Stop buying email lists
Stay away from buying email lists. They are very often inaccurate, outdated, and irrelevant.
You want to really get people to explicitly consent to receive an email, and event double opt-in into your email subscription (look that up if you're not familiar)
The fastest way to get subscribers is a lead magnet. A good small e-book, notion template, a checklist, or a manual collection of resources to help your audience do something. Check many of the top ProductHunt posts to see some examples. Create good content as a lead magnet. Find a good hunter for product hunt, and go from there. You can easily get a few thousand subscribers from that one tactic if your content makes it to the top voted spots.
Instead of spending money buying the email list, use the money to generate the content (pay someone to write it or do it).
Finally, consider public (a common method for gaining traction these days).
Good luck!
Buying an email list is good if you’re trying to sell a one-time product, and not build a brand off of it.
Renting a list is a much better alternative. If you don’t have the funds to pay upfront, do a revshare JV with the list owner. If you have a good product and a decent offer, most influencers will agree to it.
You are correct @JKalan. There is one key difference between buying an email list and pitching your product to someone who has an active audience.
What you're proposing is legit, and good sense marketing. But if someone is pitching you an email list for users who use products so and so or something like that, it is almost definitely a scam.
Good input @JKalan
I totally agree with you that businesses must keep in mind while prospecting for emails to be careful about the source from which they are receiving their email database. Even I do not support purchasing shelf leads because the authenticity of those leads can never be determined unless they are purchased and used. Also, it is the business that has the most empathy for its target audience and is capable of finding relevant and convertible leads more efficiently. Rather than outsourcing the lead generation and prospecting process, a business can use good lead generation tools and carry out the prospecting process by themselves.
Aeroleads is a good example of the top prospecting tools as it leverages LinkedIn, Angellist, Crunch Base, and other partner sites for finding contact information of individuals and businesses, which makes it great for both B2B and B2C firms. This tool can produce the contact details of hundreds of prospects when a relevant search query is passed on LinkedIn search, making use of search filters further enhances the quality of the search results in terms of their relevance as prospects. Aeroleads also allows the user to individually select the search results that are believed to have a higher chance of conversion and also has a data verification system in place that ensures the quality of information being extracted from it. This whole process can be carried out by the business firm itself and makes sure that good quality sales intelligence is being generated.