Why You Should Never EVER Buy One

Building a good-quality email list might seem like a daunting task.

In fact, you might be tempted to take the quick route and just buy an email list for your business. After all, it’s hard to say not to the promise of a list of leads you did not have to build yourself.

However, buying an email list is rarely as good as it sounds.

In fact, it could end up with your business getting blocked by email providers like Gmail and Outlook. Or worse, these lists could get you into some legal hot water.

Let’s break down how buying an email list could have some nasty consequences.

Low-Quality Leads

Most email lists you could purchase will be jam-packed with low-quality leads.

Think about it this way.

When you buy an email list, you are not involved in the process of sourcing the list. This means that you won’t know how recent the email addresses are, where they have been sourced from or their legitimacy.

You could end up with a list of old email addresses or worse, with a list full of emails that were obtained illegally or without the consent of those users.

In those cases, you could end up paying large fines for emailing addresses that were obtained illegally. After all, we live in a GDPR and CASL world, where multiple companies have already been fined with hundreds of millions of dollars over regulation violations.

Consequences of High Bounce Rates and Spamming

Due to how likely it is to end up with a list full of low-quality leads by buying it, this list will also increase your email bounce rates and spam scores.

An increase in these two metrics could have devastating effects on your business. For once, high bounce rates or spam scores can be seen as abuse by email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp or Hubspot. They could then ban your business from their platforms, locking you out of your legitimate contact lists and historical email data.

In a worst-case scenario, which is not that unlikely, email service providers such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo may categorize your IP or domain as a spam email sender. This would make it so almost every single email coming from your business will end up in users’ spam folders.

This could have serious repercussions on your business that could last for years.

How to properly and QUICKLY build an email list

Now, it’s not all gloom and doom when it comes to properly building an email list.

In fact, there are ways to make the process incredibly quick and automated. So time is not a concern in this case.

The main way you can quickly automate this process is by using a web scraper.

Scraping Emails with a Web Scraper

Web scraping relates to the automated extraction of data from any website.

You can use a web scraper to select specific data from a website and download it in a more convenient format, such as an Excel spreadsheet.

With web scraping, you get to choose the source of the emails you will be scraping. Saving you from many of the risks we’ve mentioned.

Furthermore, web scraping is also an automated process, meaning that it will also save you time.

In fact, we’ve written an in-depth guide on how to use a web scraper to scrape emails from any website. You can also read our guide on to create a b2b email list for free.

Lead Generation via Web Scraping

With the power of web scraping in your hands, why stop just at scraping emails?

What if your lists could also contain key customer information such as their address, phone number, business information and more?

Web scraping can power-up your lead generation efforts overnight.

Curious to learn more? Read our guide on how to automate your lead generation process with web scraping.

Closing Thoughts

You can now see why buying an email list is a bad idea. Not only does it provide you with low-quality addresses but it can also put your entire business in a lot of risks.

With automated tools such as web scrapers, you’ll be able to quickly and safely build your email lists without sacrificing your peace of mind.

Which web directory will you scrape first?