What would you say if I asked you to hire guests for your wedding? I am not kidding, that's all the rage in Japan right now. If you don't have enough guests for your wedding, you can just hire a few.

Add a few thousand yen and they might even sing a song for you or praise all your virtues in front of the "real" guests.

Now, if you are running a B2B sales team, do you think you could do something similar for customers? I don't think so.

What would you tell your teammates? "Let's hire some customers for this quarter."

I am sorry for the quip there but when I see teams buying business email lists for sales outreach I feel that it is quite similar to hiring customers.

Understandably, you might have had to resort to some last-minute measures for a campaign and buy an email list of some marketplace. But relying on email lists bought off marketplaces as a central strategy is bound to fail.

In this article, I want to point out a few reasons why you shouldn't buy business email lists. Let's get started.

Bought lists have low-quality data

The first and most obvious reason is that business email lists bought by sales managers suffer from poor data quality.

Even if you contact an email, the response rate of business email lists bought off marketplaces can be as low as 1 percent.

This means you might end up with hundreds of emails of business contacts that are not even up to date or deactivated business emails.

And no matter how many business mailing list companies try to convince buyers otherwise, they will always sell outdated data.

To make things worse, business address lists on marketplaces like eBay and Amazon are not even human-verified.

So you might end up buying business mailing lists full of dead business emails or misspelled business names. When it comes to business email data quality, the adage "you get what you pay for" is more relevant than ever here.

Lack of verified contact details

When business email lists are bought off marketplaces, they lack contact details. That's because business mailing list companies who offer business addresses and business emails do not verify any of them.

This means that when you buy business mailing lists from such companies, all you get is a bunch of business email addresses and business names (and sometimes company titles).

Sales teams end up in the dark when they use business mailing lists lacking verified contact details for outreach campaigns.

It comes down to the simple fact that unverified business address and business email address data hinder your lead generation processes. 

It is no secret that business mailing lists bought off marketplaces leave businesses open to spam complaints and legal risks.

What usually happens when you send an unverified business email or call a business contact after finding their details on one such list is that you get labeled as a spammer by the recipient.

And guess what? This will damage your professional reputation!

Bought email lists have incomplete data

So, if you are still wondering why business email lists bought off marketplaces are not ideal for lead generation campaigns, let's take a look at how they affect your leads.

When businesses sign up for mailing list services like the ones mentioned above, they often provide incomplete data because it is easier that way.

For example, they might leave out the company name or the job title of their contacts - which means that all you have is an email address and a first name.

A lot of times this also happens when businesses subscribe to newsletters via online forms. But usually, mailing list companies will work around this by filling in the missing information with dummy text.

Now, when you don't have the verifiable details of your business leads - like company name or job title - it makes it hard to prioritize outreach. And the data that companies are willing to give away voluntarily is usually incomplete as well.

But even worse, if any lead data you already have for an email address changes over time (for instance, a person leaves their job) then you risk reaching out to them with outdated information!

This means that using business email lists bought off marketplaces can lead to lead generation failure and lost revenue for sales teams.  

Bought email lists harm your email deliverability and IP reputation

The reason why it is so important to prioritize valid email addresses for outreach is that email deliverability depends on main factors like IP reputation.

When you use business mailing lists bought off marketplaces, they usually contain spam traps and gray-listed email addresses.

Spamtraps are inactive or unused email accounts that can lead your emails to end up in the spam folder of business contacts.

Gray-listed email addresses on the other hand are real business emails that your messages might never reach depending on their current activity. And if they do reach your leads at this time, chances are that their inbox filters will flag them as junk mail later on!

Both of these scenarios represent email deliverability risks.

So, even though it might seem like a great idea to buy business mailing lists off of online marketplaces from unknown sources - from the outside looking in - it is never a good idea.

In fact, buying these types of business email lists not only puts your email reputation at risk but also directly harms your company's bottom line!

Anyone who has ever been responsible for running marketing or sales campaigns knows that there are a lot of ways to get false leads vs. real ones. Buying email lists is just one way that people accidentally destroy their branding and fail to meet their target goals by engaging with false contacts.

If you are serious about lead generation from cold emails, a much better way is to get verified contact details for leads that fit your ICP. With the help of multiple data sources and data mining, the latest prospecting software like Truebase can find you verified contact information and provide a complete picture of accounts and leads for better conversion.

And it will effectively cost you less than buying business email lists off a marketplace.

Don't believe it? Test our claims in a 14 day free trial of Truebase and see the difference for yourself.

Want to know more? Drop us a word at growth@truebase.io.