WHY BUILD YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASE?

Get your customers’ email addresses:

• 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 continuing postal and telemarketing pressures affecting many organizations’ marketing budgets this year, email marketing could turn out to be the “silver lining” 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 postal 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 customer engagement and retention rates:

START ORDERING IT!

Every communication or point of contact with a customer should start 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 on these mailings. This is a big step forward. However, businesses need to look for a major upgrade if they want to increase their email address collection rates.

To date, most requests for email address information have been pushed, prodded, or stuck on the white space that remains. 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 special discounts and offers are just some of the benefits that will encourage your members to participate.

2. Collection of web pages

Many companies have a feature of collecting email addresses through the web. To improve your signup rates, add text below the email request box that informs your visitors of special email benefits they will receive (ie e-newsletters, purchase confirmations, delivery updates, etc.) check in. You can also use a popup link to let users know 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. Every click away from your homepage 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 they believe have similar interests.

4. Telemarketing Collection

Don’t assume your telemarketers are asking for email addresses from potential customers. Make sure your agents have an up-to-date script outlining the benefits outlined above for prospects providing their email addresses.

The suggestions above are a great start! However, they should really be seen as a secondary plan to building your email database. To grow your email database exponentially and quickly, read on!

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 – is the process of adding a person’s email address to that person’s postal record in your existing database. This is accomplished by matching the postal database with a third-party permission-based email and postal address database.

Best Practices: Email aggregation is not a prospecting tool. The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) and its interactive arm AIM (Association of Interactive Marketing) have guidelines that dictate that email aggregation 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 email attachment provider, who will do an initial match of the raw email address on file with 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 time, 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 of any successful email marketing effort is to build a permission-based list of your customers’ email addresses. 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 database of email addresses. As many companies have already learned, the ROI and cost savings to be achieved will far exceed their expectations.

Bill Kaplan CEO FreshAddress, Inc.

FreshAddress, Inc., The Email Address ExpertsTM, offers a comprehensive suite of industry-leading database and email delivery services to help businesses increase their eCommerce revenue. For more information on how we can help “build and update” your email list, please visit http://freshaddress.com/biz or email [email protected].

(c) 2003 FRESHADDRESS.COM