There are endless companies offering to send out millions of emails to sell your products. Some are genuine businesses that take care over their mailing lists but many are just spammers who buy mailing lists from anyone and send out any rubbish they are paid to.

There is also a different approach where you don’t pay for the number of emails sent out but for the number of leads generated from the emails.

Generating leads means that someone (or a computer) has clicked on a link or returned an email in order to show further interest in whatever is being promoted.

This sounds like a better option for the business buying the service and in some cases it is.

But there are many unscrupulous people who when offered a payment for each lead generated, manage to create huge numbers of supposed leads, but they may be very poor quality leads. “Poor quality” in this case means people who are tricked into clicking or replying to something nothing to do with the item being promoted so the chance of them buying is very slim.

They are a variety of ways to do this, including:-

• Offering entry to a competition with big prizes
• Fake retail vouchers e.g. 100 pounds Marks and Spencer voucher for answering 3 questions
• Massive supposed discounts
• Clickbait i.e. the link is labelled with something to catch the eye that may be completely irrelevant to the actual link e.g. “Revealed: Meghan Markel’s Secret Past”

The easiest approach for the unscrupulous is to simply invent supposed leads or buy spam mailing lists and claim they have responded.

Protect your business – do not buy leads unless you are absolutely sure it is the best approach and the business you are buying from is ethical and can get the results you want the way you want.

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