Mauricio RomeroMany clients ask us to make campaigns buying email lists. Which is one of the worst ideas. This old practice not only starts to be taken as illegal in some countries such as Canada or México, or even at some European countries as well, but it has proven to be one of the most inefficient practices in terms of effectiveness and ROI. Just to name a few:
- No one's ever subscribed to these lists
- Inefficient in performance
- Harms your reputation and you might get sanctioned
- Mass mailing systems won't let you do it
- You want to build your brand in an honest way
No one's ever subscribed to these lists.
Companies that send massive emails based on bought addresses, have usually never bothered to ask the contacts to voluntarily subscribe. It'd be like asking: would you like to subscribe to my SPAM? Which is why no one wants to receive information from someone they don't know, and that's a fact. Therefore, people who actually see you emails will take them as trash email and as an invasion to their privacy as well.
Inefficient in performance.
Since these are lists that nobody has subscribed to, people won't want to receive information about your brand or organization. So the degree of involvement they generate is very low. To start with, few people open these emails, the rate is below 8% of the list. Out of those who open the email, only a few will be interested in your information because they probably even aren't your target market. And finally, the vast majority will send your mails to their SPAM folder. Companies that sell email lists charge by each mail that gets sent, not by results, it is a business for them, not for you. So if you like to throw your money down the drain you'd better contact me, I can gladly give you my bank account number... or maybe, you are feeling philanthropic, donate that money to charity! That's an even better strategy.
Harms your reputation and you might get sanctioned. (Legal implications).
Since the contacts don't want to receive your information and since these lists aren't really good-quality lists, the hard bounce rate of emails is very high. This hard bounce rate is a technical term which means that: since the emails are being received by a server which doesn't recognize the domain that is sending them, it bounces them back by sending them directly to the blacklist or SPAM. If the emails don't exist because they've been deleted, the same thing happens. There are organisms that regulate hard bounces. When more than 5% of your list is detected as hard bounces, the server notifies these regulatory organizations according to the CAN-SPAM law. If you carry out this practice for more than 3 times (with that +5%) your domain.com will be sanctioned and servers worldwide won't receive any more emails from your domain. This will of course, damage your online reputation and your reputation with Google as well, so you won't be highly recommended in its searches.
This practice not only brings this technical problem along, but it can also get you into legal trouble. In Mexico there is the Federal Law for the Protection of Personal Data, which requires that you ask for the contact's permission to have their contact data, such as their Name, Surname and email. If you brake this law, your brand might end up getting fined with up to 1 million pesos. So if you want to keep throwing your money away, you'd better donate it to charity and you would have at least done a good deed.
Massive mailing services won't let you do it.
When you hire mass mailing services such as mailchimp to get these mass mailing services, they'll simply won't let you do it in order to avoid getting in the breach of the CAN-SPAM laws. So you will be forced to clean your databases before sending a massive one with nonexistent and poor quality emails.
You want to build your brand in an honest way.
One of the premises of Inbound Marketing, is to attract the right people. So instead of sending massive emails to people who don't know you, who aren't interested in your brand and who don't require your services immediately, you must attract people who are looking for your product or service, because they already have the need to find you. Sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time, are three of the principles of content marketing. You want to convert your visitors into prospects by having them share their data with you (voluntarily) and thus, get registered to your email lists. That's one of the objectives of Inbound Marketing.
Ok, that's not the way to go, then... how should you do it?
Lists of current clients
If you want to start a good list, you have to do it with the clients and contacts that you already have. We know that it is much cheaper to sell something to a current customer than to attract a new prospect. This can be a quick way to have a positive impact on sales and show your customers that you can always do more for them. So start by gathering all the emails from your current customers as well as from your your personal networking and ask them to subscribe to your communications. The key so they don't unsubscribe is the one I mentioned above: send the right information, to the right person, at the right time. Send information that interests you buyer persona, within the right context, and at the right time.
Blog
The best way to attract new people who subscribe to your email list, is to create an audience around the topics of interest of your ideal client. How does this work? Well, very simple, when we enter the Internet we do it with the intention of solving a problem or a doubt. We look for that perfect content that will help us to achieve this. So if we happen to have a blog about that topic, people will come to your website through organic searches, that is, when search engines such as Google recommend us to people. These search engines will keep recommending our website (offering it on their search results) as long as we make good quality content. This is how we'll attract visitors who are looking for our solutions.
More offers
Once people are visiting our website and we've attracted them with content that will solve their doubts, problems or their search for opportunities, we must get their contact information. If we don't get their contact information, all the efforts made to fill your site with content, is lost. For this reason, we must offer something that will motivate them to share their name and email with us (at least) in exchange for our offer. This is how we do Inbound Marketing, If your content is interesting and will really solve that doubt, problem or opportunity search that they have, they'll share their contact information with you.
Paid publicity
Another smart way to get contacts is to invest in paid publicity. Sometimes it helps to hire services from Google or from a social network such as Facebook or LinkedIn so they help you find the keywords that people are looking for. Once you know these keywords, you can use them so people find you and your special offers when searching for them and thus, voluntarily share their contact information with you. If you don't do this the right way, you'll be once again wasting your money and you'll see you online advertising campaign fail.
So, whenever you plan to invest on this medium, get advice from an expert and achieve those conversions from visitors to prospects, based on landing pages and managing email lists.
Wrapping things up
It's time you forget about those old marketing practices that can damage your brand, affect your reputation and make you spend money on strategies that won't bring a return on investment. I know it's not easy to change, specially when this practice has been done for a long time but, if you don't change, your company will have to face some serious problems and you'll be damaging your domain regarding the law.
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