If you are one of the multichannel marketers lucky enough to have mailing and e-mail addresses on a single database, multi-touch strategies are a great way to boost response and subsequent revenue. E-mail campaigns with a catalog follow-up are among the most popular strategies for catalogers because both vehicles are measurable and setting up test cells is relatively easy.
Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself before beginning this type of campaign:
- Are my e-mail addresses clean? To avoid bounces, be sure that the addresses are formatted correctly, and that there are no typos or invalid domain names. There are services that can run this process for you much like regular mail service bureaus.
- Does my e-mail blast vendor send updates such as opt-outs and hard bounces to my marketing database provider? Many marketers take this step for granted. But if you don’t set up a process where your marketing database is updated with the most current e-mail addresses, thousands of customers with of out-of-date e-mail addresses can be included in the wrong mail cells.
- Is my company or blast vendor on a blacklist? Blacklists are lists of IP addresses or Internet domains that are perceived to be sources of spam. Go to Habeas.com and find out if your company has been blacklisted. If you are, you will not get a bounce and may never know unless you check.
And remember to do your utmost to collect e-mail addresses with every contact and match them to snail mail records on your database so that you can use this potentially valuable multichannel contact strategy again and again.
Tracy Blake is marketing manager at San Rafael, CA-based catalog consultancy Lenser.
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