Email Append – Is it safe and effective?

The process of matching email addresses to a direct marketing database has been around for over a decade. Email Appending started as there was a huge demand for email marketing in the very early 2000 and this service has evolved to an extremely simple, quick and effective marketing service for marketers to communicate with their clients via email.

It is tough to get a customer email address at check out point, registration of a product or through phone surveys and even if you get the email address at point of sale, it easy to make misspelling mistakes etc. Cost per email acquisition is high and it takes forever to build a solid database of thousands if you try to do it organically. Of course, an organic grown email database will always outperform purchased lists but over time if you grow your purchased list correctly it will perform just as well as an organic list.

Email appending is highly recommended for marketers looking to quickly and affordable increase their email database. Email Append service is the process of matching opt-in email addresses to a marketers direct mail file. The email append vendor licenses large quantities of email contact information which is stored in a large database with a data matching application built as part of the system to append email addresses to incoming data files.

Using email appending solutions, a marketer will within 72 hours add thousands of matching and valid email addresses through this email appending service.

Is email append safe? Yes—if you work with a reputable email append vendor this practice can be completed safely and can easily provide a return on investment. What is safe? We define safe as:

1. Matching accurate email addresses to your database
2. Matching only opt-in email addresses to your database
3. After the email append, the vendor will send an email on behalf of client/marketer asking for permission to communicate in the future
4. The vendor uses best practices to remove hard bounces, and unsubscribers from the email appended database prior to returning it to the client
5. Before providing the email appended data back to the client, the vendor also scrubs the file against the clients known unsubscribers and banned addresses collected by the vendor
6. Advising the client to always have an easy unsubscribe link in the footer of every future email campaign

These are basic steps that are taken by reputable email appenders to make sure the client or marketer receives quality email addresses.

We recommend www.dialogconcepts.com to use as your next email append vendor—check them out at www.dialogconcepts.com and read about their platform by visiting dialogconcepts.com/emailappend.asp

As we all know – email can be more effective than direct mail if its done correctly. Always make sure your subject line is powerful and honest. Make sure that the call to action makes sense for the product or information you are providing. More to come on effective marketing…until next time.