expensive at all.

If you are going to buy email lists instead of building it, you’re making a huge mistake. Why?

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. How would you feel when you are getting loads of unwanted and irrelevant emails? The same thing happens when someone has never been to your websites, nor are they interested in your products or even unaware of your business, you are actually interrupting them. Annoying right?

If users don’t recognize your email, the next thing they will do is to send your email to the junk folder and mark it as spam. This helps them train their inbox to show only the emails they want to see, but this also sends a signal to their email provider about which emails to filter out.

Reputable email service providers (ESP) do not allow their users to send to purchased email lists, or as they prefer to call it, spam. Once they have classified you as spammer, your email will be filtered from reaching the receiver’s inbox. In short, there is a high likelihood that you will get blacklisted due to high rate of bounce or being flagged as spam.

According to studies, some major ISPs like Verizon can block all emails coming from a particular domain, meaning a significant number of the emails you paid for won’t ever be received and even worse, deliverability to those loyal brand fans that opted-in to receive your email communications will be impacted too. This is why an email service provider will ask you to verify that the list you are uploading had opted in.

To ensure you are able to communicate effectively to build brand awareness for your products and services, try to contribute and share high quality content on your social media sites, blog and website behind a form that encourages sign-ups. You can also create a very easy way to sign up for email updates on your website and ask your customers to sign up for your email newsletter.

Buying email lists to generate leads may seem like a shortcut but NO, this isn’t the way to go. Build your email list the ethical way to lay the foundation for a strong relationship with your audience. Always remember that using inbound marketing to build organic lists will help you to achieve your goals and deliver better results.