Should You Pay for Leads to Expand Your Online Business?

The common thinking among many Online business owners is that
you are never supposed to buy email lists because the people on that
list don’t know you. After all, you don’t know for sure they are open to
what you are selling. They may mark you as spam and get you banned
from email services.

All those things are true, in general, but there are certain lists that
absolutely are worthwhile to buy. So you shouldn’t dismiss buying leads
altogether because there is a right way and wrong way to go about it.
You just have to be very careful about how you proceed because there
are risks.

Most Lists Contain High-Target Customers

You should only buy leads if there is a high probability that they are going
to convert. What you don’t want is a list of people that you essentially are
going to be cold-calling — via email — because that’s going to be low-
converting.

Obviously, the best leads — and the optimal way to reach people — focus
primarily on customers who have interacted with you at some point or
another, either through your squeeze page or your sales page or your
YouTube videos or on social media or what have you.

Those people have already opted-in, so they have in effect given you an
implicit permission to contact them. As a result, they are going to be far
more likely to open you email and, more importantly, to act on your call
to action.

This is a very important point because if people haven’t opted-in to
receive your emails, it can be very dangerous for you.

How Much Should You Pay?

Now, you see a lot of companies out there that will sell you thousands of
email addresses for $99 and the like. You may be wondering if these are
a good option.

It’s a good idea to proceed with caution. If you have done business with
the company in the past or the company has been recommended to you
by somebody that you trust, then it may be a good idea to consider
buying a list from them and trying them out.

Risk vs Reward

Buying lists can be a big expense, so what you have to consider is the
value that you are getting for your money. It can be a financial burden
and there also are other risks involved.

For example, you can seriously harm your reputation if you buy the
wrong list because when you buy a list and contact people who never
heard of you before, they can send it to their spam folder.

Whenever they do this, it sends a notification to the email service. If it
happens often enough, it can lower your sender score, which can affect
your domain’s ability to send emails through that email service in the
future — even if they are legitimate emails to people who have asked
you to contact them.

Don’t Get Banned

If enough people mark your unsolicited emails as spam, you will
eventually get banned on some of the biggest email providers, such as
Yahoo and Gmail.

If that happens, you are going to have to shut down your website and
start over with a new one.

That’s not going to put you out of business, but it will delay your efforts to
get your business up and running. Plus there will be the additional
expense of buying new domains, setting up new pages, re-establishing
your autoresponder, not to mention the opportunity costs associated with
being offline.

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