The rising cost of printed materials and postage is driving companies to communicate more by email. You can send an email with a link to online information for a fraction of the cost of printing the same information and mailing it in an envelope. Moving to all-email communication sounds like a no-brainer, right? Unfortunately, the relative lack of email addresses compared to mailing addresses in most in-house databases can be a stumbling block.

Here are some ways to increase your list of email addresses:

• Always ask for an email address.
  • Include a spot for the user to enter an email address on every printed or online form. If possible, especially on an online form, make the email address a mandatory field.
  • Train your inbound call representatives to ask each caller for an email address.
• Make sure to enter every email address that you collect into the appropriate database.
  • There is no point asking for the address if you are not going to use it!
• Give your customers and prospects an incentive to provide their email addresses.
  • A coupon, a newsletter, or a chance to win a prize can be a great response booster.
  • Appeal to your contacts’ desire to be a good citizen of the planet: Ask them to help you help the environment by using less paper!
• Conduct a telephone or mail campaign to collect email addresses.
  • In a recent telephone campaign, DataWorks collected email addresses from over 70% of a customer’s mailing list. Now our customer can spend 70% less on printing, postage and mailing labor while maintaining their schedule of frequent communications. (When you ask someone for an email address, let them know that it will be used for a specific purpose and will not be shared with other companies.)

Just like a mailing list, an email address list must be maintained and updated in order to be effective. After you do an email blast, use the list of bounced or bad addresses to update your list. (DataWorks does this as standard procedure after every email blast.) If you have a large and infrequently used email list, it may pay to use an email scrubbing service to fix common format errors, check valid domains, and weed out bogus addresses.

Oh, and please send me an email if you liked this post! We will enter you into a drawing to win a free email blast to your list of up to 1000 addresses.

Tags: Email Addresses, Email List Management, Lehigh Valley