Well, you may be looking to buy a Database like an email list to get some quick business by contacting the prospects. A database usually consists of the names, company name, email addresses, and other details which you may be looking for. But in reality, it can prove a great wastage of money.

There are a number of disadvantages associated with buying a database you are looking for.

Let us have a look at the top disadvantages of buying a database:-

• Poor Quality Database

The database you purchased might not have the information of most ideal and suitable prospects for your business. Be aware, that you may end up spending your resources on a poor quality database. The problems you might have to face with such database are:-

• There is data redundancy, and a lot of data can be missing or incomplete like missing names, incomplete email addresses etc.
• The biggest and the most common problem is that the data is obsolete, i.e. the information is out-of-date. A large share of it, sometimes more than 40% of the data may be invalid or outdated.
• The data may not be legally collected by the database provider, for ex-The people in the database may not have chosen to be a part of any list.

• Other Companies Also Might be Using the Same Database 

This is the thing which most of the buyers fail to consider when buying a database from the vendors. The same list you buy is also purchased by other buyers and they are using the same list of users for marketing and other purposes. There is a possibility that the people in the database are already frustrated with the number of marketing emails they receive. They might have added numerous filters in place, and chances are they might never see your emails due to the filters they have implemented.

• Poor Response Rate

By buying a poor database, your response rate can be as low as 5%. Most of the people from the database will never even open your email. If as little as 5% of the people open your emails, there is a great possibility that almost none of them click on your sales page. For healthy and targeted lists, the average response rate should be around 20-25% and that can bring good conversions. But a purchased list having poor database does not bring a substantial open rate, and therefore your campaign just goes in vain due to very low conversions or just not at all.

• Threat to Your Reputation

Another serious problem with buying database is knocking down your reputation. Imagine you have put your company name in Google Search and you find frustrated remarks of people on your company because of unsolicited emails, in the top of the results!

It is really alarming and your PR will seriously go down.

Getting a good reputation of your brand or company is a difficult task in itself. By sending unsolicited emails, you would bring a bad reputation to your company, and therefore it has to be avoided.

• Spam

If a number of messages you send are marked as spam, your email service provider can take serious action against your account. Your email account can be closed, or you may be fined or there can be some legal action taken by your email service provider against you. The act of buying an email list is considered as a serious violation of the service agreement by almost all of the email service providers.

Image Source

There are laws in the countries against sending unsolicited bulk emails like the CAN-SPAM Act in the USA. You might not be wrong on your side, but if a lot of recipients complain about your emails, you might have to face costly consequences, or you may have to prove your innocence.

• Reputed Email Marketing Service Providers Don’t Allow the Use of Purchased Database

If you are using an email marketing software or a service for sending email campaigns, you will find that all the reputed services will allow you to use only the opt-in email lists and not the purchased lists. They always cross verify the source of the database you have.

If you think that you can better use a non-reputed email marketing service then again, you better change your decision. The non-reputed email marketing services which allow purchased lists have poor delivery of the emails.

The purchased email lists used by other customers can affect the delivery of your email campaigns done through these non-reputed email marketing services. So, if you really want to get into the inboxes of all your prospects for the business, it is always better not to use the bought database from the vendors.

What could be done?

Well, the best and obvious solution is building your own email list which should be done from scratch! So, how to do this?

• Build a website to attract customers to sign up for your email list. If you are giving a great content to the people, you can ask them something in return, and that is their email addresses. It is really a matter of trust which has to be built in every business.

Image Source

• Offer customers an incentive for exchanging their email addresses to you. It can be a short guide or a good interactive tutorial to understand what they are looking for.
• Put opt-in forms on your website which can be a floating bar, welcome gates, after post forms, light box and more.
• Design a great landing page, and take the users from there into buying your services and products

Bottom-line

It is not of worth to buy a database from vendors since it gets proved the wastage of money and resources. The best method is to avoid the purchase of database directly and instead grow your database from your own organic efforts. The database thus created will be targeted, responsive and people will be ready to hear you, which will in-turn bring more conversions.