- Where to Ask for Names
- How to Ask for Names
- Closing the Deal
- Finding Email Addresses for Existing Customers
- Purchasing or Renting Names
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Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Finding Email Addresses for Existing Customers
If your business includes a physical component, or if you're transitioning from traditional direct mail, you probably already have a huge list of customers' names and implicit permission to send out regular mailings. These names are in your existing customer list, people who’ve purchased from you before by mail or phone.
The problem with emailing to existing physical customers is that you might not have email addresses for some or all of these names. If this is the case, you need to somehow find the mail addresses for your existing customers.
While you could ask your existing direct mail customers to provide you with email addresses, that’s requiring them to do a lot of work—and probably won’t have a high success rate. A better approach is to contract with a direct mail or email specialist to run an email append on your mailing list. The vendor will take the names on your list and, as accurately as possible, find matching email addresses for them. The vendor then sends emails to these people on your behalf, asking for permission to send more emails. Those people who respond in the affirmative (and whose names accurately matched their email addresses) get added to your email mailing list.