How marketing lists work
Mailing lists are lists of either postal or email addresses that can be used by a marketer to send promotional mails. You can build a mailing list yourself through your website, or you can buy or rent it for specific mail blasts.
How to get a marketing list?
Building a mailing list yourself
Using your website or an existing newsletter to gather the contact data for your prospects list is probably the best way of generating a marketing list. You can even ask your customers for their email address at your shop, or use a promotion to get them.
Advantage
By building a marketing list yourself, you can be 100% sure that the people on it are interested in your services and will not consider you a spammer.
Buy from mailing list brokers
Some companies specialise in gathering and then selling mailing lists, segmented by demographics, job titles or geographical location. Some can even be commissioned to build a marketing list on your behalf to your exact specifications.
Disadvantage
While using a reputable broker to buy mailing lists is generally not a big risk, the results you will get will be worse than if you had built the list yourself.
Spamming
If you buy from somebody who is not a legal mailing list broker, you risk all your emails being classified as spam, and people making formal complaints about your company. Buy only options in mailing lists refer to an situation where people have confirmed that they are agreeable with their data being shared with third parties.
Rent a mailing list
Some companies offer the possibility of renting their mailing list for a single mailing, for example to offer a related product to their audience. In most cases, they will not allow you to use your existing email solution and will require you to provide them the creatives and mail them to their users.
Confidentiality
This is to safeguard the confidentiality of their subscribers, and if somebody just offers to give you the email addresses, beware of using them. It may be somebody who is just trying to make a quick buck by reselling a spam list.
Management of mailing lists
Business marketing lists
B2B email lists are usually sourced from the public listings of business leads or business events. They email addresses which usually degrade quickly, since people change jobs and stop using their old work address or phone number.
Consumer mailing lists
Consumers are more protected from spam than businesses, and for that reason, it is important never to send a mailing to a list that is not legitimate. Addresses on a consumer mailing list stay active for longer, since people don't change their personal contact details so often.