The truth is this: it makes no logical sense for marketers to take an interest in purchased lists. Aside from the legal implications on the horizon, there can be no benefit to stunting your highest performing channel with data that doesn’t convert.

Not convinced? Here’s 6 reasons to avoid bought data now and forever:

Bought data is cold

Recipients who’ve chosen to receive your marketing emails have shown an active and recent interest in your brand; they’re warm and ready for your team to work on them. Bought data’s a different story. The prospects are unengaged, and there’s often no way of telling how old it is; it’s cold data. Unengaged contacts take longer to warm and even longer to convert, putting greater pressure on your team while incurring greater cost to your business. There’s very little chance of achieving the ROI that you’re after.

Bought data is a drain on your resources

The costs associated with cold, bought data are manifold. Get charged per contact by your ESP? That’s money down the drain for every unengaged contact you’ve acquired. And the more cluttered your list gets, the less efficient you’ll find your strategy becomes. On a pay-per-email contract? The same applies. Every cold email address is a detriment to your ROI.

Purchasing lists cripples your email marketing

So you’ve invested your hard-earned budget into a top email marketing platform, you’ve taken the time to train up your team, and your emails are looking better than ever. You’re ready to hit send on a huge campaign and watch the returns rack up. But you bought your email list for this campaign and – unknown to you or the seller – some of those emails are spam traps.

A spam trap is a fraud management tool used by the big ISPs to catch out malicious senders and marketers with poor data hygiene and acquisition practices. Bought data lists are peppered with traps. How do they get there? Check out this comprehensive guide from Laura Atkins for Word to the Wise.

The spam trap has no way of telling whether you’re a bad guy or an unsuspecting marketer, so you’ll be treated the same way as a spammer. Your sender reputation will start to deteriorate with every send and some of your best customers’ mail servers will block your emails from reaching them, causing those relationships to depreciate. You’re single-handedly shooting your ROI in the metaphorical foot

Bought data skews your reporting

If your contact list is riddled with cold or false data, it’s impossible to get an accurate measure of your email marketing’s performance; every campaign report you collect will be distorted by the non-opens, bounces and poor engagement rates associated with these addresses. This means that one of the most important features you’ve gained access to by investing in an ESP won’t work properly.

Purchased lists are a legal minefield

There’s no two ways about this point. Sending to bought data means you’re contacting people who haven’t opted in to receive your messages. In many jurisdictions, this is illegal practice – not to mention a poor introduction to your brand. And no one wants to be on the wrong side of the law when the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on 25th May 2018. Check out this blog post from dotmailer’s Chief Privacy Officer, James Koons, for a deeper dive into the legal implications of using purchased lists.

You could impair your marketing stack

The majority of ESPs are unable to provide a service to businesses that use purchased lists, in order to protect their customers – and themselves – from poor deliverability scores. A marketing team looking to graduate to a more empowering and scalable automation solution will struggle to get the best fit for their business, purely because top providers are unable to accommodate their bought data. And at the other end of the scale, an ESP without a robust anti-spam policy isn’t a clever investment of your time or resource.

At dotmailer, our Terms & Conditions prohibit the use of purchased lists, because we know that’s how you’ll get the best out of your strategy. And because we’re only interested in empowering marketers (and not punishing them), we work hard to ensure that you always have access to the most cutting-edge list growth and nurture tactics, along with the latest in sending best practice. Check out this whitepaper on list acquisition, or download our comprehensive guide to Deliverability.

This month, the Australian Privacy Principles (APP) came into effect – a comprehensive list of new privacy laws that apply to Australia.

If your brand operates in Australia, this will affect you. In particular, sweeps competitions, promotions, email campaigns and surveys – i.e. operations designed specifically to harvest customer data – will be affected.

In short, the new laws make it now compulsory for organisations in Australia to notify new and existing customers about all of the personal data they collect – and most importantly, what they’re going to do with it.

Many organisations already have an obligation to data privacy but now this covers a need to publish a ‘Notification of Data Collection’.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority, the responsible authority for oversight of the new regulation, has already stated that they will be naming and shaming brands that breach protocols. Obviously, The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) released guidelines towards compliance in late February – which are thankfully straightforward. Among the most prominent points are:

• ‘Opt-outs’ are now required to be very prominent in marketing materials – special consideration needs to be made for third-party data and ‘inferred consent’ entries.
• Classifications of tracking data (e.g. interaction data and cookies) now treated as personally identifiable data

The Association for Data Driven Marketing and Advertising (Australia’s DMA) has a massive online resource towards helping brands comply, including checklists and data breach responses. The below graphic illustrates their definitions towards compliance.

Could this be an end to the market in email lists? We can only wait and see how this plays out over the coming months. However, the issue of privacy is ever changing, and as a result we’ll be starting a new blog series on promoting international data hygiene, helping ensure good list hygiene and mitigating future risks in changes to privacy laws.

DISCLAIMER: This article is meant purely for reference, and should not be taken as formal legal advice. Please refer to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner for additional information.

You send me – one of your trusted peers and colleagues – an email letting me know about something cool you discovered.

Then I email you back saying thanks, and sharing a link I have with more information.

