E-Append: How to ensure you get the best service

Any business that has analysed its sales by customer will know that a customer who has provided an email address is worth between 30% and 300% more than one without.  The reason being that customers can be easily prompted and promoted to by email and become more 'engaged' with the business.  This realisation is driving many businesses, retailers in particular, to try to add email addresses to their customer data.

Many other organisations, commercial and non-commercial, have recognised that to be able to communicate with customers by email is a significant saving and usually for less than the cost of one mail piece or phone call, they are able to 'append' an email address and happily communicate at very little cost thereafter.  The range of organisations that fall into this category of driving cost savings is led by financial services but is quickly followed by charities, member organisations and even quasi government/local government departments.

So what is the downside?

The problem that all of these organisations face is the issue of quality: if they pay what can be a significant amount of money for email data, does it work? And if it can be delivered to, is it actually an email address that people will look at, or is it a convenience address that somebody has used to avoid future spam emails?

If you were to search the web to see what the 'e-append' customer experience has been to date, you would soon see warnings from people that this is not worth it and in general will not deliver its anticipated return on investment.  In general the issues seem to be caused by various issues of quality and service delivered by the businesses that operate in this area. Rob Bielby, CEO at The Marketing Innovation Group has researched this problem and concludes that fundamentally unless you can access transactional email data, it is likely that the large data files that most businesses use for this service are populated with secondary or low quality email addresses derived from free offers and competition entries.  

"E-append is largely defined as the process of matching your customer names and addresses with those held on a data pool, and that is the extent of the service offer for most providers in the market.   There is no mention of the source of the data or the history of using the data, no guarantees, no iterative process and usually no long term benefit to those 'mug' enough to take the solution at face value and pay good money for poor quality data.  You only have to take a low level view of most providers to know that you should discount them."

Bielby's view is that there are some basic rules that any business should consider before it embarks on a strategy of purely appending email addresses to its data.  Without doubt the quality of the service is determined both by the way the process is undertaken and also the data that is used.

1. Email Service- If the provider doesn't have their own email platform, they will not know if the data is active or dormant, they won't have access to open and click-through stats, and most permission pass emails don’t give the receiver any opportunity or incentive to click to anything.  Simple economics will mean that regular contact with the data is not made and so the email data is likely to be out of date and lacking support evidence.

2. Data Source- The data should be transactional in nature i.e. used by the recipient to buy things and interact with on-line operators.  

3. Data Owner- The provider should actually own data and ideally be using the data themselves to both keep it current but also to add extra intelligence that can be used to improve performance or matching.

4. Permission process- The permission process needs to be managed thoroughly and be iterative.  It should be possible to show statistics of current rates and also offer potential alternative routes and a test/development programme.  Like any direct marketing programme this needs to be evolving and include A/B split tests.

5. Longevity- The contracted agreement should cover a standard of delivery over a period of time and not be a 'one hit wonder'.  If the supplier tells you the match is static around a given pool data then that implies that they don’t own the data or have active up dates.  The contract should be more about service than volume or value!

6. Suppression- A good provider will also have a suppression file of known 'bad email' records and be able to equally advise you that some of your data with emails won't work.  It implies that they know which of their own records don’t work.

7. Bad email- A good email provider will have both experience and systems to help recover lost records that are flagged as bad emails.  Many businesses simply move on but it is possible to resurrect customers via other solutions, and an experienced provider will know what options there are, and what the metrics and costs are likely to be. E-appending isn't just about matching data; it is actually about getting more active email addresses as a percentage of the overall customer base.

8. Other media- This is not just a process around email append. A good provider will take a holistic approach and provide the ability to use other media to deliver results over time.

9. Payment- Whilst there are obvious set-up and processing costs, a provider should be prepared not only to charge on achievement of results but also give you the ability to spread the costs so that you can get the benefit of having appended the bulk of data before you have to pay for it.  This is not a normal data supply scenario and so shouldn’t be treated like one. It is a service and most 'data brokers' will fail at this point.

10. Guarantee- The ultimate test is a guarantee. It doesn't need to be a money back guarantee it could simply be that the inevitable bad emails are swapped 1 for 1. A good data owner will appreciate knowing that an email address has stopped working and will be keen to resurrect it.

The whole service is actually about improving communication capability and that will include methods of data capture, along with management of emailing - including design effectiveness, SMS and increasingly automated voice contact.  The best service provider in this area will understand all aspects of the process and will probably advise you on your strategy and what to expect and who will work alongside you.  It is probably wise to consider why you want to embark on this work, and what value you want the customer group you have in mind to deliver in future.  As with most things, good value is not necessarily cheap.

In general, organisations want email addresses because they want to engage long term with their best existing customers in a more timely or event-driven way online rather than using more expensive media. They may also want to interact with them in a more meaningful way to engage with known valuable prospects or re-activate past customers.  There is also growing interest in reducing carbon footprint; in advance of the legal changes due to pressure businesses to achieve savings next year, a strategy to migrate communications to email and mobile is probably an investment as well as a saving.

For more information, contact James Macleod on 01565 653000, or email james.macleod@m-i-g.com.