Buying Adult Email Lists: Why This is Always a Bad Idea

Since it can take quite a while to build your own email list properly, you’ll no-doubt be tempted to purchase an email list from a third party. In fact, you may even find yourself receiving unsolicited offers from shady entities online offering to sell you lists.

At first this will probably seem like a great idea. With a large list in your possession you’ll have an instant channel to thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. Sending an offer to millions is sure to get sales right? We’re telling you, it’s a BAD idea.

Even with us laying out the case below why you should NOT do this, many of you will ignore it and do it anyway because the temptation is just too strong.

You think you’re smarter than Google? You’re not, and they’ll know you’re using a bought list

Here’s the problem: most email boxes used by the people you want to reach are provided and serviced by large mainstream tech companies, like Google or Yahoo or Microsoft (typically through webmail services). Their algorithms are really good at detecting who’s sending to a bought list, and who’s sending to a list they built up themselves.

There are quite obvious and discernible differences in the behavior of people who receive emails from entities they know (and want to hear from) versus people who receive emails from likely spammers. Webmail providers measure how often emails are opened or trashed, how often people click on links in the emails, and how often people complain — just to point at a few of the metrics involved. When you send to a bought list, you’re basically advertising this fact to Webmail providers based largely on how people react to your emails.

Being labelled a spammer hurts your sender reputation

People who did not ask to receive your emails will often be annoyed to receive them. Emails you send to a bought list fall into the category of spam, which will severely damage your sender reputation with the big webmail companies, but can also be potentially illegal.

Why should you care about damaging your sender reputation?

When your sender reputation gets hurt, fewer of your emails will get delivered. At first this might be a modest drop in delivery rates, but if you persist in the activity your rates will continue to decline until delivery is non-existent.

The more emails you’re sending, the more drastic steps the webmail providers will take to keep your emails away from their customers.

And if you’re thinking that just means the ‘spam box’ it doesn’t. If your reputation drops enough, webmail providers will simply choose not to deliver your email entirely.

So you’re planning then on just swapping out sending domains?

Some people regularly change the email addresses they’re using to send campaigns to bought lists in the hope of getting around the damaged reputation of another domain.

The problem with this approach is webmail providers always treat new domains with a healthy dose of skepticism. Until they know the sender, they won’t deliver a large number of emails from you — they’ll defer delivery while they measure the results of a small portion of your overall send. If the portion they measure isn’t looking good, the rest of your send will never arrive.

That’s why (like building up good credit) you’re always better off sending from the same domain and proving to webmail providers that all emails from that domain are following best practices. When you have a warmed-up and trusted sending domain that’s incredibly valuable, and you’ll get your best results from email marketing. Also when recipients know the company that’s sending them emails, they’ll open them more, click on them more, and report them less — which all adds to a better reputation and thus even better delivery rates.

Fixing the damage from bought lists can take a long time

If your sender reputation is badly damaged from sending to bought lists, repairing that reputation can take a long time. And worse, webmail providers are not going to provide you with much feedback (for fear of alerting spammers to their tactics) so it’s near impossible to tell when you’re on the right track. Even if you change your sending habits, it could take six months or longer before you start seeing the results in your delivery rates.

This is why it’s always best to stick to email marketing best practices. It takes longer to deliver big results, but the reward at the end is consistent and recurring revenue.

The YNOT Adult Affiliate Marketing Guide is a free resource designed to help webmasters, internet marketers and web developers earn recurring and sustainable revenue from promoting adult industry goods and services.