email-grow-2Forrester Research released their latest report on digital marketing trends, predicting that the amount invested in email marketing campaigns will top $3 billion by 2019. On average, email spend increases 10 percent a year, and there’s a reason for it: Email works. Last year, respondents who answered a marketing survey on ROI said their email marketing activity accounted for as much revenue as all their other digital advertising streams combined.

Given the importance of email marketing for business communications, it’s no wonder that email addresses are such a valuable commodity for marketers. Even social media streams feed into email; even if conversations originate on a social network, the conversation quickly moves to email as interest grows. It’s no wonder, then, that gathering email addresses is paramount to your company’s digital marketing success. Email append for verification, look-up, and reverse look-up is an essential database service for marketers who want to tap into their largest source of leads.

Email Appends

For companies that have primarily used other channels for communicating with their leads, gathering email data quickly and cleanly can be a challenge. Your customers may offer you this information over time, but to gather information rapidly on a much larger share of your leads, you need data append services. Data enrichment through appends can enhance in-house databases that already contain names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and business names with valuable email addresses. A reverse email append can also take email data and expand it into knowledge about leads’ other information.

Working with the Best Ingredients

Successful append services start with rigorously cleansed and carefully maintained databases. With a properly maintained database, services can achieve a match rate of more than 50 percent for business data and 40 percent for information on individual leads. Ideally, your data append provider should align data elements across a number of channels via corporate databases and masterfiles rather than relying on aggregate data from general lists. Larger databases are also better; you’re more likely to match email addresses in a database of 70 million records than in smaller, less comprehensive ones.

Data Overlays

While finding email addresses may be your primary goal, database services that offer data appends can also enrich your existing records with more complete demographic and firmographic information. Not only will you get email addresses, but you can also link those data elements with details about job title, job function, company size, decision-making power, and other business intelligence. With more information about your leads, you’re better able to qualify them and pinpoint your target audience precisely, resulting in a higher ROI on your marketing activities.

Data-enriched customer files are important to any organization’s success, but it’s especially vital to B2B companies as they rely on deep customer knowledge to convert. With email enhancement, you’re able to develop a robust, complete database that lets you engage more fully with your audience.