3 Reasons You Should Never Buy an Email List

The new year is here, and you may be considering an email marketing campaign to generate buzz around your senior living community. You have your current contact list to reach out to, but you want new email addresses – and you want them fast.

Markentum understands this mindset, but buying an email list is never a good idea. Though it can be a quick and easy way to build your contact database, in the long run, it can cause severe issues for your email marketing strategy and your brand.

{{cta(‘151074e4-be2a-4ed8-b936-609ba4d2fe13′,’justifycenter’)}}

Why? We’re glad you asked!

1. Bought Email Lists Can be Low-Quality

Since you don’t know the source of each email address, you can’t trust the accuracy or legitimacy of them. Issues that can arise when you buy an email list include:

• Old contact information (email addresses that no longer exist or are inactive)
• Missing or incorrect data (email addresses that are incomplete or incorrect names associated with an email address)

While buying 5,000+ email addresses at one time may seem like a quick fix, it’s not going to help your business if it’s full of useless or unusable data.

These outdated and incorrect email addresses will negatively impact your email statistics by driving up your hard bounces and decreasing your engagement, which will harm your IP reputation and email deliverability. These elements are important because email server providers often check your IP reputation before deciding what to do with your emails. The lower your reputation score, the less likely your emails are to get into your contact’s inbox (the provider will automatically send them to spam or junk). 

2. You’ll Be Reaching Out to People Who Don’t Know You

This seems obvious, and you may be thinking, “that’s the point.” You want to reach out to a new audience and build brand awareness for your senior living community.

However, that is rarely the case in these situations.

When a contact fills out a form on your website, they are signaling that they are interested in hearing from your business. When they receive an email from Your Senior Living Community, they are inclined to open it to learn more about your services and offerings.

Check the rate at which your emails are marked as SPAM. An average rate is 1 in every 1000 emails.

When a user receives an email from a business or brand they are not familiar with, they are likely to mark it as “spam” since they do not know who is reaching out to them. While a few spam reports are common, many email providers have a threshold as to how many spam or abuse reports an account can have before action is taken.

What action?!

 3. You Can Get Penalized by Your Email Service Provider

Due to the risk of bought email lists being associated with suspicious activity, many email service providers don’t want to be linked to these accounts. Some providers, like AWeber, will immediately terminate your account! While others, like MailChimp, will suspend an account if the complaint rates exceed the threshold until an investigation can be done into the list collection process.

Unfortunately, once the damage is done to your brand reputation and email deliverability, it can take weeks, months, and in some cases, years to build it back up. Further violations can result in non-compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act, which can lead to hefty fines for each separate email in violation!

When done properly, email marketing can have one of the highest returns on investments for your digital marketing strategy and bottom line. However, if done incorrectly, it can result in harm to your brand and future marketing efforts. It’s important to always consider the user when building an email marketing strategy.

• Who will be receiving emails?
• Did they opt-in to receive emails from your senior living community?
• Is the information you’re providing relevant to them?
• How often will one user be receiving an email from you?

Answering these and similar questions, as well as complying with the CAN-SPAM Act, can ensure that you are providing the best content possible for your current contact database!

—

If you would like to learn more about email marketing services for your senior living community or how Markentum can add momentum to your marketing efforts in 2020, contact us!