Once in a while, I still see services where you can buy email lists.
As far as my knowledge goes, the action of buying an email list itself isn’t illegal.
A huge maybe. I say that with 80% confidence. I mean, unethical tech companies buy and sell data all the time.
But I can say with 100% confidence that sending promotional emails to a paid email list is against the law. Plus, it’s a huge waste of money.
Here are some reasons why.
1. The most obvious reason is that it’s against the CAN-SPAM Act.
2. You don’t know if the email addresses are active, unmonitored or non-existent. And that leads to my next reason.
3. Low response rate. If a large portion of the emails are dead emails, you’re not going to have many people reading your unwanted emails in the first place. And if they do…
4. They’ll most likely ignore or unsubscribe from you. On top of that…
5. If you’re using an email marketing software like Mailerlite, Mailchimp, or Activecampaign, they’ll most likely, if not they will boot you off their platform since it’s against their terms of service.
It’s no different than being a lottery winner who spends all their winnings within five years and ending up broke. You instantly gain a huge amount of email addresses. After some time of emailing them, the list slowly dwindles. The only difference is, you’re breaking the law.
So if you value your business’ reputation and your freedom, then I suggest starting building your email list manually.
In How to Become an Email Titan, I share 8 different methods to build a nice, responsive email list. And of course, the main teaching, as in the emails you write to them will be taught in that book too.
You can get it here.