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E-MAIL
MARKETING
WHY BUILD
YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASE?
Gaining
your customers' email addresses will:
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Provide an additional channel for reaching your
customers
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Increase the ROI of your marketing investments
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Significantly reduce your customer acquisition and
marketing costs
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Allow
you to easily measure the impact of your marketing
campaigns
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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.
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