Since email marketing is the most effective form of marketing, it’s tempting to use any means necessary to grow your email list quickly. And if you already have a list, the idea of earning passive income by selling it could also be tempting.

But buying and selling email lists is not worth it. Here’s why:

You’ll tarnish your reputation

As soon as I receive an email I did not sign-up for, I immediately unsubscribe. If a company disrespects me by adding my email address to their list without my consent, I find them rather untrustworthy. Most people feel the same.

You could face legal repercussions

Laws such as Europe’s GDPR require double opt-in, meaning that subscribers verify that they want to be on your list. By adding subscribers from a purchased list or selling your own list, you are violating their right to consent.

Psst! Remember to always have an unsubscribe feature in your emails. This is also a legal requirement.

You may not be able to send emails to these lists

Reputable e-newsletter platforms can detect purchased lists and will thus not send emails to those contacts. Not only that, your platform may cancel your account.

And if you opt for a less reputable platform, your deliverability is likely to plummet. This means that the email addresses on your purchased list won’t receive your emails in the first place. Why? Because, according to Hubspot, “One customer's ill-gotten email address list can poison the deliverability of the other customers on that shared IP address.”

Psst! Wondering how to choose your e-newsletter platform? Click here.

The lists aren’t worth it

It takes time to build a strong email list, and quality is definitely more important than quality. You can have 10,000 subscribers on your email list, but if only 50 consistently open your emails, the other 9,950 aren’t worth having.

That being said, many purchased email lists contain more unengaged users than engaged, so the list is not worth the money.

And that’s likely because these people don’t know you and are likely irritated that you added them to your email list without their permission.

Wondering how to grow your email list the right way, as well as how to create emails your list will want to open? Check out my Expand With Email online mini course. Psst! It’s included in my comprehensive Marketing 101 course.

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