Dropped $1,400 on a lead list from a vendor in Chicago and 90% of the emails bounced | B2b Marketing Discussions

Mark Cooper · 2026-10-07T19:35:03.770568+00:00

So I bought a lead list for $1,400 from a vendor out of Chicago back in March, thinking it would fill our pipeline for Q2 since our normal inbound had slowed way down. What I got was a spreadsheet with 4,000 contacts and when I ran it through our email tool, more than 3,500 came back as bad addresses or spam traps. My domain health tanked for about 3 weeks and our real outreach emails started landing in junk folders, which cost us way more than the list itself. The vendor's reply was basically 'we don't guarantee deliverability,' which is a joke when you're selling contact data. I ended up rebuilding trust with our sending domain by hand, cutting volume in half, and going back to pulling names from LinkedIn and webinars the slow way. If you're looking at buying a list, run a small sample through a verifier before you hand over any cash, because once your domain gets flagged it takes forever to fix. Has anyone found a lead source that doesn't feel like a coin flip every single time?

Opinions Matter

Loading…

Dropped $1,400 on a lead list from a vendor in Chicago and 90% of the emails bounced | B2b Marketing Discussions - Opinions Matter