After doing a bit of googleing, I found a few new email append resources that I thought you might find valuable.
Understanding Email Appending (Direct Marketing Club of New York)
Email Append: Consumer Pricing (From an Email Append Service Provider)
E-mail Appending Examined: 5-Minute Interview (Target Marketing Magazine)
It’s tough to find a concise source of email append companies online but here’s a directory of mostly high-level email append companies from mFormer.com.
Simply browse the directory to sort through email append suppliers that have been recommended by your peers or get a free referral from mFormer’s editor.
Happy shopping!
In a recent ClickZ article, Derek Harding has an overview of The Dangers of Email Append that highlights his problems with the practice. According to Harding:
Many marketers want [email append] 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.
Later the process was further discussed, or should I say battered, on ExactTarget’s Subscribers Rule blog.
I posted or discussed these articles on several Linked Groups, including Email Marketing Gurus to get a feel for what email append suppliers and their clients had to say. Although many great responses were filed, the following from Dan Babb of Walter Karl Interactive was by far my favorite. Babb writes:
As with any marketing plan, if you have a clearly defined strategy and execute well…then your programs tend to have success.
If instead you just take your appended names and dump them into your email database and send them the same thing that everyone else gets, then your results won’t be as high as they could have been.
Once I had a client that did an append and called me about 2 weeks later to talk about the complaints they were getting. When I asked some questions, I found out that they just sent the appended emails the same thing that everyone else got. Well, the header on that email was “Here’s this week’s email that you opted-in to receive.” I pointed out that the appended emails didn’t affirmatively opt-in (as they knew because they provided us with the copy), so a poorly executed marketing plan was to blame.
Sure enough, they changed the header and some copy for the appended universe and the complaints stopped. In that case, the client caused the complaints.
Funny how you never hear the naysayers talk about clients that had success. We’ve had a number of ExactTarget clients use us for email append projects (with good plans on how to use the data) and they’ve been repeat clients…so I’m glad that not everyone listens to bad advice.
What’s your take?
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