How To Buy An Email List (The 15 Essential Tips)

The best type of email list is your own: A list made up completely from people who have come to your website said “yes, I like you. sign me up to receive more of this”. However, though that’s always the best type of list, you can get great results from another type: The email list that you buy.

Don’t worry - I’m not advocating going to some back-street broker & hoisting over cash for a list he’s cobbled together by trawling facebook for addresses. There are thousands of reputable companies selling email data. Their lists are usually made up of people who tick those “Yes, I would like to be emailed by carefully selected third parties” boxes.

Buying and emailing this kind of list sounds very simple: Buy the addresses, email them, profit. But in practice there are quite a few pitfalls to avoid. I’ve bought email data myself quite a few times over the years & have learned a lot about the process. I thought I’d share some of the tips with you. I hope these 15 tips save you a bit of pain & save you some money!

How To Buy An Email List: Know What You’re Getting Into

Tip 1. Understand The Numbers:

Lists are almost always sold on a CPM basis - meaning Cost Per Thousand (the ‘M’ in CPM stands for ‘Mille’, which is Latin for ‘Thousand’). Here are a couple of quick examples:

• If you are paying $80 CPM, that’s $80 for every thousand addresses you buy (or 8c for each email address). Let’s say your budget is $800. That’s enough to buy 10,000 email addresses ($800 / $80 (per thousand) = 10).
• If you’re paying £5 CPM, you get 1,000 email addresses for £5. So £50 would buy you 10,000 addresses.

Tip 2. Understand The List Criteria:

List brokers will usually hold a lot of data relating to their lists. Good brokers will allow you to use that data to specify exactly what you want. A little example probably illustrates this best: Let’s say you’re running a campaign to sell high-end mice to Apple Mac owners. The list broker has a list called ‘computer owners’. You want to find out as much information as possible about that list, so that you can slice it down further & find exactly the people you’re looking for. For example, you might say you want a criteria like this:

• Computer Owners
• Who Have been active in the last 3 months (eg. opened an email or clicked on an email that the broker has sent to them)
• Earning $40k+ per year
• Who Own Apple Mac Products

So, if a ‘computer owner’ does not fit that criteria, you’re not wasting money by emailing them. The idea of the above criteria is to give you the best chance of finding a Mac user who is actively reading emails to the list & is likely to have the money to impulse-buy your high-end mouse.

Tip 3. Understand The Mechanics:

There are usually three options for broadcasting:

1. The list broker provides you with the list & you broadcast to them yourself
2. You provide the creative (the content of the email) & the list broker broadcasts to the list for you
3. The broker handles everything - you just give them the money & tell them what you want

Make sure you know what you’re getting before you hand over any money!
Tip 4. Understand The Results:

If you’re buying from someone who is going to broadcast for you, make sure you have a way of measuring the results. This could be an agreement over exactly what data the list provider will give to you (open rates, click through rates, bounce rates, etc) or it could be that you direct people through to your site & use your web analytics tool to measure results from there.

If you can tell your list broker how you’ll judge whether or not the campaign has been successful, they can often help you out/offer suggestions from previous campaigns they’ve worked on.

Tip 5. Understand The License:

Some list providers will sell you lists with different license terms. The main ones you’ll see are ‘email once’ (you’re only allowed to email users once), ‘email twice’, ‘1 year license’, ‘unlimited license’.

Bonus tip: It’s worth realising that - even if you buy on an ‘email once’ basis - if the recipients then sign across to your list, you’re fine to keep emailing them.

Extra Bonus tip: It’s also worth remembering that - if you’re buying an ‘unlimited license’ (to email the list as much as you like) - there are probably other people who have done exactly the same thing with exactly the same list & it may be bombarded. ie. the tighter controls on a list, the more valuable it may be.

Tip 6: Understand The Data Itself (& Make Sure It’s Clean)

It’s incredibly important to find out how the list provider collects the data, how they keep it clean, etc. Firstly, if you buy & email a bad list it can get you into serious trouble legally. Secondly, if you email a dodgy list, it can get you blacklisted by the major ISPs/email providers & can also be unbelievably damaging for your brand.

Here are the four most important questions you can ask to make sure you’re buying a ‘clean’ list. Try to get the answers to these on paper/via email if possible:

1. How do you collect the data? (the answer to this should NOT be ‘we trawl the web’!)
2. Are the email addresses all double opted in? (the answer to this should be ‘yes. definitely’)
3. Have they given permission for third parties to email them? (again - the answer must be ‘yes’)
4. How often do you email these clients? (the answer to this should not be ‘I have no idea’)

How To Buy An Email List (Cheaper!): Getting The Most Value

Tip 7. Never take the first price

Some people love negotiating. I am not one of those people, but I would /always/ do it when buying email data. List sellers always build something extra into their prices so that they can discount down. If you are uncomfortable negotiating, blame your ‘boss’. “I’ll have to see what my boss says…”, “If I can get my boss to give me the go-ahead today, can you do it any cheaper?”.

