Building An Accurate Email Marketing Database

Building an email marketing database is essential to growing your clientele and/or gaining you more subscribers. A robust email database combined with strong email messaging, will increase the number of returning purchasers and encourage new inquires to purchase. But, building an accurate email marketing database can be challenging and take a lot of time.

“73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email”(Hubspot, 2020).

Starting Your Email Database

If you are a company just starting out, it’s recommended to begin with buying an email list to start your email database. It’s smart to first start out with purchasing an email list since these lists are designed to include people interested in your company’s particular niche or who are looking for a product similar to what you sell. Since starting a company you don’t have any contacts to reach out to about your product or service and gathering emails from your website can take time. We recommend starting with a purchased email list from a company that provides lists compliant with your local guidelines and follows CAN-SPAM laws, to avoid trouble later down the road.

Aside from purchasing a mailing list, it is a good practice to begin your email database with your current clientele or those you have been reaching out to. Next, would be to invest in adding form fills to your website. As your website gains traffic these form fills allow your website visitors the chance to provide you with their email information, which helps build your email marketing database. Not only will you be growing your email marketing database by doing this, but also these visitors are likely to have a higher engagement rate with your brand and convert into sales more so than the purchased email list.

Feeding Your Email Database

Your email database should be filled with every contact you meet that could potentially purchase your product or service. This means adding emails from business cards, form fills, trade shows, purchased lists, and much more. It’s important that your marketing efforts aim to build your list in some way, from making sure there are places on your website for your guests to submit their emails to having them record them at trade shows. Keep in mind that to comply with CAN-SPAM laws, the contacts you are adding to your email marketing database, need to have expressed interest in your brand and cannot just be random emails you find on the internet.

Updating Your Email Database

After a year or two of being in business, it is important to begin updating your email database. Making sure that your bounced emails are stored somewhere and your unsubscribed emails are removed from your database. By updating your email database on a regular schedule, you’ll be ensuring that your email deployment system (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc.) does not flag you for having bad data. It also assures you that your emails are getting to the right people.

Ordering A Data Append

After you have manually updated your email database, it’s important to have your database appended. This is when a data company will take your database and update all the contact information. Companies like Alesco Data will not only update your contacts, their data append service can be combined with machine learning and find you new contacts that are similar to your current database. Which in turn will enhance your email marketing database and give you new prospects to reach out to.