Nearly 9 out of 10 marketers use email marketing as a form of lead generation – and for good reason. Email marketing offers a potential return on your investment of as much as 4,000%.

However, not everyone is achieving these impressive figures with their marketing campaigns. The success of these companies is often limited by out-of-date or incomplete customer data that impacts deliverability, engagement, and data collection.

When your customer database is filled with old or incorrect emails, leads that you think you’re reaching out to may never even see your email. After they’ve ignored your emails for a while, you might be tempted to prune them from your database as an uninterested lead even if they’ve shown interest in the past. This lost opportunity can greatly reduce the reach of your campaigns and the impact of your marketing while also skewing your campaign data.

Plus, with 71% of consumers expecting personalization when you’re communicating with them, having complete customer profiles becomes even more important for engaging your leads.

If you want to improve your email marketing with larger customer bases, more personalization information, and higher deliverability, email appending can help.

What Is an Email Append?

Email appending is the process of adding or updating an email address in your contact database so you can reach them as part of your email marketing campaign. It aims to keep each of your lead and customer profiles as complete and up-to-date as possible so they’re more likely to convert.

Email appends are often used when a previous contact is no longer engaging with your email or your emails are being returned as undeliverable to make sure you don’t prune a potential customer due to miscommunication.

You can also use email appends to retrieve the email address of customers you’ve interacted with over the phone, through text, or in person using the alternative information they’ve provided. They can then be targeted as part of your email campaign, allowing you to expand your email marketing’s reach.

How Do Email Appends Work?

Despite their importance, email appends are a straightforward process.

As a business, you’ll provide your existing customer database or information about specific contacts that you want an email for. Some details you can provide are the contact’s name, phone number, address, or any other piece of contact information you may have. Generally, the more information you can provide to the email append provider, the more accurate the appended information will be.

Once they know what to look for, the provider takes the supplied information and cross-checks it with their comprehensive database to look for matches. If their database has information that you’re missing, like a new or updated email for your contact, it provides you with the data so you can update your local database with up-to-date information.

How Effective is an Email Append?

The effectiveness and accuracy of an email append depends on the accuracy of the information you provide, your provider’s database, and how many pieces of information you provide.

Generally, as long as the database is correctly managed and all contact information is consistently and frequently verified, checking against a larger database will be more effective for matching your information. The provider can check against more records in a single wave to unveil a majority of the information that smaller providers may have, unless the providers have specific industries or niches that they operate in to separate their information.

Additionally, the accuracy, quality, and quantity of information you provide will greatly determine how well your email appends will go. The more contact information you can provide, the higher the probability of making a valid append match.

Benefits of Email Appends

Email appends are one of the best ways to optimize your email marketing campaigns and strategy. Here’s how they can help.

Improves Response Rates

The goal of every marketing email is to engage the reader and encourage them to take action. You may want them to download an ebook, sign up for a webinar, or take advantage of an upcoming sale. But, if you can’t reach your lead, you won’t generate a response.

When you improve the integrity of your contact list, you reduce the chances of undeliverable emails and emails that sit in abandoned email addresses. As a result, you’ll have a more accurate idea of how your campaign is performing to help inform future campaigns.

Ensures Your Database is Accurate

Your email marketing campaigns can only be as effective as your contact list allows for. 

An accurate database lets you effectively target the segments of your email list, improving engagement and driving better results.

Inaccurate databases can not only impact your reach and marketing cost, but can also push customers away if the information you have about them is wrong. Mistargeting is more harmful than not targeting your emails at all, so ensuring your information is accurate helps you avoid shooting yourself in the foot. 

Additionally, instead of pruning contacts that showed potential, because your emails aren’t reaching them, you can use email appends to recover that lead with an up-to-date email address.

Reduces Wasted Marketing Spend

Email marketing costs money. From the time investment and costs of creating your database to the in-depth targeting and analysis of your contacts, it’s a significant investment for a major marketing channel.

If your database is out-of-date, your efforts are less likely to pay off with a conversion because you won’t be able to reach your leads and customers. Plus, most email marketing tools charge you by the number of emails you send, so if you’re sending emails to ghost inboxes or having emails returned as undeliverable, you’ll be spending money on nothing.

