How Real-Time Enhancement Services can Improve Your Email Marketing

As much as marketers would like to ask dozens of questions of visitors to their websites, the reality is that they must minimize the number of fields on forms or else no one will fill them out. If email is the only required field on your forms, even the most interested parties are inevitably going to leave out names, phone numbers and other critical info-leaving you with incomplete data. Fortunately, real-time enhancement services can help you to fill in the blanks and even answer questions you didn’t directly ask. Here are a few ways data enhancement can take your marketing efforts-and your profits-to the next level.

Location, Location, Location

You may serve customers across the country or around the world, but local appeal is still crucial for effective marketing. However, most of your visitors won’t consider how important their geographical info is to an online vendor. Just think: How many times have you skipped over the optional city, state and zip code forms on a website?

Real-time enhancement can help you grab this info through three means: email accounts, phone numbers and IP addresses. Given an email address, reverse append can provide a postal address. Reverse phone append will do the same or you can obtain geography based on the area code and phone exchange. And of course, visitors who log in from their home or business networks will almost always broadcast place-specific IPs.

Your marketing efforts will be far more effective once you know where your customers are located. Imagine you’re a sporting goods retailer, for instance. Why blast scuba and snorkel gear offers to your entire list when half your customers live in frigid, land-locked states? You’d see a lot more sales and far fewer unsubscribes if you pitched products that fit your customers’ climates. The same principal applies to the varying cultures, problems, preferences and laws you’ll find in different cities and states.

Knowing Your Customers

Location isn’t the only metric that matters. In fact, quite a few visitors will leave out the most important detail for an ongoing relationship – their names! You probably ignore messages that begin with “Dear Sir” or “To our valued customer,” and your prospects will do the same. Real-time enhancement services can analyze your customers’ email addresses or phone numbers to fill in their names and ensure personal connections in your messaging.

Enhancement can also provide a wealth of demographic data: gender, age, occupation, education, income, marital status and more. In the online, location-independent environment, these metrics may be even more important than geography – especially if you’re selling products with universal appeal. Everybody likes big TVs, for example, but young, high-income single males are much more likely to buy them than older married couples.

Keeping it Simple

The longer your forms are, the fewer responses you’ll get. You certainly want to capture names and locations, but your prospects may get frustrated if you ask for more info. With real-time data enhancement, you can generate plenty of leads with simple forms, and use a service to fill in the details.

Want to try real-time lead validation and enhancement for free? Simply click here to get started.