Tips for Building Your Email Address Database
WHY BUILD YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASE?
Get the email addresses of your customers:
- Provide an additional channel to reach your customers
- Increase the ROI of your marketing investments
- Significantly reduce your customer acquisition and marketing costs
- It allows you to easily measure the impact of your marketing campaigns.
- Increase your customer engagement and retention rates
With continued postal and telemarketing pressures affecting many organizations’ marketing budgets this year, email marketing could become the “silver side” for many marketers. But how do you create a successful email marketing campaign if you don’t have a substantial email database? That question may be one of the biggest Internet-related challenges facing businesses this year.
Research shows that most organizations have email addresses for less than 10% of their mailing files. So how do you level the playing field and start adding quality permission-based email addresses to your database?
Here are some tips you can use to profitably build your email address database and increase your engagement rates and customer retention:
START ASKING FOR IT!
Every communication or point of contact with a customer should begin or end with a request for an email address. By using the four points below, you should be able to add email addresses for 5% to 10% of your postal file over the course of a year.
1. Direct Mail Collection
Think about how much time and money you spent on the copy and design of your latest new direct mail piece. Most companies have started asking their customers for their email address information in these mailings. This is a big step forward. However, companies need to look for a 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 stuck in the blank space left. It should come as no surprise that the success rate has been less than stellar.
To enhance these efforts, you must provide your members with a reason to disclose their email addresses to you. E-newsletters, purchase confirmations, requests, and discounts and special offers are just some of the benefits that will encourage your members to participate.
2. Collection of web pages
Many companies have an email address collection feature over the web. To improve your registration fees, add text below the email request box that informs your visitors about special email benefits they will receive (ie email newsletters, purchase confirmations, delivery updates, etc.) to the check in. You can also use a popup link to inform users about these special benefits.
Finally, your email address request feature should be available on your home page. Don’t make your users go looking for it. Each click away from your home page reduces the chances that your users will take an action and provide you with their email address information.
3. Collection of existing email database
Don’t forget to ask members of your existing customer base for the email addresses of their friends, family, and associates. Viral marketing is a powerful tool to use and it is extremely profitable! You can ask them to provide you with additional addresses, or simply to forward your newsletter, specific email offers, or other information to others who you believe have similar interests.
4. Telemarketing Collection
Don’t assume your telemarketers are soliciting email addresses from potential customers. Make sure your agents have an up-to-date script, outlining the benefits outlined above to potential customers by providing their email addresses.
The above suggestions are a great start! However, they really should be seen as a secondary plan for building your email database. To grow your email database exponentially and quickly, keep reading!
EMAIL ADDENDUM
Using an email aggregation service allows you to add email addresses for up to 25% of your postal file, all within 3-4 weeks.
Email Addition: The process of adding a person’s email address to that person’s mailing record in your existing database. This is accomplished by comparing the postal database with a third party permission-based database of postal and email addresses.
Best Practices: Email aggregation is not a prospecting tool. The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) and its interactive arm AIM (Association for Interactive Marketing) have guidelines dictating that email addition should only be used to add email addresses to your subscription postal record house file. existing.
The process: Your acceptance postal file is securely transferred to an attached email provider, who will do an initial comparison of the raw email address on your file against their database of email and postal address records . Your attached provider will 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 email address file will be returned to you based on permissions from your customers.
Cost – Less than the price of a postage stamp!
IN SUMMARY
The first step in any successful email marketing effort is to build a permission-based email list of your customers. The easiest, fastest, and most cost-effective way to do this is to add emails, which will allow you to add email addresses to up to 25% of your postal file. Secondary email address collection efforts through targeted direct mail, web, viral and telemarketing practices are also important and will allow you to add email addresses for an additional 5% to 10% of your base annually.
Best of luck in building your email address database. As many companies have already learned, the ROI and cost savings that will be achieved will far exceed your expectations.
Bill Kaplan CEO FreshAddress, Inc.
FreshAddress, Inc., The Email Address ExpertsTM, offers a complete set of industry-leading databases and email delivery services to help businesses increase their e-commerce revenue. To learn more about how we can help “build and update” your email list, visit http://freshaddress.com/biz or email [email protected].
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