

Ask HN: Purchasing Email Lists - philip1209

I have a client that is insisting on spending thousands of dollars on email lists to plug into our CRM system.<p>These email list businesses all seem like complete scams to me. When I bring up CAN-SPAM, both legally and with spam filters, he says that others get around that and he wants me to figure it out. He says that lots of his peers do it in a "legal and rational" way. We're already spending money on a CRM email system, so he wants to get the value out of that rather than use facebook ads or google adwords.<p>Does anybody have advice / stats / articles to help me talk him out of this? Or, if I'm completely wrong, does anybody have advice on this practice?
======
ggchappell
A few random thoughts for you.

I used to have huge ethical issues with spam. Not so much anymore, since the
anti-spammers have gotten such a clear upper hand in the arms race, making
spam only a minor annoyance for anyone who cares about it at all.

But that means that spam-based marketing is stupid. You know it. I know it.
Your client doesn't. You want to convince him. Is that going to happen?
Someone who has already decided to spend thousands of dollars to do something
that he thinks is an industry-standard practice, is hardly going to be easy to
dissuade. Yes, you could look for those statistics. You'd almost certainly
find them. But would it help?

That said, here are some questions that I feel like I might be asking myself,
if I were you:

\- Is your client asking you to open yourself up to a lawsuit? Is this a
problem for you?

\- Is your client asking you to help him damage your reputation?

\- You seem to be interested in keeping a good long-term relationship with
your client. However, you have seen that he is clueless about how to obtain
new customers (= sources of revenue, which is where he gets the money to pay
you). Does this affect the value you place on your relationship with him?

------
abraxasz
I'm genuinely interested in the following question: why would anybody think
that spam based advertising works?

I'm not in the business of marketing so I have no idea whether this is common
practice in the business, but just looking at the way I (and the people I
know) interact with their email clients, it seems to me that unsolicited mail
ads achieve nothing. They may even be harmful to the business: I don't receive
much of these thanks to gmail's excellent filter, but I know that it would
really annoy me to receive unwanted ads..

------
paulhauggis
if you have your own mailing list, emails work very well (it's double-opt in).

My ex-boss bought $5000 worth of mailing lists against my advice. The result
was a .0001% click through rate and a banning from our server provider.

Unless the lists are tailored to your industry and you know exactly how they
were obtained (which is nearly impossible), it's not worth it.

You can try to advise your client. But like my boss, they may just need to
make the mistake themselves.

