Where can I mail a purchased list?

We’ve had a lot of comments over the last few weeks regarding our post on ESPs that don’t allow purchased lists. Most of them were companies adding their addresses to the list. But one comment needs a little more discussion, I think.

Here’s the problem though, when your employer has purchased a list and INSISTS on using that list for lead generation.
I have explained ad nauseum why this is a bad idea. They look at me blankly and move on with scheduling our emails. They expect me to find a provider that will allow purchased lists. Where do I turn?
All I can find is articles on NOT using them. Well, I have no say in the matter and my job depends on doing this. What about us stuck in that place? Doug Marshall

It’s a tough situation to be in when your job depends on doing something that is generally viewed as a bad idea. Most of the ESPs that will let you send to purchased lists will have poorer deliverability than those ESPs that require opt-in. Most purchased lists have very poor deliverability.
I’ve regularly had companies come looking for help because their purchased lists were widely blocked. One of them was earlier this year. Their purchased list was only seeing about a 40% acceptance rate and about a 15% inbox rate. They wanted to know if I could help them resolve the blocks. There wasn’t anything we could do.
If you’re in the situation where the choice is send to the list or get fired then you have some hard decisions to make. Is this your line in the sand? My experience is some management folks refuse to believe that purchased lists are a bad idea. They’re going to mail those lists because they paid good money for them! and their vendor would not lie to them! Sometimes the only thing you can do as an employee is do what you’re told or walk away. Those aren’t easy decisions.
In terms of how you can negotiate this pathway without giving up your job, there are some things I can think for you to do. Depending on your relationship with your ESP, you can call your account rep and ask them about the ESPs policy for purchased lists. I know many ESPs deal with this question regularly. They may help you convince your management this is a bad idea.
If you’re uncomfortable involving your provider, you can document your findings about how bad an idea this is. You can reference my blog, and the other statements you’ve found that say purchased lists are bad. Even if you are ignored, you have documented this is a bad idea. If there is poor delivery and fallout, then you’ll have the documentation that says this is how purchased lists work.
Another possibility, depending on the size of the purchased list, is to actually contact each lead individually. Introduce your company, what you have and invite them to join your newsletter program. If they respond, great, you have a new contact. If they don’t, well, they’re a poor lead for you.
Good luck!

Unexpected break
June 2015: the Month in Email

Related Posts

What not to do when buying lists

Saturday morning I check my mail and notice multiple emails from the DMA. Yes, I got three copies of an email from the US Direct Marketing Association with the subject line Kick It Up A Notch With The DMA Career Center. It seems the DMA are buying addresses from various companies. Because I use tagged email addresses, this means their naive de-duping doesn’t realize that laura-x and laura-y are the same email address. Of course, they’ve also managed to send to an untagged email address, too. I have no idea where they got that particular address; I’m sure I’ve never handed that address over to the DMA for any reason.
Saturday afternoon, I check one of the professional filtering / anti-spam mailing list.  Some subscribers are asking for copies of spam from 97.107.23.191 to .194. They’d seen a lot of mail to non-existent email addresses from that range and were looking to see what was going on and who was sending such bad mail. Multiple people on the list popped up with examples of the DMA mail.
Sunday morning, I checked the discussions wherein I discovered the DMA was added to the SBL (SBL 202218, SBL 202217, SBL 202216). It seems not only did they hit over a hundred Spamhaus spamtraps, they spammed Steve Linford himself.

Read More

Buying Lists

One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM.
As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me.
I can report nothing has changed. He’s still violating CAN SPAM. He’s still claiming I have no right to post, share, spindle, mutilate or fold his spam. Well, in the interest in something, I thought I’d share the whole post this time. Just to warn folks from attempting to purchase services from appendleads.com (nice website, by the way).

Read More

Email verification services

Just yesterday a group of delivery folks were discussing email verification services over IRC. We were talking about the pros and cons, when we’d suggest using them, when we wouldn’t, which ones we’ve worked with and what our experiences have been. I’ve been contemplating writing up some of my thoughts about verification services but it’s a post I wanted to spend some time on to really address the good parts and the bad parts of verification services.
Today, Spamhaus beat me to the punch and posted a long article on how they view email verification services. (I know that some Spamhaus folks are part of that IRC channel, but I don’t think anyone was around for the discussion we had yesterday.)
It’s well worth a read for anyone who wants some insight into how email verification is viewed by Spamhaus. Their viewpoints are pretty consistent with what I’ve heard from various ISP representatives as well.
In terms of my own thoughts on verification services, I think it’s important to remember that the bulk of the verification services only verify that an address is deliverable. The services do not verify that the address belongs to the person who input it into a form. The services do not verify that an address matches a purchased profile. The services do not verify that the recipient wants email from the senders.
Some of the services claim they remove spamtraps, but their knowledge of spamtraps is limited. Yes, stick around this industry long enough and you’ll identify different spamtraps, and even spamtrap domains. I could probably rattle off a few dozen traps if pressed, but that’s not going to be enough to protect any sender from significant problems.
Some services can be used for real time verification, and that is a place where I think verification can be useful. But I also know there are a number of creative ways to do verification that also check things like permission and data validity.
From an ESP perspective, verification services remove bounces. This means that ESPs have less data to apply to compliance decisions. Bounce rate, particularly for new lists, tells the ESP a lot about the health of the mailing list. Without that, they are mostly relying on complaint data to determine if a customer is following the AUP.
Spamhaus talks about what practices verification services should adopt in order to be above board. They mention actions like clearly identifying their IPs and domains, not switching IPs to avoid blocks and not using dozens or hundreds of IPs. I fully support these recommendations.
Email verification services do provide some benefit to some senders. I can’t help feeling, though, that their main benefit is simply lowering bounce rates and not actually improving the quality of their customers’ signup processes.

Read More