Over the years many of our clients have built large direct mail databases and have been slowly migrating to an email marketing model. Email makes alot more sense with Retention or Loyalty marketing. You already have a business relationship with these customers and you have opportunities to market to them with relevant offers based on their previous purchase history. Plus it is alot less expensive than direct mail marketing.
As our clients are migrating to email they are seeing terrific results. Direct marketing experts have shown that email can offer an ROI up to 95x that of direct mail.
To help our clients in this transition, we have been offering Email Append services for many years add value to their customer database. We have helped our clients rapidly append email data to their customer file. However there are many more append opportunities including postal data, phones and demographics such as household income, gender, presence of children, age, ethnicity and more. These helpful data points enable you to personalize your email marketing to your customers using variable data to make the content more relevant to their needs and interests. This process is often much less expensive than renting new lists or experimenting with other marketing strategies.
Before you consider doing Email Append we offer these helpful tips to ensure you get the best value and results.
8 Things You Should Never Do When Using Email Append
- Don’t append emails to non-customers. Email is a relationship-centric marketing channel where you need to show trust and respect to your recipient. This is not only good, ethical marketing, it is also the law. You don’t want to be legally liable with the federal CAN-SPAM law. Sending emails to prospects, compiled directory data or really old customers will likely lead to complaints and low response rates.
- Don’t be ignorant of the append strategy. You don’t want an append based on name only as there are countless Steve Smiths in America. Your vendor should be matching based on name and postal address, or name and phone number, or all 3. You want this append strategy to be narrow, focused and conservative to ensure your results have the highest quality.
- Don’t attempt to append the names of those who have unsubscribed from your email list. Provide a separate list of opted-out subscribers only so your vendor can use it to suppress overlapping results and, for CAN-SPAM compliance, avoid mailing people who have already requested not to be emailed.
- Don’t ignore your unsubscribe list. Obviously you shouldn’t be appending data to please that said “take me off your list!”. But more importantly, you should run your unsubscribe list against your recently appended email data to suppress them from the data file. You don’t want these folks accidentally sneaking back into your list and then making them angry with emails.
- Don’t be cheap. There are many email append vendors out there that will bounce your data file against low quality, harvested email database files and then offer your an email append at a very low price. Buyer Beware! This exercise is about quality, both the quality of your email database and maintaining the quality of your brand. You also don’t want to append so many emails that you end up blasting out junk emails and risk getting your domain blacklisted. Be sure to invest with a vendor that has trusted data and a strong track record.
- Don’t be a marketer when you ask for permission. It is ethical to send an introductory email to your new appends asking their permission to join your list. These emails should remind them that you have a prior business relationship and you will send them information, tips and offers from time to time. These customers will have the ability to opt out in this permission request email. But this is not the time to boldly sell them on new products and services. It’s about relationship building. Ask them to dance respectfully.
- Don’t be too aggressive. It’s like having a new girlfriend. Don’t smother her. Ease into the relationship with gentleness and respect. Put these new emails in a separate bucket and send them information gradually at first and then ease them into your master file over time.
- Don’t have unreasonable expectations. Email append is not going to deliver super high append rate. If you are thinking you can convert 80% of your postal database into emails, then you are living in fantasy land. It is common for email append match rates to be around 15%. Match rates may vary depending on the quality of your list.
Email append is an important tool for any marketer. Use it wisely and get great returns.
Good Selling!