What To Expect When Buying A Cold List

When purchasing a cold list, that is a list that you have never made a point of contact with before, expectations can be high. After all, you did pay good money. On a business side, it makes complete sense that you expect good results.

On a consumer side, however, they often see the emails as spam. They have never heard of your product, company or brand and here you are invading their inbox trying to sell a product or service.

To make thing simple let’s say we bought a list of 100 contacts. We did some great segmentation and got only the job titles we needed, in areas we serve with budgets that fit our ideal customer.

We craft an amazing email selling Product A, showing off features and explain why it will make their life easier. We may even have a few merge variables ensuring customization. We send it to all 100 contacts.

Now once we hit send a few things happen with a cold list.

We will automatically without fail get a few hard bounces (This will be around 5%). We will also get a few soft bounces as well (we will average it out to about 10%).

So right there 15 of our contacts didn’t get our message. No problem though we have 85 more.

If our message gets into their inbox (not their spam) the reader will assess a few things before opening. Who is it from? Do they trust it? Is the subject line relevant to them?

On a cold list, a high open rate is anywhere between 15–20%. So only 17 people opened our email at best (Taking the rate from emails delivered, not include any bounces).

So what happened to the other 68? They don’t trust it, so they send it to their trash without opening it or it delivered to their spam.

17 people though, that’s not bad that’s 1/5 from our bought list. But we don’t want to just have them open your email. We want them to click the CTA.

If we have a click-through rate of 5%, which again is high. We will have 4.25 clicks and a click to open rate of 25%.

So from our 100 bought emails only 4.25 clicked. Now we will lose about 2/3 of them on our landing page. Leaving only 1.4 people who followed through.

Now most usually buy more than 100 emails. As you increase your list size you convert more. But remember these numbers were all at the higher side.

Your results may be less than this. To increase your list, you also might have to open your segmentation parameters. Also in B2E the burn rate of emails is about 25%. So every year a quarter of your list is rubbish.

You can also kill a list by contacting it over and over. There is a point of diminishing point of return, which can be easily crossed.

Buying a list can get your brand across to people you might not have reached otherwise. Understanding the value of the list is another thing. Ensure to capitalize on your list by crafting an excellent email, segmenting before buying and not over deploying.

Add a few forms to your website to capture emails either off a download or a newsletter/blog sign-up. This list will be eager to hear from you, and already trust your incoming email. Ensure to treat them with respect though or else you might get more unsubscribes than conversions.