Don’t Buy, Sell or Steal Email Lists

It’s a tempting offer.

Someone approaches your organization and tells you that for an unbelievable price, you can buy thousands of email addresses to instantly grow your online advocacy campaign. Sometimes email addresses are just given away– old campaign lists that people have accumulated from election cycle to election cycle.

Take my advice: don’t buy the lists.

Here’s why:

1. 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.



2. 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%?)



3. 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.



4. Blue State Digital (or your own email service provider) won’t let you upload the list. Nearly every company in the political/nonprofit technology industry has a policy against purchased email lists. BSD’s policy states:

   BSD does not allow our clients to use commercially purchased lists or voter file lists with email addresses appended. If you choose to use these lists (and we recommend that you do not), you will need to find another vendor from which to send emails.  You may link back to your BSD-hosted site, but you may not send emails to those addresses from BSD.  Of course, if a person on a purchased list clicks through to your BSD-hosted site and takes an action requiring them to supply their email address, those addresses will be added to your BSD email list and can be sent to/from BSD.

Why is this the case? First off, it’s to protect you. One of the biggest factors affecting email deliverability is the rate of spam complaints your emails receive. If you send an email to 100,000 people who didn’t ask to receive your email, chances are a very high percentage of them will hit the “report spam” button in their email inbox. If too many people reading your email in, say, yahoo, click the spam button, yahoo will block all of your emails. If your emails are deemed to be spam, not only will your purchased list not receive your emails, but your real supporters who opted-in for the list won’t receive them either. That’s a big risk to take.

Secondly, this policy protects Blue State Digital and our other clients. BSD uses a shared mail delivery infrastructure, and the server that sends out your emails might also send out 30 other clients’ emails on any given day. Because internet service providers use information about the server for deciding which emails are spam or not, if one client’s emails get marked as spam, every client who uses that server might have the same problem. This is known as “blacklisting.” If a server gets blacklisted because of your purchased list, not only will you have angered a whole lot of other organizations, but you’ll have violated your terms of service and may be shopping for a new email vendor.