Keep Your Email List Current

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last week’s first installment of our Success Series was a huge hit. As a result, look for more interviews to come. We’ll be peppering them in once a month or so. Thanks to all those who sent in feedback…keep it coming, I say! The email address is mailto:feedback@webadvantage.net.

Now, do you:

• Use email to reduce customer acquisition costs?
• Use email as a retention/communication tool?
• Direct market to your customers through your email database?
• Maintain an opt-in customer list that you rent out to others?
• Plan to incorporate more emailing into your current marketing strategy?

If any of the above apply to you, this week’s tip is for you.

Marketing through to in-house email list is one of the most cost effective marketing methods around. But let’s ask a question: what happens when you lose a customer or prospect email address? It happens every day right? People move, change jobs, or even change ISPs. Problem is, when this happens, they’ve also likely changed their email address. In fact, studies show that about one-third of your list members change email addresses each year. This amounts to potentially one-third less business (or more!).

Hidden Costs of Lost Email Addresses:

1. Wasted Marketing Dollars - just like in the off-line world, sending email messages to bad addresses (which also generates undeliverable error messages) is money down the drain (loss of revenue; wasted time; wasted server space). But you’ve got to be careful: if you remove a bad name from your database that was only *temporarily* unavailable, you have not only deleted a valuable name, you have also wasted your time.

    

2. Redundant Acquisition Costs - some companies spend hundreds of dollars to acquire a single new online customer. Losing one- third of your email list each year means you could be spending one-third or more dollars just to acquire them again. And that’s not counting that it always costs more money to acquire a new customer than to keep an old one.

    

3. Lost Revenue - one-third fewer emails equals one-third fewer potential buyers equals revenue slump.

ECOA Services

So how do you combat the problem of email list turnover? One solution is a service called “Email Change of Address” (ECOA) that can help keep your email address database accurate. Similar to the NCOA (National Change of Address) service used by direct mailers to maintain “clean” postal lists, ECOA is designed to ensure that companies have access to the most up-to-date email addresses of their customers and prospects.

Presently, there lots of companies that provide ECOA services that benefit individuals. If, for example, you change jobs, you can employ a plethora of free ECOA services to notify your contacts that your email address has changed. Some of these service providers include:

• FreshAddress
• EmailChange.com
• ActiveNames

   

Marketers seeking to reduce the losses created by email turnover, however, are looking for a different kind of service, one provided by companies such as Return Path and Responsys. These companies specialize in providing opt-in lists of up-to-date email addresses. The biggest difference between the two companies is that while Return Path utilizes a permission-based approach, Responsys takes a forced opt-out one.

Return Path’s method employs a network of sites. A user changing email addresses can report the change to one of the sites that belongs to the Return Path network. Return Path matches up the user’s old and new addresses and reports back to the user what other sites on the network can be notified. The user then authorizes Return Path to notify the other sites of the change. Provided your site belongs to the Return Path ECOA Network, you will be notified along with other network members.

Responsys takes a different tact. Responsys clients give names and postal addresses of lost customers, and Responsys will find a matching deliverable email address. To woo the lost customer back “into the fold,” Responsys sends the individual an opt-out email offering future communications from the client.

Although these companies take different approaches, what’s not debatable about the topic of ECOA is that for marketers who rely heavily upon email for customer communications, retention and sales, ECOA ought to be part of a best practices email strategy. For more on email marketing, visit our article, “Email Marketing Do’s & Don’ts”.

Related links:

http://www.returnpath.com
http://www.responsys.com/acquire/ecoa.asp

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