In this economic environment, many organizations want to use
e-mail more effectively. List maintenance and growth are critical. The constant
attrition from churn, unsubscribes, and complaints places a downward pressure
on lists and presents challenges to marketers trying to maintain program
efficacy. Most organizations also have only a fraction of their customers’ e-mail addresses. Eventually this leads to the topic of e-mail append.
I’ve written before about how to perform e-mail append
successfully. While the advice is accurate, it doesn’t express what I truly
think about the topic. I can sum how I really feel about e-mail append with
just two words:
It sucks.
There you have it. Many in the e-mail marketing industry
think the same thing, but avoid saying so publicly.
Many marketers want it to succeed, especially those who come
from a print direct marketing background. However, for many in the e-mail
marketing industry, especially deliverability professionals, the problems and
shortcomings of e-mail append are an open secret.
This clearly raises the question: why do people dislike
e-mail append? Here are my top problems with it.
Old-Media Thinking
E-mail append is essentially old media, print direct
marketing thinking shoehorned into the online world. When print directmarketing evolved, there was no realistic way for user preferences to be
expressed.
A culture developed where permission was irrelevant.
Personal data is bought and sold, lists are purchased, traded, rented, and
appended all without concern for the recipients’ wishes. The end result is that
the marketing gets called junk mail and has commensurate ROI (define).
This kind of old-media thinking has no place in the
new-media world. Online users are in control. What they do and don’t want is
important. Thus permission and preference have an enormous impact on your
programs’ success and your organization’s reputation.
Some people argue that we’re in a post-permission world
where relevance is king. Nonsense. Permission is table stakes for entry.
Relevance is key for an effective program.
Bad Premise
E-mail append is predicated on something that doesn’t exist.
To have useful match rates, the append company needs a large list. To perform
permission-based appending, the list must contain people who have knowingly
provided (at a minimum) their name, address, and e-mail address; agreed to
receive third-party e-mail solicitations; and agreed to have their information
sold.
Unfortunately no such list exists. This means e-mail append
companies must use other sources and other processes to create a match list.
Depending on the company’s sophistication and its ability to
filter spam traps, complainants, and bad data, final list quality will vary.
The best are quite effective at it, but in the end what you’re buying is a
non-permission, partially sanitized list.
Corner-Cutting
If you’re adding people to your mailing list, at a minimum
you should obtain their permission. The norm in e-mail append, however, is to
perform an opt-out permission pass. This means the e-mail append vendor sends
an e-mail to the matched addresses. Any who don’t actively choose to be
excluded in a manner the vendor recognizes are considered to have given their
implicit consent.
This concept is flawed in so many ways it could have an
article of its own. Suffice to say it’s a symptom of append vendors’ poor data
and poor reputation combined with recipients’ reluctance to be appended.
Another way of cutting corners is accepting address-only
matches. Instead of matching a full profile between your list and the appender’s,
the match is performed on just the address. For example, a single-family
residence is typically matched to a family member. An apartment block or a
multi-business location could be matched to almost anyone.
Lipstick on a Pig
Many industry commentators, myself included, have given
advice on e-mail append. Read it carefully and you’ll notice it amounts to a
list of tips and tricks to minimize e-mail append’s negative impact and protect
yourself from fallout if it goes wrong. The advice typically includes
segmenting the appended addresses, sending to them on separate IP addresses to
avoid reputation damage, giving incentives to appended recipients, and close
monitoring to spot problems quickly.
Why such advice? Because we all know it can go wrong in a
lot of ways. The best we can hope for is marginal ROI and list growth with
low-value subscribers.
There are many effective ways to maintain and grow your
lists. E-mail append is faster and cheaper than many in the short term. In
general, however, I don’t believe it’s the choice of smart marketers who care
about the long term and their organizations’ reputation.
Article From: www.clickz.com
