As digital marketers, the technology available to help us get the word out about our products seems limitless. Whether you’re focused on hyper-personalization, segmentation, or building out models to target ideal customers, the most tried and true channel has been, and for the foreseeable future will remain, email marketing. Why do we love it so much? It’s fast and efficient and inexpensive compared to other channels where you may pay per click, for postage, or what have you.
One KPI marketers are typically measured on is the size of our email marketing list, and how many people you could send a promotion to at any given time to influence bottom line sales. Through many conversations with B2C customers, I have seen the same questions crop up in regards to growing your email marketing list: How do I get it right upon entry? I have all of these emails that are relatively unresponsive, what is my opportunity to run re-engagement with them? Is it worth looking into e-append programs? Let’s tackle these three big questions and give you some direction on how to accomplish the goal of growing your list responsibly.
- Get it right from the start
Think to yourself, which channels are these emails coming from? Do you collect at POS, through your website, through tradeshows, in customer portals, when a customer places an order, from your call center? This answer will be different for everyone. All of these touchpoints present the risk of collecting bad emails because of human error (either internal or external). By putting a real-time email validation solution in place you could save yourself a lot of headache down the line when an email address makes it into your database and you’re expected to drive revenue from it. The transactional cost of validating an email address is very low compared to the lifetime value opportunity of an accurate email address for the business and future sales.
- Running re-engagement
When considering a re-engagement campaign, it’s important to keep in mind that the further back you go to pull your data, the higher the likelihood that it will be inaccurate due to the nature of email and turnover rates. Work with a trusted partner to get this list of emails validated to avoid spam traps, honey pots, etc. Once this is done, think about your messaging. These individuals haven’t heard from you in some time, think about sending something along the lines of “We miss you!” rather than “Buy this new product, here’s a coupon!” This is your opportunity to get back in touch with your customers to regain their attention before delivering your typical marketing offers. Also, when running these programs be sure to have a conversation with your Email Service Provider (ESP) to ensure they are aware you will be mailing to this list.
- E-append programs
Talk with your ESP before considering additional data attributes; a lot of senders don’t allow marketers to send to appended email data. If you have that conversation and it goes well, that’s great! Assuming your ESP approves, you can work with a partner (like Experian) to get the email address appended provided you have a file consisting of first name, last name, and physical address. Because of privacy, the partner you work with will have to send an opt-out email to the appended emails (and should work with you on the content of that email). Typically, you must wait for 10 days after sending the opt-out email before the partner can send along the list of emails that did not opt out, which you can now include in your specific programs.
My advice here is to just be completely transparent with your ESP in terms of what you’re looking to accomplish. If you can find a good use case to work on a project like this and your ESP is on board, you’re golden—and now have a new channel to use in communicating with that customer!
Are you interested in growing your email marketing list? Our email validation solution can help ensure you have the best list possible!
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