Where can I buy lists of email addresses?

the guidelines like a proper subject line, a notice that it is a commercial email, your address, and an opt out button, link, etc and the ability of the receiver to respond with REMOVE in the subject line.

Not all SPAM is illegal

Email Marketing 2.0

The main point of the act is to punish fraudulent or deceptive emails. Read it carefully. The danger in dealing with emails is spam filters and black lists do not care where you got the email. We have over a million emails in the list of one of my clients but we can not send them all emails in one day.

Opt-in emails are no protection from black lists

If you send completely opted in emails to enough people there will be a certain amount that mark it as spam in their email client like gmail, hotmail, etc. This type of thing gets you black listed regardless of the legality of how you obtained the emails.
Tips for purchasing lists

If you purchase a list make sure there is a disclosure on how the emails were obtained so you can show good faith purchase if required. Our experience has shown that you can not send more than 400-500 emails an hour without getting your gateway IP address block by your ISP like Quest or Comcast.

Sending too many emails gets you black listed

Stay under this threshold and you should be fine, no promises though. Emails are risky business. My clients do have lists for sale that they obtained with an opt in to sell to third party advertisers. There is a risk of a link or url address, inside of an email, marked as spam getting on one of the many black lists no matter how legal your actions.

Ways around black lists

There are many ways around this. Many companies buy urls that redirect to their site. This keeps their main url out of emails. Some send traffic directly to a search engine search result pages that are designed in a way that the only link to click will be one of their own. This is called an email url filter or purifier. Many hire companies overseas that do not have strick ISP limits on the amount of emails they can send per hour. This can get really stick legally.

Bad emails gets you black listed

Another risk is when you get bounced emails. Lets say you send out 100k emails and 2k of them are not even real. The email client and server you sent them through will be traced to these bad emails. Bounced emails is a sure sign of spam. Remember spam does not mean illegal. Like the Attorney General for Washington State said, “SPAM may be annoying but not all SPAM is illegal.”

Scrub your emails list thoroughly

Run you lists through multiple “scrubbers” if you can. some scrubbers send electronic signals to email boxes to see if they are real. Others check the domain names to see if they are real also. Cheaper ones might just check to see if their are more than two characters before the @ symbol and more than two after it with a “.” and a “com” or “net” etc.

Segment your lists before making offers

All in all, emails are proven to drive real customers. If you are not the originator of the email list then likely the owners of the emails do not trust you. That means they are more likely to click the spam button. The best way to get results from an email list that you buy or rent is to give something of great value away for FREE.

Give them FREE stuff to earn trust

Do not send them a solicitation or a self severing link until your 5th or 6th email. Give them free e-books, downloads, music, art, coupons, or something else. To get the free product they have to click a link which you can track and thereby segment your list. You begin to know who is interested in what before you ever give them a real offer.

Free giveaways bring real buyers

You have gained their trust by giving them value without them deserving it. It has been proven that the more you give away free the more people will feel obligated to buy when they have a chance. Make sure your giveaways are cheap to you but of real value to people. It has to be something they are shocked is free or at least surprised they don’t have to fill out a survey or something to get.

Email marketing is only one aspect of internet marketing

Email marketing is one aspect of internet marketing as a whole. Search engine optimization is the best way to get a email catching page ranked for different long tail keywords that you want lists for. So lets say you are a retailer. You have a baby shoes page where you sell baby shoes. You might have an email catcher on that page that offer free coupons for subscribers or free giveaways or contests. Getting a page ranked for “Free Baby Shoes” is very easy and you lists will be segmented as you build them.

Search engine optimization will build your lists

Set up pages for each of your offers and get them ranked. That is when you will get the results you are expecting from emails. Emails should be a customer retention tool and not a front end marketing tool. Why not spend that same time and effort on getting a page ranked for that particular offer and then use emails to bring people to the offer and also to bring them back for now offers. Internet Marketing is Search Engine Optimization.