Every company dreams of having a robust emailing list, daily likes on their Facebook page and glowing online reviews, but when business is slow, it's sometimes tempting to want to jump ahead in line. For as little as $8, you can buy 1,000 "real human" likes on Facebook, and for a little bit more, you can buy whole email lists of potential customers.
As they say, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. In this case, it definitely is. Buying email lists, social media likes and followers, and online reviews waste your money and hurt your business. Here's why buying lists can end in disaster.
Poor IP Reputation
Every IP address has a reputation. When you email customers or they opt in to receive your emails, your reputation improves. If they mark your emails as spam or unsolicited, your reputation will suffer. A poor reputation means your emails may be blocked from customer inboxes and sent straight to spam boxes where they will almost certainly be deleted.
Normally, you might get a few spam complaints (everyone does at one point), but if you're using a bought email list and sending out unsolicited emails, then there's an even greater chance receivers will block your emails and mark them as spam. They didn't sign up to receive your emails, so as far as they're concerned, your well-designed emails are garbage.
As in real life, it's tough to shake a bad reputation. The best way to keep a positive reputation is to create an opt-in emailing list. This list is built completely by customers who have opted in either in your store or through an online portal to receive your emails. This means that they really want to receive your emails. In fact, most email marketing systems will only let you use opt-in email lists.
Make sure your emails also have an easy-to-see unsubscribe button. Some customers may not want to receive emails forever, so giving them the opt-out option means they'll be less likely to report your IP address as spam and more willing to quietly unsubscribe. Your reputation will not suffer, and you can focus your attention on customers actively purchasing from you.
Poor Online Reviews
Online searchers are savvier than you might think. They read dozens of reviews of products before they purchase, and they know when a review feels a bit off. When they suspect a fake review, you can guarantee that searcher won't be back to look at your products for a long time — if ever.
Fake reviews glow, but they have little substance. They may read awkwardly and have noticeable typos and other strange grammatical errors. Few products or companies out there ever retain a five-star standing, and that's okay — no one is perfect after all.
As small business marketing expert Gee Ranasinha, CEO of Kexino, told us, fake online reviews are against Google's Terms of Service, which means Google can kick your website off its search engine. Now your site will no longer appear in search results, and if that thought doesn't keep you up at night, then you are indeed brave.
On social media, it's not hard to determine who's real and who probably isn't on Facebook or Instagram. Accounts of young-looking people created this year or last year are probably fake. They have either a small amount of friends or an obscene amount of them. Their posts (if there are any) sound robot-like, and they have few pictures of themselves or anyone real on their page.
Any casual observer of your page can tell right away that your likes are inflated by looking at your engagement rate. If you have over 10,000 followers, then you should be getting plenty of likes and comments per post, right? If you're not, it's obvious your likes probably aren't real.
Poor Use of Money
Perhaps the most important reason to avoid buying lists is the cost to you. No matter how cheap the list may be, the likelihood of making a sale from these lists are few and far between. Many of these lists have been torn apart and repackaged by the sellers, so the email addresses are rarely checked or have been closed completely.
Facebook actually uses your low engagement against you. It measures the quality of your posts and your user engagement to determine how many of your users will actually see your posts in their feeds. If you have a high number of inactive followers and low engagement rates, then few, if any, people will see your posts. Twitter is now using a similar algorithm, so purchasing followers here will likely hurt you as well.
It's hard work growing your email list or Facebook followers, but just like in the fable of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race.