That’s how it works. You’d probably have been expecting a response or reply from me. It’s a mutually beneficial interchange. The sharing of information, the exchanging of value, the forging of a trusted relationship.

And this is exactly how it should be with email marketing. Because you want to forge trusted relationships with your customers and prospects, and you want to develop worthwhile value exchanges.

So why are so many businesses are still using a ‘no-reply’ in their email marketing messages?

When I’ve asked this question of marketers in the past, I’ve heard the stock answers many times: “nobody replies to emails these days”, “I don’t want my inbox cluttered”, “I don’t have the time to read them so what’s the point?”.

The point is this…

A ‘no reply’ address allows the user to make the assumption that you couldn’t care about them and what they have to say. Which is the exact opposite of the effect you wanted your email to have, isn’t it?

So, if you’re still using a ‘no-reply’ address in your email campaigns, here are some reasons why you need to stop:

1. Spam complaints

Not all recipients will look for an unsubscribe link. Many see the reply button as a mechanic for them to asked to be removed from future mailings.

But if you stop them using this method, either by bouncing their response or by using a noreply@ email address, the chances of your unsubscriber reporting you as spam go up, along with the potential damage to your email reputation and delivery rate.

2. You will miss out on being added to subscribers’ contact lists

One of the best ways to ensure your emails get into inboxes is by having recipients add your email address to their contact lists

If you are using a no-reply address why would anyone add this to their contact list? They are never going to be able to use it to email you!

What’s more, ISPs like Gmail and Yahoo can automatically add a contact to a contacts list/trusted sender list, following an interaction from the recipient.

So by encouraging or at least enabling a conversation via the reply button, you are helping to build your own deliverability rates.

3. You’ll limit your ability to bypass spam traps

Auto responses… exactly the type of responses you are avoiding and should be ignored, right?

Wrong.  Auto replies can provide a treasure trove of useful information for email marketers.

For example, you’ll discover email addresses that are no longer active, and contacts who have gone away.  By removing these addresses you will see an increase in your open rates and so be better placed to avoid hitting spam traps.

4. You may be damaging your brand online

This is probably the most important reason why you really shouldn’t be using a no reply address. Your recipients want to feel valued by you, and at the very least they want to feel you have an interest in what they have to say.

Seeing a no reply address or receiving an auto-response from you saying “do not reply to this email” can only leave them with the exact opposite impression. Namely, that you don’t want to hear what they have to say. And that’s not good for your brand.

5. You may be missing out on sales opportunities!

It’s true. Subscribers don’t only use the reply button to unsubscribe. There’s a good chance you’ll be missing out on replies from subscribers requesting more information, or asking for a call from you. You could be missing out on buying signals, or even orders!

What is unsolicited bulk email (SPAM)

Unsolicitedmessages being sent to numerous recipients via email is a textbook definition of the phenomenon we call Spam. But as Skip has argued in the past, this definition can be confusing and means different things to different people.

Spammers tend to collect email addresses in various ways; from websites, chat rooms and viruses that harvest people’s address books to dictionary attacks where they go through every combination of letters hoping to hit on actual email addresses. At Dotdigital, we run a permission-based system with tools like our Watchdog in place to identify problem lists. Naturally, a big part of this is protecting against poor data making it into the system and affecting reputation or deliverability.

So, how do you avoid the junk folder if your reputation and authentication are up to standard?

All spam filters have a long list of different criteria that will decide whether or not your email is junk and these can change on a daily basis. Some of the most commonly known include the use of spam words such as “!!!FREE!!!” and excessive use of CAPITAL LETTERS. Each email is scored for every occurrence so if you are forced to use a spammy word, avoid repetition if possible.

Below is an example of spam scoring for certain phrases by Spam Assassin, a popular open source mail filter. (The higher the score, the more spammy!)

There is no obligation 0.905 points

Risk free. Suuurreeee…. 2.051 points

Why Pay More? 1.249 points

SPF: sender matches SPF record -0.001 points

Spam assassin has some great further examples of scoring criteria on its website.

If your email’s total spam score passes a certain threshold, it will end up in the junk folder. Before you ask, I know what you’re thinking: what is the spam score threshold? Unfortunately we cannot say as it differs for every server, as this can be set by the systems department at the receiving end!

Common mistakes to avoid

Here is a list of other common mistakes we see that can result in emails getting junked:

Designing an HTML email in Microsoft Word; the code is sloppy and scores highly against spam filters

Sending tests multiple times to recipients within a company, there could be firewall issues here

Creating image heavy campaigns with no or little text (scores highly as filters can’t read images)

Over use of the exclamation mark

Use personalization

Having focused on things to avoid, it is also worth pointing out that there are things you can do to help avoid landing in the junk folder. Personalization is a good example (though you should be aware that if it’s in the subject line, this can ring spam alarm bells in the eyes of the recipient.) Not only can it increase the effectiveness of your campaign, it also pleases the junk filters as it tells them the sending isn’t entirely automated.

When creating your campaign in Dotdigital, make use of the ‘insert actions’ option as it will allow you to insert data you have mapped against your contact list; first name for example

So there you have some quick and easy tips on what to avoid, but also what to do, in order to prevent your messages being labelled as spam. As mentioned, I plan to write a follow-up post soon that will delve even further into this area and provide more practical tips and advice.