The first thing you do with your customers’ email addresses, of course, is send them email. That’s far from a business email list’s only purpose, though, and savvy businesses know it. The next time you go shopping for anything from lumber to lemon-scented candles, notice how many cashiers ask for your email address. They know that with an email address and data appends, they can learn valuable lessons not just about you, but about their entire audience.
Here are a few other feats a simple email address can perform.
Unlocking Additional Data
Email addresses contain a wealth of information to marketers who use data append services to discover more about them. With an email address, you’re able to find postal addresses for direct mail campaigns to leads who fit your marketing profile. You can also learn about your leads’ geographical location, workplace, and other key pieces of information.
Fostering Customer Loyalty
Once just for airlines and hotels, loyalty programs have become a mainstay in a wide range of B2C and B2B industries. Getting an email address is often the start of a lasting relationship with a customer, particularly if the company asking for it has a robust customer care program in place. Once you have an email address, data append services can expand your knowledge about your customer so you’re better able to personalize your marketing messages. Data enhancement connects that address with buying history, prior customer service interactions, and firmographic data to make every future conversation smoother. Even before you use the email to send a message, it’s already working hard to show you how to serve your top customers better.
Getting the Big Data Picture
Big data is big because it’s made up of millions of tiny data points. It’s certainly useful to know that one customer downloaded your latest white paper and then made a purchase related to it a month later. How much more important would it be if you and your data management team could analyze thousands of records and see how each of your white papers correlated with sales over the next quarter? That’s a lot to ask of a simple email, yet it’s part of what data append technology can do for businesses. By looking into buying histories as an aggregate and comparing them to other database elements, you can spot trends as they’re happening.
Making One Channel into Many
If marketing channels were rivers, email would be the mighty Mississippi. Other marketing streams feed into it as tributaries, so having an email address allows you to trace customer data back into these other channels and continue the conversation there. For example, if you have your new customer’s email address and perform data append processes on that key piece of information, you can gain other knowledge that then becomes your checklist for retargeting. A true omni-channel marketing campaign relies heavily on email addresses and data enhancement to know precisely how to use those other channels to their best advantage.
Seeing the Future
While a single email address isn’t enough to let you and your marketing automation system predict stock market movement (yet), it does give you a glimpse into the future for you and your lead. Let’s say your prospect uses this email as a login name for a commercial real estate website based near you. If you’re selling construction materials, this could be your cue to strike up a conversation with someone who’s likely to be building or renovating in the region.
Email addresses are more than just a means to contact your customers via their online inboxes. They’re also keys that, together with data append services, can unlock a host of insights about individual customers and your audience as a whole.
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