Don’t buy, sell or steal email lists

Obama’s digital team, Blue State Digital, recommend NOT buying email lists. Here’s why:

These people didn’t ask to hear from you. Nobody – not even you — likes to receive emails from organizations that they didn’t ask to hear from. Sure, your list might suddenly double in size, but do those names care about your cause? Are they going to take action on your behalf? Probably not. Time after time, clients who come to us with purchased email lists want to know (a) how to scrub their lists and clean out the bad names, and (b) how they can grow their list in smarter, healthier ways than what they previously tried. Save yourself the trouble – don’t do it to begin with.

You’re killing your statistics. Everybody who runs an email campaign is obsessed with metrics. What’s a good open rate? What’s a good click-through rate? What’s a good action rate? What’s a low unsubscribe rate? If you dilute your email list with purchased names, you’re immediately dropping those statistics. With nearly every client we’ve ever worked for that had purchased their list, the performance has been dismal – sometimes with open rates as low as 6-8% (which, when you account for different email providers, essentially means that nobody is reading your email). And after those clients send out a few emails, the bulk unsubscribe rate of emails that repeatedly bounce back can result in a huge chunk of the purchased list – sometimes a quarter to a third of the list — dropping off.
No email list you buy or steal will ever perform as well as a list built with good, old-fashioned hard work: giving people meaningful things to do, empowering them to take action, and making it as easy as possible for those people to tell their friends to take the action also. (And do you really want to be the person who has to explain to your boss why the list you purchased for $5,000 caused open rates to drop from 20% to 12%?)

It’s disingenuous. One of the key components of a really successful online campaign is authenticity. People organize online because they want to be a part of a grassroots movement bigger than themselves; they don’t want to feel like they’re a pawn of a purchased PR stunt. Repeatedly we’ve seen corporate entities like Wal-Mart and the insurance industry torn apart by the media for running “astroturf” fake-grassroots campaigns – paying people to act like supporters. Don’t be the organization that has to pay people to show up; create a quality campaign that people want to line up to join.

HT (Don’t buy, sell or steal email lists | Blue State Digital)

What would you do?