Those who do it swear that its effectiveness is not as catastrophic as the content on the internet claims it to be. And those who don't do it at all point out that there are simple and guaranteed methods to generate them.
In other words: buying a list of leads may deliver results in the short term. But the strategy comes with an expiration date, and the alternative is not that difficult or that expensive.
In today's text, we will explore this controversy from a very objective point of view. We will not go into what is right and what is wrong, but rather what leads companies to buy leads, and what this represents for the brand.
There are some situations where this seems to be the only possible strategy to even get leads. We cannot in good conscience say that these brands are wrong.
But at the same time, we will bring some alternatives usa email database to buying leads that, although they are not as cheap as buying them, will generate more qualified leads, which is the true objective of digital marketing at the Top of the Funnel.
Before we start talking about the validity of buying leads — that is, whether it is worth it — we also need to understand the reasons behind this purchase.
Why do businesses prefer to buy cold leads, which offer less chance of purchase, than generate their own leads?
The reasons are varied, but as you might imagine, many of them are related to the size of the business, its time in operation and the rush for results.
But some are also related to the type of marketing that the company is applying.
In fact, these are the main good reasons for buying leads. It's not that buying leads is a good idea in these cases, but the decision to buy leads is based on a real difficulty that these brands face.
There are bad reasons . These are related to the rush for results, exaggeration in the economy, etc.
We will expand more on this in the two topics below. Follow me:
“Good reasons” that lead to buying leads
In many cases, the company is just starting out and needs to sell urgently to stay in business.
In fact, this is the case for most companies that are opened in Brazil. It is not very common to find businesses that can afford to have 6 months of low performance as leads come in.
In these cases, she resorts to lead lists so that, while she generates her own, she can at least make a few sales here and there.
These companies will buy lists of leads online—we don’t provide links in this article, but they’re easy to find on Google—for very modest prices, a fraction of the price of a single month’s salary for a marketing team.
And with this list in hand, the company starts either making calls or sending emails. This technique is known as cold calling or cold emailing.
This is an honest reason. But there is another, much more in-depth one, which involves ABM — Account Based Marketing.
In this case, there are agencies specialized in finding leads and creating lists according to your segment.
These lists will be much more expensive, as they already have a more in-depth level of sophistication and also work even in the early stages of an Outbound Marketing strategy.
Read also: Active Outbound Prospecting — how to structure, leverage and be successful
“Bad reasons” for buying leads
The good reasons for buying leads are lack of resources or a more specific purchase, in the case of ABM.
All the good reasons revolve around this: business impossibilities or the search for new, more segmented opportunities.
The bad reasons are those related to over-economics — the stingy brand, which has resources to invest, but prefers the cheaper route.
Think about it: to create an Inbound Marketing strategy that generates leads every month, you need to hire strategists, copywriters, social media professionals, designers, etc.
And still invest in other Outbound resources, such as Google Ads.
All of this is an investment, since the result of these actions will certainly bring much better leads than any purchased list.
However, in addition to the expense involved, it is also necessary to wait a while to see these results. From 6 months to 1 year for Inbound strategies, and at least 1 month for Google Ads to understand your segment and your ads.
Companies that do not want to make these investments end up “cutting corners” and buying leads.
This is a mistake, as the leads are not of very high quality and you end up spending more and working harder to take advantage of them.
Read also: Inbound or Outbound? When to use one or the other
But what are the consequences of this? What exactly does buying leads do? Let’s talk about this in more detail below:
What happens when you purchase leads?
Our formal position here at Adtail is that you should not buy leads.
The problems this causes can be immediate or long-term, and they can be small or huge.
There are companies that have been buying leads for years and have never had a single problem. But there are also companies that send a single email campaign and have their subdomain banned from further sending.
Buying leads is a very complicated task because of this. You may face quite serious penalties if you follow this path, which will impact your marketing to the point of stopping some actions for a while.
Let's talk more about these cases below:
Ban on email providers
If you send too many emails that have never had any kind of contact with your brand, you may end up being banned from the email provider's trusted domains list.
One day your manager arrives with a list of 1,000 emails that no one knows where they came from. He just asks you to launch the campaign and you do.
None of these emails have ever been in contact with your brand before. When it reaches people with Gmail, it automatically goes to the Spam folder.
In other words: Gmail understood that you sent Spam because you actually sent Spam .
In the first campaign, no problems. In the second, too. But from the third onwards, Gmail got smart and blocked the zumzum domain for Spam.
What does this mean? That your entire domain zumzum is blocked by Gmail. Any email ending in zumzum will not reach anyone who uses Gmail.
And that's literally — you can test every email, even the one from the CEO, and it won't get delivered.
Therefore, if the ban occurs, it only impacts that subdomain, and not the entire domain.
Either way, you don't want to get banned. And too many bans from subdomains related to your main domain can also cause problems, greatly decreasing your chances of getting into the inbox.