Email appending is one of the fastest and most accurate ways to add emails to your customer lists. Although it has been around almost as long as email marketing itself, many brands are not using it often enough or even at all.
Email appending is the process of adding or updating a missing email address into a customer record within your database. This significantly improves email marketing metrics on all levels. According to experts, you can see an average increase of 30% in your ROI when you use email appending.
Email addresses are only valuable if they offer a company a viable channel of communication by being continually deliverable. According to industry experts, email marketing databases naturally degrade by about 22.5% every year. Several challenges exist within an email collection and management process including:
- Incorrectly written on a paper form
- Incorrectly typed when being keyed from a paper form
- Incorrect entry in an online form (can be limited by requiring multi-entry)
- Discontinued use of an email address by a consumer/user
- Preferred use of an alternate address by a consumer/user
- Blocking of a sender’s domain or IP by a consumer’s ISP or filters
- Termination of a consumer email provider’s service (paid or free)
The process of appending will allow you to add missing email addresses information about your target consumers, as well as help you correct errors such as invalid emails and domains.
Additional benefits include:
- Better overall deliverability leads to better response rates E.g. if your campaign has 25% bad email addresses, not only will you not reach those 25%, but it will impair the deliverability of the remaining 75%
- Clean email data will preserve your IP Sender reputation, resulting in more emails reaching inboxes
Email Append Process and Best Practices by Porch Group Media
Best Practices
- Start with your active customers for whom you don’t have an email address and then move slowly back through older records.
- Append during your off season and complete ramp up a minimum of 1 month prior to your high season.
- Perform updates regularly such as monthly, quarterly or bi-annually.
- Implement a phased approach – Add only about 10% to your house file at any one time to help mitigate IP risk. Also be sure to spread it out. Smaller, more frequent ads are better than one large ad.
Append Process
Using a name and postal address, Porch Group Media can locate and append a matching email address that the consumer has given permission to receive marketing messages with. This can be done at the individual level where first name/last name/address are matched or at the household level where last name/address are matched to locate someone in the household. A permission message will be deployed to all matches and only deliverable, non-opted out emails will be added to client’s original file, along with match level indicator.
Example of How to Deploy an Append Specific Series
Email marketing is thriving and has the potential to produce huge ROI. But only if you are marketing with clean and deliverable email addresses. Take some time to get your emails in order and reach your audiences with one of the most effective methods of customer and prospect communications.