Sentori email marketing blog

It's an unpopular view amongst some marketers, but you could be doing your organisation more harm than good by buying or renting email marketing lists. The short term benefits are small, the long term implications are bad -- both for your reputation and the success of email as a marketing tool.  

Data capture forms designed to mislead

Companies that sell email lists collect their data via several means.  Some of these techniques are shadier than others and some are simply illegal. The most common technique is to buy in data from companies whose registration forms include a checkbox asking whether or not a recipient would like to "receive marketing information from third parties". 

You have probably seen this kind of form many times and will no doubt have seen that the option to opt out of third party email is commonly obfuscated, worded in a difficult way, or is sometimes not visible at all. A very common approach is to mix the case of checkboxes within a single form, with a checked state affirming a positive, but in other parts of the same form it affirms a negative.

Another technique will see the intention to sell on your email address buried deep in terms and conditions, with the request to opt out only possible after the event (and then it is often a manual process).

Make no mistake: the goal of these forms is to get a recipient to agree to have their email address sold on, and on, and on – and a form's designer is not adverse to tricking recipients into agreeing to this. After all, who, in their right mind, would seriously agree to have their details passed onto potentially unlimited third parties?

Membership organisations offering targeted lists

All sorts of membership organisations sell or rent their lists directly to you rather than through a broker. Professional bodies, hobby/activity related groups, political organisations, magazine subscription lists, almost anything you can imagine. These organisations will often describe their lists as "targeted", "opted in", "qualified", etc.

The simple fact is this: whilst the members know the organisation they joined, they don't have a clue who you are. Forget the idea that these people want to hear from you: it's a myth. They've already got a bad opinion of your competitors who have rented the same list, don't make the same mistake.

What are the alternatives to buying email lists?

No marketing medium offers a better return on investment than email, but that only applies when it is done right. The only way to do it right is to change the way your organisation works. Front line staff, or anyone who comes into contact with potential prospects, need to be educated as to the importance of collecting email addresses. They don't simply need to be told do it, they need to know why they are doing it and the importance of growing the marketing list in this way. It must be a number one priority and these new contacts should, of course, be sent an introduction email.

Your organisation's website may need to change its focus too. As well as offering visitors the chance to contact you or purchase, for those who are not ready to commit ensure that you offer a simple one field sign up for your newsletter. Your newsletter must be promoted well on the site and its content must be perceived as exclusive, valuable, or educational.

Our advice to marketers is to use Sentori’s list building tools to help you grow your organisation's email marketing list. Sentori can help you generate sign-up forms for your website and manage the whole subscription and double-opt in process. On top of this, Sentori can also report on sign up performance across both online and offline sources, charting where recipients are signing up from. Through Sentori's mailing list reports, you can pin-point where you are succeeding and failing at collecting email addresses.

As a final word, Sentori, like any good email marketing service provider, does not allow the use of bought or rented lists on its service.