Email marketing is soaring. Now firmly proven to generate the fastest direct marketing return on investment, it is successfully used in both customer acquisition and retention. For the most part, commercial email has evolved over the past decade into a legitimate and highly accountable marketing channel based on the principles of permission. The concept of obtaining permission to send marketing messages to recipients, and of encouraging prospects and customers to proactively and affirmatively provide information about themselves to enhance targeting and message relevancy remains the bedrock of its foundation.
While seeking customer email addresses and the permission to use them is a fairly common and achievable practice, prospecting via email can require more planning and strategy than simply emailing to a house list. Further complicating the landscape is the fact that email marketing to rented lists has been cited as both a best and worst performing online marketing tactic in a 2006 end-of-the-year survey jointly conducted by ad:tech and Marketing Sherpa. So which is it? Since most marketers know a lot more about their customers than their non-customers, there are many unanswered questions when it comes to prospecting with email: Where do you find permission-quality email lists, and how do you then construct and send a marketing campaign to an audience who may not know you? How do you entice an audience who hasn't done business with you before to not only trust, but also engage with you online? And what must occur at your response destination (Web page or otherwise) to ensure that responders convert into customers? Read on to learn the five most important steps to successful prospecting with permission email:
1) Get To Know Your List
Just as there is a universe of direct mail lists, there are now hundreds, if not thousands, of email lists available for rental. But all email marketing lists are not created equal. Permission is even more critical when emailing prospects than customers. After all, a customer who has an established relationship with you may forgive an initial or occasional unsolicited email message - but a prospect will not. If you are not using 100% affirmative consent opt-in lists for email prospecting you not only risk the damage to your brand caused by being labeled a spammer, worse yet you negatively impact your deliverability thus killing the potential for subsequent email marketing efforts to the same audience.
After ensuring that your list sources are genuinely 100% single or double opt-in, your most important consideration should be the relevancy of your offer to the audience. For example, an email marketing campaign from an airline offering a vacation package to Orlando is appropriately targeted to a list of people interested in Travel & Leisure, but may be considered spam if sent to individuals interested only in Business Travel. A critical step in ensuring your email marketing adheres to permission marketing standards is knowing your target audience is specifically interested in what you have to offer. The more specific their stated interests, the better, even if this results in smaller list inventories.
Finally, since a prospecting effort implies the use of another company's (or division's or affiliate's) customer list, the more detail you can glean about those list members, the richer your targeting will be. Whether you're working directly with an email list owner or through a broker/manager, don't be shy about asking lots of questions.
Email List Rental Questions
- What is the source of the names on the list? (This may be obvious - such as a company that rents its customer file - or less so. If you don't ask, you won't have a basis for understanding the type and degree of permission used to build the list)
- How often is the list mailed?
- Have list members indicated a preference for when and how often they'd like to receive email, and are those preferences adhered to?
- Which percentage of the list can accept messages in HTML? Text only?
- What's the average monthly unsubscribe rate and what was it the last time the list was mailed?
- What's the average monthly undeliverable rate?
- Have companies like mine (or offers similar to mine) rented or been mailed to the list before?
