How to Buy an Email List for Affiliate Marketing & 3 of the Best List-Building Services

If you’re an affiliate marketer, there’s a good chance you’ve heard people preach the gospel of email marketing.

After all, for every $1 invested in email marketing, users can expect a $36 – $42 return on investment.

Considering those ridiculous ROI numbers, it’s no surprise that email marketing is such a hot topic.

However, to do email marketing, you need people to market to, and if you don’t have an email list, then you’re out of luck.

There are two options when it comes to getting an email list: building or buying, the latter of which I’ll be talking about here.

Buying an email list can get you started much quicker than building one would, and you could score early and get some commissions without having to do the work of building a list yourself.

Before I get too far into that, though, I want to answer the big question…

Why buy an email list for affiliate marketing?

There are a few reasons to buy an email list for affiliate marketing, which I’ll write out below:

Time & Effort

In short, building an email list takes time and effort.

For some people, that could be time they don’t have and effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

However, if you purchase an email list, all of the work has been done for you so you can focus more on the actual marketing than building your list.

Another benefit of buying an email list for affiliate marketing is that it takes significantly less time if you’re just starting out with affiliate marketing.

If you’re trying to get some traction right out of the gate, then building an email list yourself will take the wind out of your sails.

However, if you buy an email list, then you can immediately start marketing to that audience without the hassle of creating the list in the first place.

An early win with affiliate marketing is all it takes to convince some people that they’re going down the right path, and if you can get that win with minimal effort, that’s even better.

Targeted Marketing

Given that, when you buy your email list, the vendor isn’t just throwing a bunch of random email addresses into an Excel file and sending it off to you, you can typically have your email list catered to your target demographics, interests, or purchase behaviors.

This means that you can focus your affiliate marketing efforts on an audience with the highest chance of conversion instead of a less interested audience with a minimal chance of conversion.

Some of the demographics you can target with list-buying services include the following:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation
• Income level
• Purchase history/behavior

Testing & Validation

If you’re just starting out with a new affiliate campaign or product/offer, it can be advantageous to buy an email list to get a feel of how effective that offer will be.

Instead of spending your time creating an email list specifically for an offer you don’t know will succeed, you can just buy an already-created email list and get the testing done and dusted before investing too much time into that campaign.

Buying an email list vs. building an email list

There are definite downsides to buying an email list, particularly if you’re buying a pre-made list that isn’t purpose-built for your needs.

For example, in places like Europe and California (because of GDPR and CCPA respectively), you could be violating the law by sending unprompted emails to email addresses that weren’t collected legitimately, and that’s no good if you want to do email marketing in the long term.

Additionally, many email marketing services won’t act actually let you send emails to bought email lists, and will only let you send emails to people whose email addresses you’ve collected legitimately.

Lastly, you can harm your email deliverability and IP address reputation if you’re sending unprovoked emails to people who you don’t know and don’t know you. This is because many people are likely to flag you as spam, which is bad for your deliverability and IP reputation in the long run.

Overall, if you don’t know what you are doing, there are risks to buying an email list. However, these risks can be entirely avoided by using a list-building service like the ones I’ll list below instead.

Now, with that said…

What are the best email list sellers & list-building services?

Now that you know the bigger picture of buying an email list, I’ll run through some of the best companies that offer to either sell already-created email lists or create email lists from scratch based on your needs.

If you’re planning on doing B2B marketing, then UpLead is the best list-building service for you. Hell, it’s my go-to for list-building because I do not like doing the standard way.

Uplead gives you access to a massive database of over 135 million professional profiles, which you can sift through using 50+ filters and find the perfect leads for your email marketing needs.

One of the best things about UpLead is its 95% information accuracy rate, ensuring you’re sending emails to active email addresses and not wasting time and money on dead leads.

Overall, I’d say UpLead is the best way for you to build your email list if you’re a B2B marketer. Affiliates can make a lot of money with B2B marketing, and UpLead is the perfect place to make your marketing take off.