5 Easy Ways to. Take Your. to the

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1 5 Easy Ways to Take Your LIST to the Next Level

2 Though there are a excess of avenues today by which to connect customers, marketers still rely a great deal on marketing. It is a cost-effective way to reach, educate and motivate audience in order to drive new business and increase revenue. Therefore, growing and developing a list of quality addresses should be at the top of every savvy marketing manager s to-do list. Checking off this to-do item is not easy to achieve when you re faced with incomplete, out-of-date or inaccurate customer lists, which often lead to messages not reaching their intended recipients. Crafting convincing marketing messages about your products is your skill, not cleaning and enhancing lists. To get your list in order, think about enlisting the help of a specialist. Specialized service providers can help by validating, correcting and enhancing your in-house database. They also use time-proven algorithms and large-scale databases to match up customer names and addresses with verified addresses. It s now a science, but you don t have to be the specialist. Let s take a look at 5 services that can make your list cleaner, bigger and more robust: validation Hygiene Demographic Segmentation append reverse append 1

3 1 Validation Don t Miss your Mark: Improve Aim with Validation Even the most cautiously thought-out marketing strategy will wilt on the vine if the s sent don t reach their intended audience. Data entry errors and frequent changes continue to plague marketers efforts to reach target audience. On top of that, ISPs monitor your sending status to determine whether your should be delivered to the inbox, the spam folder or blocked entirely. Making sure you re working from a clean list can greatly progress your chances of success. Validation, the weapon of choice for combating dirty lists, can help you: reduce bounce back rate: By removing inaccurate addresses from your list or preventing those from being there in the first place a higher percentage of your s will be delivered. avoid spam traps and reduce complaints: Avoiding customers who will mark your s as spam and steering clear of spam traps that can get you blacklisted will lower your complaint rate. improve open, click and response rates: Reducing bounces rates and complaints, the principal factors that impact your reputation, will result in more of your messages being delivered into the inbox and opened by your customers. Correct data entry errors: Fixing grammar and spelling errors in your database or as they re entered on your website recovers lost leads and improves customers experience. Cut mailing costs: If you use an Service Provider to send your , fewer messages sent by using a fresh list directly translate to lower costs. Improved deliverability also means less management and fewer headaches associated with mailings. Generate more qualified leads: Validating and updating s in real time when they re entered on your website stops user errors and ensures you capture exact data about your customers, enhancing data quality while increasing the number of audience you can reach. Stop fraud: By applying validation at the point of entry, online businesses can avoid false and fake addresses from bypassing your forms and compromising your security. 2

4 It Bounced: Now What? The Benefits of Hygiene 2 Hygiene Instead of removing deceased addresses from your list, wouldn t you rather replace them with current addresses for your customers? The statistics on bounce rates are pretty intimidating: The average list has a 18 percent bounce rate, mainly due to misspellings, typos and the fast rate of address changes (35 percent per year). These bouncing addresses lead to condensed response rates, lost sales Prevent list decay with proper hygiene. opportunities and increased costs, but removing them also means a major reduction in your list size. hygiene services, which develop upon validation to include updation and change of address (ECOA), not only reduce your bounce rate but also assist to keep the size of your list by: RECOVERING valid addresses that were inaccurately classified as dead. REPAIRING dead addresses by correcting misspelled or invalid addresses. REPLACING old, out-of-date addresses with current, working ones. INFODATAPLACE can fix up to 30% of your invalid s. We use a professional knowledge base developed by probing and correcting thousands of addresses combined with our address change database. Employing hygiene to catch and repair the misspellings and data entry errors that happen on your website or in your stores not only improves data quality but also prevents typographical spam traps, which have become increasingly common, from getting on your list. 3

5 3 Demographic Segmentation One Size Doesn t Fit All: Modify Your Messages using Demographic Segmentation Once you have a fresh list, you can focus your attention on your messages. Your customers don t have the same interests, lifestyle or any other number of attributes that make them unique so why target them all with the same message? Separating your audience into smaller subgroups enables you to send more targeted, relevant s that can greatly rise response rates. According to the Annual Optimizer Report, marketers who segmented lists experienced: 43% 30% 27% higher open rates lower unsubscribe rates increase in sales leads & revenue Enhancing your customer database with demographic segmentation is an tremendous way to spot your best customers, target retention, acquisition efforts more efficiently and increase the number of touch points available to you. You can segment your list by hundreds of variables including: Age Gender Marital status Income Occupation Education Presence of children Owner Length of residence Lifestyle segmentation 4

6 More Bang for Your Marketing Buck: Getting More s 4 Append If you identify the benefits and efficiencies of marketing, it s natural to want to strengthen your results by growing the size of your list. If you have developed a large and consistent postal mailing list from which to target customers, but don t have the addresses for most of those people, you are missing a great chance to do just that. By enlisting the help of an append service, you can open up new avenues of communications with your audience. append services have qualified over the past few years, and through the use of advanced algorithms and in-house databases of more than 800 million records, append has become a swift, affordable and consistent way to grow your list by matching opt-in addresses to your postal list. In addition, studies have shown multichannel marketing reaching out to audience across several touch points can significantly improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by using each channel to promote the other. One of the ways to accomplish this is by adding an online module to your direct mail marketing efforts. How append works: 1) Provide a file of your customers names and postal addresses to the append service 2) File is matched to an opt-in database to obtain addresses of those customers 3) An introductory message is sent to the matched customers requesting permission to receive from your company 4) Final matches (average approximately 25 percent of the input list) and unsubscribes are collected and delivered to you You can boost sales and reduce costs by marketing to your current customers through . With append, you can build your own list using your customer files instead of renting an arbitrary list, and you ll achieve significant list growth in a matter of days (as opposed to months with other alternatives). 5

7 Double-down with Direct Mail using Reverse Append 5 Reverse Append Reverse append services provide a complementary way to enhance your database by adding names and postal addresses to your list, enabling you to segment your list by geography and to augment your marketing efforts with direct mail. As described above, multi-channel marketing can significantly increase response rates. Do your homework and make sure you pick a reverse append service that delivers results that are DPV-certified (Delivery Point Validation) by the U.S. Postal Service for accurate postal delivery at discount rates. Top services can match postal information to 35 to 50 percent of your list. Give Your Message its Best Shot with a Quality Database It takes a lot of effort to create compelling and motivating messages for your subscribers. However, your efforts may be wasted if you don t start by working with a quality list. These five services can take your marketing to the next level by improving your deliverability, increasing the number of customers you can reach and enabling you to send more targeted, relevant marketing messages. After all, the deliverability of your message is just as important as the message itself. Partnering with specialists who can help you validate, clean and enhance your customer data can help assure you that your carefully crafted message won t miss its intended target. It s as simple as submitting a batch file. Or you can get any of these results in real time via an API. 6

8 About InfoDataPlace Since 2003, InfoDataPalce has helped thousands of companies improve the quality, size and performance of their databases. We are a seasoned team of direct marketers and database technology experts ready to help you increase the number of customers you can reach via , improve your delivery rate and reputation, and segment your list for better response. For additional information or a free trial of our services, Contact InfoDataPlace at or support@infodataplace.com