On the second day of Listmas, my data showed to me … 2 purchased lists.
Did you know that people in the email delivery space hate list purchases? We really do. It’s because we know how strongly linked permission is to customer success.
I’ve spent some time in the past discussing things like permission and policy, but I haven’t really talked much about purchased lists. Really, there’s one blog post where I spend a lot of time talking about purchased lists.1 (And, yes, I know that there’s one post regarding appending and purchased lists,2 but I don’t spend much time talking about why.)
But just because I haven’t really mentioned it before doesn’t mean that I don’t have an opinion. Purchased lists are bad news. They indicate a lack of permission, which, in turn, results in higher spam complaints, increased bulk folder placement, and lower overall delivery. Why is this? Well, it’s because email users are not only your consumers; they’re also the product sold by the mailbox providers. Anything that causes those consumers to want to spend less time looking at mail (and the ads helpfully inserted by the mailbox provider over to the side of the web interface) costs them money. And a lot of that can be attributed to a lack of permission.
So, how do those providers take care of their users, the product that they’re selling to the advertisers? They implement spam filters and block senders who would cause a poorer experience for those users. Filters based on mass voting (“This message comes from a sender that many of our other users…”, or machine learning (“This message looks like messages….”), or even simple content filters. And what kinds of messages are more likely to tick the boxes for getting sent to the spam folder or even blocked:
- Messages with blue backgrounds
- Messages sent to purchased lists
- Messages consisting of images with no text
So there’s a reason email service providers prohibit purchased lists.3 It’s not because the ESP is mean. It’s because they’re listening to the gatekeepers who are saying, “We want to block messages sent to purchased lists because our users don’t want to see them.”
…And that’s why they’re having slow delivery.
Footnotes
- Mickey Chandler, “The Recession Has Forced Us to Drop This Etiquette.” (Feb. 22, 2010), https://www.spamtacular.com/2010/02/22/the-recession-has-forced-us-to-drop-this-etiquette/. ↩︎
- Mickey Chandler, Are Appended Lists Really Purchased Lists? (Jan. 20, 2011), https://www.spamtacular.com/2011/01/20/appended-lists-really-purchased-lists/ ↩︎
- See: e.g.: Laura Atkins, Purchased Lists and ESPs: 9 Months Later (Feb. 1, 2016), https://wordtothewise.com/2016/02/purchased-lists-and-esps-9-months-later/; and Laura Atkins, Purchased Lists and ESPs (May 13, 2015), https://wordtothewise.com/2015/05/purchased-lists-and-esps/. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
