Back on March 10th, I quoted Chip House on why opt-out email append is bad news. That was one of Chip's “5 Ways to Kill your Email Deliverability” from his article in this month's Visibility magazine. Today, I'll talk about another one of the points he raises: Misstep #3: Buying a list.
Chip says: “This is so bad, so insidious, and so detrimental to your deliverability that I don’t know where to start. Where appended lists might have a few spamtraps per million addresses, a purchased list will have hundreds. Nothing will raise your complaint rates more or drive blacklisting more than sending to a purchased list. This will kill your deliverability and your reputation and it will take a long time for you to climb out of the hole.”
Want an example of what can happen when you buy a list? Here's my favorite.
E360 is a company labeled by Comcast, and even by a judge, as being what “some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer.” (That quote being from a court ruling that did not go in E360s' favor.) E360 is famously in a number of legal tangles – against anti-spam blacklist Spamhaus, with internet service provider Comcast, and with various individual plaintiffs who allege that E360 spammed them.
Now, E360 has turned around and sued a company called Choicepoint. From what I can tell, Choicepoint is the source of the email data in question, the data that got E360 sued by those various individuals. E360 is alleging that Choicepoint gave E360 email addresses that were people who had supposedly opted-in to receive emails, but had not.
That's the core of the problem here. When you buy a list, you're taking somebody else's word for it that the people really did opt-in to receive third-party emails. There are a lot of liars out there selling lists, and even if the vendor is not a liar, are you sure they're smart enough to have appropriately vetted and validated the addresses themselves and the associated permission? (After ten years in the email industry, I'm still not sure that any vendor I've dealt with is smart enough. “Legitimate” vendors have sold clients spamtrap addresses one too many times.)
And what does it actually cost to buy a list? In E360's case, it cost them approximately $350,000. That's what they ended up spending “defending and/or settling three lawsuits: Ferron v. e360; Silverstein v. e360; and Ferguson v. e360.”
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