Spencer Kollas says, “In recent weeks I have had a number of customers ask me about purchasing an e-append in order to increase their overall customer list size right before the holiday season. For those of you who are unfamiliar with an e-append, it is the process purchasing email addresses from a third party company and then matching them to your known customer demographic information, so that you may start emailing customers whose contact information you previously did not have. There are a number of potential issues with the use of e-appends so I want to caution anyone considering this practice and outline a few pitfalls before you spend your marketing dollars on a practice that could potentially decrease your ability to reach your customers, rather than increase it as expected.

The Opt-out Process

When most marketers append an email address to their database they usually perform an opt-out type of append. This means that a message is sent to those email addresses asking them to take an action if they DO NOT want to continue to receive your messages. Let’s think about that for a minute—most marketers are happy with a 20% open rate, which in turn means that 80% of their customers are not opening. If we go with this logic that means that at least 80% of the email addresses that were added to the customer file will automatically begin receiving emails because they didn’t opt-out. There are some companies that will adopt the safer practice of sending an opt-in message. If that is the case with your company, you should make sure to move only those addresses that have specifically taken the opt-in action to your master database”.

e-appends, a potential trap for email marketing

‘Experian Marketing Forward’ Blog

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