Email Append Best Practices

Email appending is an incredibly effective way to improve the efficiency and performance of your email marketing strategy – but only if it’s done correctly.

Here’s how you can make the most of email appending.

Append Using Specific Information Like Phone Numbers

The viability and accuracy of email appending often depends on the quality of the information you provide to compare against the vendor’s database. Names and addresses are common pieces of personal information that can be used to discover emails, but they’re not always the most reliable.

Phone numbers are one of the best pieces of reference information you can provide because they’re unique and are usually tied to a specific person for an extended period of time.

Consumer contacts can have the same name and may move to a new address often if they’re renting. However, most people keep their number when changing phones or wireless carriers, making it a more consistent identifier to make sure you’re reaching your intended target.

Business contacts will also maintain their phone numbers to avoid losing business, making it equally effective for business-to-business communication.

Perform Regular Database Updates

As we mentioned earlier, databases decay year-after-year. As more contacts become invalid, your costs rise, deliverability suffers, and response rates become lower.

If you want to optimize your email marketing performance, email appending, reverse email appending, and other database updates should be completed on a regular schedule to ensure your list remains valid.

Follow Anti-Spam Laws

Email appending gives you the opportunity to reach more of your leads and customers through your email marketing campaigns. However, if they’re not interested in receiving your emails, you risk losing them as a customer or incurring fines from anti-spam laws.

Sending commercial emails requires the recipient to consent to being emailed by your business. The email append provider you use should offer the option to send a permission email to any contact emails that you’ve added to your database to ensure they consent to receiving your emails.

If they don’t consent, you must immediately cease emailing them. Otherwise, you can face a fine in accordance with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Email Appends vs Reverse Email Appends

Email appending isn’t limited to just retrieving a contact’s email with their personal information – it can also work in reverse.

Reverse email appends take the email of your customer and check it against the vendor’s database to unveil their other contact information. If they’re able to match the email to a current or past email within their database, you’ll be able to learn details like the name, address, and phone number of your contact.

Learning personal information about a lead or customer can help you personalize your emails to improve engagement. Something as simple as referring to a contact by their first name can be enough to encourage a click.

Other Types of Appends Outside of Email Appends

Data is king, so having as much accurate information as possible in your customer database helps you achieve better results with your marketing campaigns.

If you’re missing crucial information about your leads and customers, consider these other types of appends you can use to build more complete profiles in your database:

• Phone appends
• Reverse phone appends
• Address appends
• Reverse address appends
• Demographic appends
• Birthday appends
• Education appends
• Income appends

Wrapping Up: The Value of Using An Email Append Service

When it comes to marketing, the more you know, the better you can target and tailor your campaigns to your contacts for better results.

It’s not uncommon to collect some personal information without receiving an email address. You might have collected a name and phone number as part of a sign-up sheet or opt-in form, but didn’t collect the email.

Because this individual or business showed an interest in your products or services, they’re a lead worth pursuing with a multi-channel marketing approach. But, you can’t take advantage of the high ROI email marketing provides without their email.

Email appending helps to ensure you have as much information as possible while verifying the accuracy of the information and checking that it’s current. You can use it to avoid pruning legitimate leads that changed their email, help keep your marketing costs down, and maintain more accurate metrics when evaluating your marketing campaign’s effectiveness by sending fewer unseen or undeliverable emails.

Alternative appends like phone number appends or reverse appends are also valuable for achieving a more complete contact profile, so look for these solutions when picking your email append service.

Getting Started With Email Append Services from IMDataCenter

Any business that uses or plans to leverage email marketing should consider email appending. The right email append service ensures you remain compliant while verifying the accuracy and integrity of your database so you can market as efficiently as possible. 

At IMDataCenter, we use our comprehensive databases to provide email appends, reverse appends, phone appends, and other data hygiene services. Our 600+ million records are regularly audited for accuracy, giving us match rates of up to 60% that save you time and money.

We also help ensure you’re staying compliant with permission emails and deliverability checks so that the contact information you receive from us is actionable, giving you a step-up in your email marketing campaigns.

Don’t squander the marketing opportunity that email provides because of stale and incomplete data. Our email appending solutions, along with other services, help you create a more complete customer profile and expand your reach.

Create a free account today to get started.