Many entrepreneurs new to running an online business (and without much experience in digital marketing) may be tempted to buy email lists from other sources, because they want to grow their new business quickly and believe purchased lists would achieve what they want. Purchased lists are lists are unauthorized and are not opted-in to receive any emails or messages from you in the first place. You will have big concern if your email service provider/program would even allow you importing a purchase email list and sending messages to the purchased list.
The email program that you use could be Activecampaign, Getresponse, Mailchimp, or others. Some of them may be complex enough to provide the ability to create execute not only normal email marketing campaigns, but may let you set up marketing automation campaigns. Most email service providers keep track and know everything you do and the purchased lists you have imported are questionable. Once you start sending messages to your lists, more problems will be exposed including:
- The deliverable rate will be very low.
- The bounce rate will be really high.
- Needless to mention, the open rate will be close to zero (simply because the receivers do not know you, and they have not ever opted-in to receive any form of messages from you).
Whether the entrepreneurs like it or not, they would have to build their own mailing lists. They do not like it in the first place because it takes time. To make it sound worse, a properly managed email campaign that works well will require much effort to fine tune and optimize. Email list building is only one stage in the entire internet marketing process. Actually, you will almost always need a website or some landing pages for your email marketing and automation campaigns to work, regardless of how well you can run and optimize your email campaigns.
Create your own website if your plan is to make your online project a success. You may simply use a blog, and even sign up a free blog that is provided by Google on Blogger or other free blogging platforms. But with your own domain, people and your potential customers are going to take you more seriously in business. With this approach, you should find out and learn how to install WordPress for your website. Most entrepreneurs when they are starting they would have no idea what types of tools or platforms to use to build a website. They may think developing a site is far too complicated for them and they need a full time web developer to do it. Depending on what your online project is about, you may quickly create your site using some ready-to-use website builders such as Shopify, Weebly, etc where web hosting setup and maintenance have been taken care for you. Or you can simply stick with WordPress, and get a freelance developer to set up the installation, design your website theme, and handle the web hosting tasks on behalf of you.
