Revisiting Email List Rental

The notion of email list rental surfaces every few years, after we've had a chance to forget the terrible ROI from our last hopeful test. We are all searching and digging for new customer acquisition opportunities, for ways to increase overall responsiveness from our prospects. And it seems that email list rental is again a hot topic.

Today, email opt-in lists are supposed to be "cleaner" and "enhanced" with more traditional RFM data- some sources even work with the co-ops to leverage their wealth of transactional data. You can also rent an email address to match a postal address for a prospect.

Unfortunately, the email marketing industry has been plagued with spam and over-saturation of contacts to consumers- with most companies mailing twice a week and some companies even mailing daily. Email is almost too good (cheap) to be true!

When it comes down to ROI, the numbers speak for themselves. For example:

1) You spend $6,000 to rent 100K qualified email addresses (approx. $0.06 per email address) and another $500 to deploy the campaign.

2) If you assume lower open rates and click through rates than your email housefile, then perhaps you might get an 8% open rate and a 4% click through rate, delivering 320 visitors to your site.

3) If those 320 visitors have a 3% conversion rate on your website, then you end up with 10 transactions. At a $150 AOV, your total demand is $1,500.

Clearly, spending $6,500 for $1,500 in demand is not profitable. We have run the math several ways, and even with a postal address, it's difficult to make the ROI work.


If you are one of the few lucky ones who can make email list rental work, please share your story with us!