Bonus tip: If you use a list provider to broadcast to 100,000 people & 10% of those emails bounce, you should really get 10% of your money back. Ask about this up-front!

Tip 8. Never take the first package

Even if your list broken won’t lower the price, they will often give you other packages. I’ve had X% ‘extra’ email addresses for the same price, free ‘repeat’ emails to the recipients who don’t open the email the first time around, free deduping (more about that in a minute), free broadcasting, etc. There are 2 things to remember here: Number 1: you’re probably dealing with a salesperson here - as long as they can get the money & please their boss, they’re happy. Work with them! Number 2: You’re dealing with data - an intangible thing - as a result, there’s almost always /something/ they can do to offer you a little more value for money.

Tip 9. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket pt 1: Test the list

Instead of buying a broadcast to 100,000 email addresses straight off, spend 5% of your budget & email 5,000. If the results are good, go back and mail the other 95,000. If the results are bad, move on to another list provider and try again.

Tip 10. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket pt 2: Test your creative

So let’s say you follow the above advice & email 5,000 people to test out the list. You can also use that opportunity to test out your email creative: Send one email to half of the list; a slightly different email to the other. For example, you could use 2 different subject lines. If you get great results from one, then you know to use that variation when you email the other 95,000 recipients.

Tip 11. De-dupe!

Let’s take our example of the 100,000 email addresses again. If 5,000 of those addresses are *already* on your in-house list you’re spending extra money you don’t need to. Good list providers will allow you to ‘deduplicate’ your list against theirs: You send your email addresses to them, they only charge you for email addresses from their list that *aren’t* already in the list you send over. Incredibly reputable companies use a third-party to do this process, but most just do it on trust (you trust that they’re not going to take your email addresses!)

How To Email A List For The First Time: Getting The Best Results

Tip 12. Tell people where you got their address

If you’re using a third-party list, make sure to introduce yourself & tell your subscribers where you got their data. If they suddenly start receiving emails from you with no explanation, they will assume you’re a spammer.

Tip 13. Give Them the chance to opt out

You should always offer the opportunity for your email subscribers to opt out. Often marketers tuck this option away right at the bottom of the email. In my experience, it’s better to put this somewhere more noticeable. If you tuck it away (especially in the first email you send to them) they may well just reach for the ‘This Is Spam’ button, which can get you in trouble with ISPs.

Tip 14. Give Them Something Valuable

If you only follow one piece of advice in this article, make it this one!

When you buy in an email list, the recipient hasn’t given explicit permission to be emailed by you - they’ve given permission to be emailed by “selected third parties”. Emailing people is a tricky process at the best of times - recipients get a lot of email they don’t want. It’s even worse when you’re a “selected third party” & they have zero trust in you. Think of all the emails you receive & delete within 5 seconds of looking at them. If you can’t grab someone’s interest before they hit the delete/spam button, you won’t get great results.

1. Make sure you get a good match between the offer & the list (eg. don’t buy a list of teens & try to sell them a house).
2. Use a great subject line
3. Be obvious. Don’t tuck your offer right at the bottom - make sure it’s visible in the preview pane.
4. Make it personal. Email is traditionally a 1-2-1 medium & the most valuable emails people get (from friends, family) are always direct to them.

Tip 15: You don’t have to go for the sale straight away

Some of the most successful third-party email campaigns I’ve ever run have been about ‘indirectly’ achieving the objective. I’ll give you an example:

I once ran a third-party list campaign where we emailed the recipients once only. We chose a list of broadband users, who’d interacted with the list recently & expressed an interest in computers. The main objective was to sell laptops, but in the email we sent, we didn’t include a ‘buy now’ button, a laptop price, or any ’sales’ offer. There was a single, very simple offer in the email: Sign up to our “Weekly Computer Deals newsletter & get 10% off your next hardware purchase.

Why was this so successful?

• Because we’d only purchased one email to the recipients. It’s tough to sell a laptop off the back of a single email, so it made more sense to try & get them to switch across to our email list so that we could then email them again (& again)
• The barrier was very low - all they had to do was sign up to another email newsletter about computers (& we already know they’re interested in computers)
• The offer was good - do next to nothing, ’save’ money
• The recipients who did sign up & get the 10% off code felt compelled to use it (otherwise they’d be ‘wasting’ money)
• By the time we’d sent the first ‘Weekly Computer Deals’ email to them (full of laptops), they’d already had 2 emails from us (the initial email & the ‘thank you’ email containing the discount), & we’d already given them something, & therefore their trust in us was far higher
• Because we were trying to sell an expensive item, the percentage discount worked well (”I’ll buy a $1000 laptop & save $100 instead of buying a $10 mouse & saving $1″)