Clients eager to create and deploy email marketing campaigns have been asking us where they can acquire and how they can build eMarketing contact lists. Many clients new to eMarketing are under the assumption that the process of finding and creating a quality direct mailing list is the same for email campaigns. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Our guest blogger today is Dude Spellings, eMarketing Program Manager of our information technology team. Dude explains the difference between direct mail lists, email lists, and the ramifications of not following best practices for generating lists associated with email campaigns.

Enjoy,

Steve

The most effective contact lists for email marketing are permission-based, home grown lists. They take longer to develop but can be more reliable and may offer higher ROI. Although there are email lists available in the industry, it is not wise to acquire a list of random email addresses and start sending marketing materials like you can with direct mail. Even with direct mail, an effective marketer would never use a list of random recipients. With direct mail, effective marketers are qualifying recipients by geographic location, home value, family demographics, income, previous purchases, by having an existing business relationship, etc. A random list of email addresses (which is what lists of unknown origin really are since you have no way of knowing how the list was compiled) usually doesn’t have any of those qualifiers and will thus perform very poorly.

Using lists from unreliable sources and choosing to email to unknown recipients can actually have multiple negative impacts such as:

Damage to your brand/goodwill as recipients associate your company with unsavory marketing practices. Recipients who get unwanted email from your company will label you in their mind as a spammer and they will get angry with your company. Think about how you feel when you get an email from someone you don’t know trying to sell you something that you don’t want. Most people feel as though this is an invasion of privacy. Do you want your company associated with that? If you have worked hard to build a brand that your customers recognize and trust, you probably don’t want to jeopardize that brand equity you have worked so hard to earn.

Degradation of deliverability as internet service providers and email providers mark your emails as spam and filter them from being delivered to recipients’ inboxes. This will even affect the deliverability of completely legitimate emails, such as transactional emails, to existing customers, partners, and/or employees. Once you are labeled as a source of unwanted emails, you will not be able to deliver ANY emails very effectively. Note that I use the term unwanted emails and not spam. The reason for this distinction is because a company may be thinking, ‘we are not spammers because we don’t send email about Viagra, or losing weight, or the Nigerian lottery, etc.’ But, the reality is that spam is simply an email that people do not want, regardless of content. The systems in place today, allow users to mark any email as spam, and then the ISP’s and email providers monitor what kinds of emails users are marking as spam. If enough users (and it’s usually a low threshold) mark your emails as spam, the ISP’s and email providers will start blocking all of your emails. So in reality, all it takes is one bad list to get all your emails blocked.

Damage to your readership, open and conversion rates. Even if your list contains recipients with whom you have an existing relationship, sending unwanted or unsolicited emails dilutes the potency of your marketing efforts. It becomes exactly like the boy who cried wolf - people start to associate you as a sender of unimportant and uninteresting emails. So, they’ll start to just delete or ignore your emails. Think about how you manage your inbox - almost everyone knows someone who is constantly forwarding chain emails and gimmicks. If you are like me, you learn that certain senders’ emails are not worth reading because they never contain any information that you want, so you delete them without even opening them. You may even create a rule that deletes them automatically. Because email marketing is so inexpensive, we tend to think, ‘Wow! You mean it costs nothing to send a million emails? The more the better!’ But, this misses the point of email marketing. The point of email marketing is not to blanket your message to everyone with an email address. The point of email marketing is to establish a trusted relationship with customers who are interested in your product or service and tailor messages specifically for that recipient so that they feel your emails add value to the relationship. In other words, there has to be something of benefit for the recipient. The better job you do of keeping your lists full of people who want your emails, the better results you will see.

Similarly, you should try to identify exactly what your customers want and try to accommodate them in your email marketing efforts. Most people view their inbox as a highly personal part of their lives. Because of this, email marketing inherently needs to have a one-to-one feel. Large, impersonal and unfocused email blasts that just hope to snag a couple new customers out of the many emails that were sent obviously will lack this one-to-one feel, and are thus ineffective. But what is worse is that habitually sending these kinds of emails will damage your effectiveness for more targeted and effective email campaigns and will ultimately damage your brand. Effective email campaigns start with a list of recipients who want to receive emails from you and/or are known to be interested in your products and services. In addition to that, your emails need to stand out without using gimmicky language that people have already identified in their mind as spam (i.e.: using phrases like SAVE Thousands! or FREE Offer! in the subject line). In other words, your email cannot look like a form letter because people are already trained to spot such tactics and ignore them. Your offer needs to be something that people look forward to opening in order to establish a habit of readership among your recipients. If you never offer anything that people want they will eventually stop opening your emails and/or unsubscribe from your lists.

One might say that these tips do not apply to lead-generation emails. I would disagree and suggest that these facts reinforce the notion that email marketing is very different than direct mail and must be executed differently. It doesn’t mean that you cannot use email for lead generation, but it does mean that you must know something about your target audience in order for lead generation to be effective. Email marketing is all about relevancy. You can not be relevant to recipients in a lead-generation campaign with a list of email addresses that you know nothing about and, therefore, will be unable to make the messages relevant to each recipient. The more you know about your recipients, the more effective you will be. If you know nothing about your recipients, your results could be worse than ineffective. You could alienate potential customers and do damage to your brand.

Email marketing can be very effective, but just like anything else you have to work at it. It’s not a panacea for dwindling sales and will not replace direct mail. It should be used in conjunction with direct mail and/or as a supplement to it, not in place of it. As I have described above, email marketing inherently has a different kind of audience and requires a different approach. Using email marketing just like you use direct mail will not produce the results most people are looking for.

I hope this clarifies the difference between direct mail lists and email lists for you.

Take care,

Dude

eMarketing Program Manager

Tags: direct mail, emarketing, mailing lists