At first glance using one of the email list brokers looks a fast track method of kick starting your mailing list. In reality though you would do well to get even a part return on your investment and that’s the least of your worries.
To understand why you need to understand how consumers perceive spam. When a consumer receives an unwanted email from a company they don’t know they consider it to be spam. It doesn’t matter that you are completely compliant to all laws and the list brokers you purchased your sales leads from all used double optin to build their mailing lists.
Being legal means you can’t be prosecuted, it doesn’t stop the subscriber from hitting the ‘Report Spam’ within their Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account. It can take as little as 2 complaints per 1000 emails to get your email server temporarily blocked and not much more to make that a permanent ban.
According to the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (www.maawg.org) 69% of Americans and 73% of Britains define spam as “an email I did not request.”
Being able to report what a consumer believes to be spam is the reason any self respecting web based email marketing software 
company will not allow you to import your email marketing lists without a permission confirmation being required from each the new subscribers.
Using email list brokers is bad for business. While it may not get you in trouble with the law it can get you in serious trouble with your hosting provider, get you and your company labelled as a spammer and ruin you or your companies good name.
Apart from the above problems facing anyone tempted to use email list brokers, the actual value of the email addresses purchased should be carefully considered. Apart from the subscribers who don’t understand why you are emailing them and delete your message or worse, hit the ‘report spam’ button, how many of those left are going to be your target audience?
Depending on the niche, open rates of double optin subscribers range from 15% to 40%. It will be a lot less from a list of addresses purchased and emailed cold.
Email List Rental
Renting the use of one of the email marketing services subscriber base is far safer than using email list brokers and should yield much better results with the right marketing campaign.
These lists are double optin and they have asked to receive details of offers like yours. The emails are sent by the email marketing company so you have zero risk of getting your servers or hosting banned for spam. The main advantage rental services have over email list brokers though is that they want your repeat custom.
While someone selling a list of emails can walk away with your money and not care what you do with that list, the companies that rent their list to you wants your marketing campaign to be a success.
The downside of course is that you don’t actually get the email addresses, you give your sales message to them and they blast it out for you to their list. They have worked hard to build their lists and they aren’t going to simply hand it over!
You can counter this by marketing a free offer and getting their subscribers onto your own lists so you can run a complete marketing campaign to them rather than just 1 blast.
At the end of the day nothing beats having your own list of subscribers, it’s why marketers continue to build their own. Save your money and avoid email list brokers. Use it instead to test your marketing campaigns by using one of the rental options. You can read a review of some of the better companies by clicking here.
