How One Mailer Switched to E-Mail and Thrived
Could you survive the switch from direct mail to e-mail? The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) did just that — and lived to tell about it at a session during the Annual Conference for Catalog & Multichannel Merchants (ACCM) in New Orleans last month. Here are the lessons the museum learned:
MFA shut down its catalog operations in 2003, but then wanted to reach out to former catalog and Internet customers via e-mail. Resource-constrained, the organization needed to find a way to quickly and efficiently build the requisite e-mail list to go digital in a meaningful way. Organic growth wasn’t sufficient — to date, MFA had accumulated only 10,000 e-mail addresses through brick-and-mortar sign-ups and Web site activity. Meanwhile, its postal database exceeded 400,000 records.
Therein lay the answer — e-mail append. MFA was able to append more than 100,000 e-mail addresses (24.5 percent) to its postal database within 12 months. It worked with e-mail database service provider FreshAddress on the project.
In their presentation at ACCM, Austin Bliss, president/co-founder of FreshAddress, and Ellen Bragalone, director of retail operations for MFA, provided the following factors businesses should consider when looking for an e-mail append vendor:
- Solid reputation. Ask for testimonials, references and a credible client list.
- Experience and knowledge. Make sure e-mail appending is the vendor's primary area of focus.
- Price. Be wary of offers that are “too good to be true.”
- Stringent data protection protocols. Understand how your data will be protected.
- One hundred percent opted-in data. Insist on the time, date and URL of the opt-in.
- Suppressions. The vendor should run your unsubscribe list and suggest other suppressions.
- Robust data hygiene. Double-scrub your results.
- Deliverable results. Vendors should offer a 100 percent guarantee that your results will not bounce.
After MFA had its appended e-mail addresses, it needed to integrate them carefully into its existing database and e-mail marketing strategy. Here’s what it did:
* scrutinized the results to confirm general accuracy;
* maintained the results separately from its housefile;
* slowly sent messages to the appended e-mail addresses in a two-step approach:
- dedicated offer to MFA retail Web site (special offer for appended results only); and
- standard offer to MFA retail Web site (same offer as housefile);
* messaged appended e-mails carefully, specifically not to personalize household append results; and
* conducted quarterly append reruns to capitalize on added data sources.
In the end, MFA saw great results. Former catalog and Web customers placed more online orders, and multidepartment newsletters experienced their highest clickthrough rates ever.
“Of course we were thrilled with the high match rates we experienced, but we were even more excited when we started seeing a return on our investment,” Bragalone said. “E-mail appending is a no-brainer if done right — it’s an easy and inexpensive way to grow your customer e-mail list fast.”
Jodi Baier is marketing and communications manager at FreshAddress, an e-mail address hygiene services firm (jbaier@freshaddress.com).
- Companies:
- FreshAddress
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Places:
- Boston
- New Orleans