Email Append Services: 5 Questions to Distinguish Good from Bad

The United States Postal Service’s February announcement that it might stop delivering mail on Saturdays beginning in August has provoked many marketers to shift to email marketing as their primary channel.

A whopping 77 percent of U.S. online consumers prefer receiving permission-based marketing messages via email, according to ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preference Survey. What some marketers don’t know is how quick and easy it is to build an email list from a postal database. Email append, a service that uses customers’ names and postal address to append accurate, deliverable email addresses to customer data, can grow your email list quickly and easily, maximizing results.

While most email append providers are reputable, some bad eggs can slip through. So how do you distinguish the good from the bad? Here are a few questions to ask:

• What are your match rates? Many providers will tout extremely high match rates (some as high as 55 percent for business email append matches), but these claims are usually too good to be true. A realistic match rate is often between 20 and 30 percent.
• Who are your current clients? An email append service provider’s clients don’t necessarily need to be household names, but it can be reassuring to discover a provider has previously assisted clients of roughly the same size or in the same industry as your company.
• Are emails permission-based? A high-quality vendor should be able to give you 100 percent opted-in email addresses with detailed opt-in info. Additionally, you should weed out providers that don’t send permission messages to their addresses to confirm deliverability and provide your customers with the opportunity to opt-out before results are returned to you.
• Can you prove results? Be wary of providers quick to share stats but hesitant to share results. Check providers’ websites for email append whitepapers and client testimonials from actual professionals.
• Do you offer a free match test? Providers confident in their services usually offer a no-hassle, no-commitment email append match test. For many providers, this means you send over a small sample of your contacts for testing, while other providers ask you to send your entire contacts list for the most accurate match report.

By asking these questions, your company can select the right email append provider to help boost sales and reduce costs by marketing to current customers through email. To get your free email append match test from TowerData, click here.

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