Marketers, hoping to make the email opt-in process less onerous, have been asking less of subscribers. Today, many programs require only a name and an email address. While this is easy for subscribers, it can make it difficult for companies to target and trigger email messages. Email append services, which tie additional data points and demographic information to email addresses, are one solution some marketers have pursued. But do they know everything there is to know about the topic? Dave Scott, CEO at online marketing firm Marketfish, discusses five things that marketers might not realize about appending.
1) There's more data out there than many marketers might realize. “People think that they are not going to find enough information, especially on the b2b side, but we find that 90% of all the lists we use tend to get appended with some piece of data. We're always amazed that there's that much data out there,” he said.
2) Marketers can—and should—test before they buy. While it's not something every provider publicizes, marketers should be able to get at least 1,000 email addresses appended for free to get a good sampling, Scott said. Marketers also shouldn't underestimate the power of their own data when assessing different vendors. “We give them the emails of everyone that we know as well as the email addresses of people we already have appended data on so we can check to see if what [the append service providers] come back with is close to what we already have,” he said.
3) Appended lists can give false confidence. “You can fall into believing that everything you get from an append service is completely and totally accurate; so you go out and send an email to everyone on a list that says, "Dear Director of IT.' Meanwhile, you might have people on the list who are not IT directors, and you've completely alienated them,” Scott said.
4) Data gets old. People get promotions. They move within a company. They quit. Because of this, Scott said, marketers should re-append their email list once a quarter or, at a minimum, twice a year. “You always want to have the most current data when you're targeting your list,” he said.
5) Don't rely simply on title, name and location when targeting. There's a variety of information out there about prospects, and marketers that are willing to get creative can get big results. “You can use something like marketing spend, for instance,” Scott said. “If you're selling a CRM system and you find a company that's got a disproportionately high marketing spend, you know that company is supporting its salespeople. Think about the indicators that apply to your market and see if there are lists out there that can address them.”
