Emails Appends are Hot

To e-mail or not to e-mail...that is the question.



While the debate rages over the effectiveness of e-mails for prospecting, no one doubts the fact that many consumers prefer e-mail communication with a "trusted source", certainly over the dreaded telephone call. We often see organizations that have a large customer master database and wish they had more email addresses. Going back after the fact is mostly a futile effort as the consumer is not just going to offer his or her email address for the purpose of receiving promotions, unless you find a very creative and compelling reason for them to give you this valuable piece of their personal information.



What is a marketer to do? First and foremost you need to address the real problem. Why are you not getting e-mail addresses from your client transactions? Probably because it was not an imperative in the past, and old habits die hard. So either invoking a penalty or offering a reward, you get the front-line personnel and systems to buy-in to your plan to get as many e-mail addresses as possible. We should also talk about mobile phone numbers, but I will save that for a different post. But now you have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of customers without an email address. What to do?



A very common resolution to the problem is the e-mail append process. Basically you submit a file of names and addresses. We match the address to a consumer file of email addresses, send the matches an "opt in" email and as long as they do not opt out (giving them a week or so to respond) the e-mail address is now all yours! What kind of match rate can you expect? Probably around 20% if you have a somewhat recent customer master file, meaning that the transactions are relatively current, say in the last three years or so.



The e-mail append process is another reason why getting a good mailing address and an accurate name spelling is important. But again, that is the subject for another post.