How to buy new leads.

When you work on your email marketing strategy, it always comes to a point where people decide to buy new leads through several means.

First thing, don't ever buy entire databases, especially in B2C (although it's sometimes legal in B2B, I highly discourage you to do so)

Do not exchange data with other companies!

Now, talking about legal methods, some might be more efficient than others.

I will not talk here about natural leads registering on your website, these profiles are of course of the highest quality.

In the list of ways to buy leads, you can:
- Organize a prize winning competition: with this method you will of course pay the price, but also your competition's advertizing on third party websites or email campaigns you will run on rented lists.
- Co-registration: I'm not a big fan of this lead generation process, but it's probably the cheapest way around to buy leads.
- Pay per lead affiliation program: you can set a CPL campaign on an affiliation platform. The benefit is you will only pay for actual leads.
- Indirect campaigns: Media (banners), SEM (google adwords) or email campaigns on rented lists campaigns, pointing either on your website or directly on the subscribe form.

In either case my advice here is to ALWAYS and WHATEVER method you use keep track of the lead source in your database (at least the type of campaign, although keeping track of the type of campaign AND the partner name is even wiser).

The point here is to be able to track in your email campaign reports what kind of leads generates the highest open rate/click rate/revenue.

Once you display campaign statistics per lead origin (sent volume, open rate, click rate, revenue) then you can take decisions on what campaigns you want to continue with and what campaigns you want to stop.

Don't forget as well to have a look at the hardbounce rate and spam complaints rate on each lead source, it's a very good indicator of poor quality or even dishonest partners