One of the tempting thing for a new startup to do is to rent or buy an email list and send an email blast to hundreds of thousands or millions people. You can do a search online and quickly find that there are vendors out there that claims to have targeted list of opted-in or even double opted-in email addresses. The amazing thing is these lists only cost a few hundreds dollars or less. They even claim to have services that guarantee hundred of thousand visitors to your site overnight.

Before you waste your money, think about these things:

1. No matter what the sales rep tell you, of those millions of emails, maybe 100 are your target audience. These 100 people will be pissed at you for spamming them and probably hit the “Report Spam” button. The rest of the emails are either invalid, email addresses from China or Kazakhstan, or of people that are sicked of getting spammed from the same email vendor. They will probably hit the “Report Spam” as well.
2. Your website domain will get black listed fairly quickly with ISP and mail servers. When this happen, you won’t be able to send legit email to customers or anyone. You’ll have to change the domain, the hosting server, the name, etc.
3. You lose all the money and won’t get a refund because the vendor made you pay first and made you sign a contract that say you won’t get a refund.

If it was that easy to reach millions of people, you think companies will still spend money on marketing? You’d have a better return for your money by handing out money to people on the street and ask them to go to your site. The first thing I would do is try out Google Adwords. If is so much easier to convert a lead when they are actively looking for what you are selling than to try to sell to someone who’s already pissed because you’re spamming them.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.