My employer was looking to reach out to a specific regional population of current/former employees in a particular field via email to provide them with information about employment/educational opportunities. I came across Amerilist and, during my meetings with their sales representative, I was assured that they could provide me with a list of names and email addresses based on my specific query, and I was also assured of the quality/validity of the contacts that they would provide.
Once I received the actual list, it was immediately clear there were problems with the contacts. A significant portion of the names and emails bore no relation to each other. I'm not talking about an email for John Smith being "celticsfan68@" - those are understandable. I'm talking about the email for John Smith being "sallykjones85@." Again, there were a lot of these - it was a significant proportion of the list.
When I contacted Amerilist with my concerns, I was told "many people create addresses using different naming conventions or unique formats" and that "historically [their] email accuracy rate is around 90%." When I asked how they defined accuracy, they told me that it was the absence of "hard bounces" (emails bounced back by a server for being invalid). I explained that the absence of hard bounces didn't mean that the emails were being delivered to the correct party, but I was told that, if I was concerned, I could hire a third-party validation service to review their list.
They also offered to replace any "hard bounce" contacts with two new contacts. When I pointed out that I'd already purchased all contacts available within my desired query, they responded that we'd need to "expand [our] geo or pull a different audience."
At this point, I let them know that the service they provided was not what had been described during the sales discussions, and that using the list they provided as we intended would likely harm the reputation of my organization. I asked for a refund, and they refused. I'm sharing this in the hopes that others will take note and avoid a similar experience. read more
