Case study in email marketing: opt-in base vs purchased base

Published in october, 16 of 2015



Every day we receive calls and contacts also through email with a question that you might have already thought of doing to us. The issue involved three points: if emailmanager had bases ready to make submissions, if we could recommend any company that works that way or simply to know our opinion about it.

Who knows us is already acquainted to our position. Emailmanager doesn’t sell database, much less supports this practice whatever the circumstances.

And the explanation for this is quite simple. The use of a purchased base is extremely damaging to your reputation online and it affects directly all your email marketing campaigns, not to mention the cost and the limited possibility of return.

The idea of getting some sales, visits or additional conversions is so tempting that some people accept the terms and conditions, without even reading what is written there.

That is why we’ll share in this post one of our customers report data, comparing the use of its own base (opt-in) with a base obtained by other means, a purchased one.


Now that you've seen the picture above, let’s analysis the most relevant data for sending in the both bases:

  • The campaigns generate clicks on a single link to download a document;
  • Both campaigns were sent to the same amount of contacts;
  • Content, date and time when the campaigns were sent were identical in both cases.

If you apply the philosophy of a glass half empty, we can say the only openings are not so unequal in both cases and, in a not expected way, a few clicks were obtained through the purchased base. After the first analysis, now we go to the most important fact of this comparison: while the purchased base had a few clicks through the submissions, none of them become downloads.

So the investment to buy a contacts database could be reversed in generating new contacts by allowing policy (opt-in) or even by a new communication and marketing strategy for the existing database itself. The consequence would impact positively in getting better results. It’s something to think about, isn’t it?


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