From time to time, you might be tempted to buy or rent an email data list, in the hope that you'll be able to send out a blanket email and score loads of new business. In the nicest possible terms, we'd strongly suggest you don't follow through on this temptation. Not only does sending out emails to unsolicited email lists go against our Acceptable Use Policy, the truth of it is that bulk sending of unsolicited emails (Spam) just doesn't work.
Why is this?
Well there are several reasons.
1. Bulk email lists, will always be, by their very nature, out of date. Despite reassurance from the company selling you the list, data goes stale VERY quickly (people change jobs, email addresses etc all the time) and nobody thinks to update a list provider when they move on (we know, how inconsiderate). This leads to bought/rented lists having high hard bounce rates (the % of emails that are sent to an invalid/inactive email address) which are a key indicator to Email Service Providers (ESP's) that you're sending out unsolicited email.
2. Bulk email lists WILL contain Spam traps. A spam trap is an abandoned email address (see point 1) that ESPs use to catch Spammers. If you send emails to an abandoned email address, your sender domain will get flagged up, and over time, will get blacklisted. This means that even if 99% of the time you're sending out timely, relevant and valued emails to your customers, that one time you succumb to temptation can flag your sender domain to the ESPs and prevent your future emails getting delivered.
We set our hard bounce back threshold at 5% in line with ESP industry standards. Campaigns generating a bounce back rate of higher than 5% will be throttled by Kulea, and risk being cancelled if bounce rates don't drop. This may appear overly strict, but we do it with love in our hearts. When you sign up to Kulea, we cherish your sender domain reputation. These measures are put in place to ensure that reputation is maintained.
In addition to throttling campaigns with high bounce rates, we ask every client to validate their sender domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to give your emails the best chance of getting seen, and we give you marketing automation tools so you can send out individual personalised AND persona-lised® communications that are delivered at the exact moment your customers are most interested. In short, we give you the tools to carry out your email marketing the right way.
So remember folks, when it comes to buying email lists, just say "no"!