This summer’s Email Insider Summit, I sat at a breakout session where marketers were debating list rental. The discussion got quite heated. If you’re in good company, list rental is just as dangerous a topic as religion or politics (”the things we don’t talk about”). Later that evening, I sat at dinner between a friend of mine from another ESP and a gentleman whose company provides email appends and list rentals. Emotions flew back and forth for over 30 minutes.

How is List Rental Like Car Rental?

  • The Company: There are scores if not hundreds of different places you can rent a car from. Most often, you get what you pay for. The same goes for list rental services. Some list rental companies are backed by well-known organizations.
  • The Car (List): Sometimes you get a good car (list), sometimes you’re not so fortunate. If you are lucky, the car drives well, responds to corners, gets good gas mileage. Other times, you get the bad car with much sound around inside the car. Similar to email list rental, sometimes you get subscribers who are really interested in your product/services, more than likely - not.

Why is ListRental So Controversial?

The problem with list rental is that the subscribers are not nearly as engaged as those who find you directly and ask specifically to be included in your email marketing campaigns. To me, that is the biggest difference. From what I’ve seen, list rentals tend to have much lower open, click-through, and conversion rates. In and of itself, lower rates are not a cause for panic, but a damaged reputation is. In my experience, emails that are sent to rented lists have more complaints, are more likely to be marked as junk/spam, and have a higher unsubscribe rate. This is where you can run into issues.

I’m not quite sold on the concept of list rental. But…if you are going to rent, be smart about it. If you think about the first email as an opt-in vs opt-out, you’re likely to see a healthier list (with fewer subscribers).