Tips
to Build Your Email Address Database
WHY BUILD YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
DATABASE?
Gaining your customers' email
addresses will:
- Provide an additional
channel for reaching your customers
- Increase the ROI of your
marketing investments
- Significantly reduce your
customer acquisition and marketing costs
- Allow you to easily measure
the impact of your marketing campaigns
- Increase your customer
participation and retention rates
With ongoing postal and telemarketing
pressures impacting marketing budgets for many organizations this year,
email marketing could become the "silver lining " for many
marketers. But how do you create a successful email marketing
campaign if you do not have a substantial email database? That
question may be one of the largest Internet related challenges facing
companies this year.
Research shows that the majority
of organizations have email addresses for less than 10% of their postal
files. So how do you level the playing field and start to add
quality permission - based email addresses to your database?
Here are some tips that you
can use to cost effectively build your email address database and increase
your customer participation and retention rates:
START TO ASK FOR IT!
Every communication or touch
point with a customer should start or end with a request for an email
address. By utilizing the four points below, you should
be able to add email addresses for 5% to 10% of your postal file over
the course of one year.
1. Direct Mail Collection
Think about how much time
and money you spent for copy and design on your last new direct mail
piece. Most companies have started to ask their customers for
their email address information within these mailings. This is
a great step forward. However, companies need to look at one major improvement
if they want to increase their email address collection rates.
To date, most requests for
email address information have been pushed, shoved or jammed into whatever
white space remains. It should be no surprise that the success
rate has been less than stellar.
To improve on these efforts,
you need to provide your members with a reason to release their email
addresses to you. E-newsletters, purchase confirmations, petitions,
and special discounts and offers are but a few of the benefits that
will encourage your members to come on board.
2. Web Page Collection
Many companies have an email
address collection function in place via the web. To improve your
sign-up rates, add text below the email request box that informs your
visitors of the special email benefits that they will receive (i.e.
e-newsletters, purchase confirmations, delivery updates, etc.) upon
registering. You can also utilize a pop-up link to inform users
of these special benefits.
Finally, your email address
request function should be available on your home page. Don't make your
users go and look for it. Every click away from your home page
reduces the chances of your users taking an action and providing you
with their email address information.
3. Existing Email Database
Collection
Don't forget to ask the members
of your existing customer base for email addresses of their friends,
family and associates. Viral marketing is a powerful tool to use
and is extremely cost effective! You could ask them either to
provide you with additional addresses or simply to pass on your newsletter,
email specific offers, or other information to others they feel have
similar interests.
4. Telemarketing Collection
Don't assume that your telemarketing
agents are asking for email addresses from potential customers.
Ensure that your agents have an updated script, which outlines the previously
described benefits to potential customers of providing their email addresses.
The suggestions above are
a great start! Yet they really should be viewed as a secondary
plan for building your email database. To exponentially and expeditiously
grow your email database, please read on!
EMAIL APPENDING
Utilizing an email appending
service enables you to add email addresses for up to 25% of your postal
file, all within 3-4 weeks.
Email Appending - is the
process of adding an individual's email address to that individual's
postal record in side your existing database. This is accomplished
by matching the postal database against a third party, permission based
database of postal and email address information.
Best Practices - Email Appending
is not a prospecting tool. The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) and
its interactive arm AIM (Association of Interactive Marketing) have
guidelines in place that dictate that email appending only be used to
append email addresses to your existing opt-in postal record house file.
The Process - Your opt-in
postal file is securely transferred to an email appending provider,
who will do an initial gross email address match of your file against
its opt-in database of postal and email address records. Your
appending provider will then send these matches a permission-based message
prepared by you. All bounces and opt-out requests will be removed
from the list. At that point a valid permission-based email address
file of your customers will be delivered back to you.
Cost - Less than the price
of a postal stamp!
IN SUMMARY
The first step of any successful
email marketing effort is to build a permission-based email address
list of your customers. The simplest, quickest and most cost-effective
way to do this is through email appending, which will enable you to
add email addresses for up to 25% of your postal file. Secondary
efforts of email address collection via focused direct mail, web, viral
and telemarketing practices are also important and will enable you to
add email addresses for an additional 5% to 10% of your base on an annual
basis.
Best of luck in building
your email address database. As many companies have already learned,
the ROI and cost savings to be achieved will far exceed your expectations.
Bill Kaplan
CEO
FreshAddress, Inc.
FreshAddress, Inc., The Email
Address ExpertsTM, provides a comprehensive suite of industry leading
database and email deliverability services to help companies increase
their e-commerce revenues. For more information on how we can
help "Build and Update" your email list, visit
http://freshaddress.com/biz or email biz@freshaddress.com.
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