Tips for Building Your Email Address Database
WHY BUILD YOUR E-Mail ADDRESS DATABASE
Getting your customers' email addresses is a great way to:
· Offer an additional channel to reach your customers
· Increase your ROI on marketing investments
· Reduce your marketing and customer acquisition costs by up to 50%
· You can easily measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns
· Increase customer participation and retention
Email marketing could be the silver lining for many marketers, with ongoing postal and telecom marketing pressures affecting marketing budgets of many organizations this year. How can you make an email marketing campaign that is successful if your email list is not large enough? This question could be the biggest Internet-related challenge facing companies this year.
Research has shown that most organizations have email addresses that correspond to less than 10% of their postal records. How can you even the playing field? Add quality permission-based email addresses to improve your database.
These are some ways to increase customer participation and retention by building your email database cost-effectively.
START TO QUESTION IT!
Every contact or communication with customers should begin or end with an email address request. You should be able add email addresses to 5% to 10% of the postal file within one year by using the four points below.
1. Direct Mail Collection
Consider how much you spent on copy and design for your last direct mail piece. Many companies now ask customers to provide their email addresses in these direct mail pieces. This is a huge step forward. Companies need to make one major improvement if their email addresses collection is to grow.
Most requests for email address information are pushed, shoved, or jammed into any white space that remains. It shouldn't surprise that the success rate for email address information requests has been low.
You can improve your efforts by giving your members a reason to give you their email addresses. Your members will be motivated to join by receiving e-newsletters and purchase confirmations. They also get petitions and special discounts.
2. Many companies use the internet to collect email addresses. You can increase your sign-up rate by adding text to the email request box. This will inform your visitors about the special email benefits they will receive (i.e. e-newsletters, purchase confirmations, delivery updates, etc.) After registering. A pop-up link can be used to notify users about these benefits.
Your email address request form should also be accessible from your homepage. Your users shouldn't have to go looking for it. Each click away from your homepage reduces the likelihood of users actually taking action and submitting their email address information.
3. Ask your customers to send you email addresses for their family, friends, and associates. It is very cost-effective and a powerful tool. They could be asked to send you additional addresses, or to forward your newsletter, email-specific offers, or any other information they find interesting to their friends.
4. Telemarketing Collection
Do not assume that telemarketing agents will ask for potential customers' email addresses. Make sure your agents have an up-to-date script that outlines the benefits for potential customers of giving their email addresses.
These suggestions are a great place to start. These suggestions should not be considered a primary plan to build your email database. Please continue reading to learn how you can exponentially grow your email list quickly and efficiently.
EMAIL APPENDING
An email appending service allows you to add email addresses to up to 25% of your postal files in just 3-4 weeks.
Email appending is adding an individual's address to your postal record. This is done by matching the postal data against a permission-based third party database of postal and email addresses.
Best Practices - Email appending is not used as a prospecting tool. DMA (Direct Marketing Association), and AIM (Association of Interactive Marketing), have established guidelines that allow email appending to be used only to add email addresses to an existing opt-in mailing record.
The Process - Your opt in postal file is securely transmitted to an email appending service provider. They will perform an initial gross match of your file with its opt-in email address database. These matches will be sent by your appending provider with a permission-based message. All opt-out requests and bounces will be removed. A valid permission-based email address list of your customers will then be returned to you.
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