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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. |
