Email Appending: Ramping Up New Emails

While email appending is a quick and effective way to grow your email list, the new email addresses you obtain should be treated in a different manner than the ones already in service. Rather than simply adding the fresh addresses into your existing mail stream, you should bring the new members into the fold gradually, with a warm greeting and introductory set of emails to win their favor.

The initial mailings should provide valuable content that engages the new recipients and convinces them to remain on the list and look forward to receiving further correspondence. It also is a good idea to segment the new customers and treat them like new prospects. Consider creating a separate email list or flagging the appended email addresses in your database so you can address and track them as a subset of your entire file.

As your mailings to newly appended members proceeds, you can gauge their responsiveness and further segment them into willing and unresponsive categories. You also can try different modes of engagement and use A/B and multivariate testing approaches to achieve the best results.

For the newly appended members who become willing customers, they can be further segmented for more effective pinpoint targeting and personalized marketing. Data for building rich customer and prospect profiles can be obtained via demographic appending.

Your entire email appending process should be an organized and smoothly running operation. Append databases are dynamic, and submitting your file again at regular intervals with any new customers you’ve added can yield additional matches. While semi-annual processing works best for most companies, those with a rapidly growing database can benefit from monthly appending.

To boost your append results with additional matches in the near term, ask your provider if they can match your file against other append databases. This can usually be performed for the same price per match and could yield email addresses for another 5% to 10% of your file.

A well-run email appending regimen can help you elevate your marketing results in a number of ways. As Bernice Grossman and Ruth P. Stevens relate, “Compared to collecting the data directly from customers and prospects, data append is a fast and convenient way to enrich your database for purposes of research, analysis, modeling, and campaign selection.”