Bridal Lead Lists: Crap-tastic Wedding Marketing

Buying email lists for your wedding business is a craptastic idea.

Maybe you’ve seen the ads.  Bridal leads from various sources like bridal registries, wedding publications and other wedding related sources promise 5,000 bride emails on the cheap.

First of all, there is nothing cheap about going down this road.

The cost to your business is high, and I’m not talking about the expenses from your pocket book.

The Real Cost of Buying Email Leads

Read ‘em and weep.

1. These lists are full of dead emails.  No matter what you’re told when you purchase them, there is NO WAY to make sure the list has been purged of zombie (bogus) email addresses.  That’s why they come with that sneaky disclaimer.

2. There is no way to guarantee that any of these prospective clients are actually interested in your service.  They could be couples whose date has passed or who have already booked someone.

3. To the ones who are not your potential clients (and they will be legion!) you are just another spammer!  They didn’t ask to receive information from you, and this is NOT a strategy for a good first impression.

4.  This list may be sold to dozens or hundreds of vendors.  You have no idea how many times this list has had the crap spammed out of it.

5. Purchased email lead lists are typically very poor in quality.  You can expect a response from only about 1 out of 100 emails at best.

This leads us to the big question.

What are you going to do with this list?  

You can’t just load it up into your email marketing service because it violates their terms of service and they will kick your butt out fast.  Why? Because they know these list are full of people who did not request your information (hello, spammer!) and sending emails to them will destroy their deliverability numbers.

Email Deliverability: all the issues which stop your emails from arriving in your recipient’s inbox, including but not limited to doing dumb ass things like sending 100 emails at once from your Gmail account.

If you try to send a mass email from your AOL, Yahoo or Gmail account most of them will be blocked, and the remainder will end up in the bride’s Spam folder.  Use an email marketing service and follow their guidelines to make sure your email gets delivered.

Sending unsolicited emails is illegal according to the CAN-Spam Act and you can be sued for up to $16,000 per violation.  Read more about what you can and can’t do with a bridal email list here.

Look, I know its tempting to short-cut the process of lead generation, but this a terrible path to go down.

People buy from businesses they know, like and trust.  This doesn’t even come close.

Don’t be a spammer!

What do you think about bridal lead lists?

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