Marketers Can Now Reach New Movers Using Anchor's New Mover/New Connects Data At Affordable Prices

Identifying new movers is an important marketing tool in establishing long-term relationships with new customers as they move into a new neighborhood. To help marketers reach this highly desired demographic, Anchor Computer is pleased to introduce one of the most current, accurate and comprehensive New Mover/New Connects data feed available today.

Farmingdale, NY (PRWEB) June 28, 2009 -- New movers are highly motivated buyers and spend more on home-related purchases within the first three months of living in their new household versus current homeowners. Marketers can now reach these new prospects at the right time using Anchor's New Mover/New Connects data at affordable prices!

Anchor's customers will now have the option to inspect any New Mover/New Connects data they identify on their file before they buy. After evaluating the data Clients can choose to buy on a "Net Hit Basis" versus having to buy all the data available on a "Gross Basis".

What does this mean for marketers? Most list brokers ask for specific data details, run a query from their database and return all the data on their file. This is referred to as buying data on a "Gross Basis". Anchor, on the other hand, will provide our clients with daily or weekly New Movers/New Connects and allow the client to run it's own proprietary sort and report back only what is unique to their database. This we refer to as our "Net Hit Agreement Program".

"By using our 'New Mover/New Connects Net Hit Agreement Program', marketers will be able to reach new buyers when they are ready to purchase, stated Dean Kuzminski, Vice President, Phone Data Services". He continued, "I strongly urge marketers to contact us to compare our prices and results versus their current source".

Anchors "New Mover/New Connects Net Hit Agreement Program" enables marketers to:

Lower marketing costs per lead Improve return-on-investment by lowering operational expenses. Reach new consumers/businesses that have actually moved Obtain newly connected phone numbers for those that have added or changed a phone line Increase market share

Our New Mover/New Connects records are compiled from Telco and Multi-Sourced data feeds, which are updated, scrubbed, CASS™ verified and ZIP + 4® coded every 24 hours to ensure 100% accuracy and deliverability.

Anchor provides a complete array of Data Processing, Database Marketing and Document Personalization Services and Software to the direct marketing industry. For more information on all of our services, please visit www.AnchorComputer.com, call 1-800-452-2357

E-mail Appends: The Good, the Bad and the Realistic

Done correctly, this once-maligned strategy can be a real boon to your list health.

by Catherine Algeri - Posted originally at www.FundraisingSuccesMag.com

Aug 1, 2008

As with any new industry, the early days of online fundraising were filled with both success and failure. Some organizations quickly found a new stream of revenue … while others found themselves struggling to get out of that black hole known as the spam filter.

Now in 2008, a year where political donors broke every record for online giving — even contributing $10 million on a Web site in one night — organizations can move forward with online outreach knowing that others have blazed the trail before them.

Over the last five years, fundraisers have found a successful model for reaching out to their donors online in the form of the well-coordinated e-mail append.

A definition
The e-mail append at its best takes a portion of your donors and activists — those with whom you have established relationships — finds corresponding e-mail addresses and gives these donors a chance to decide if they want to hear from you via e-mail. It then appends these names to your files.

Common fears
Before I outline the difference between a good e-mail append and the type likely to relegate you to the spam folder for all time, let’s address the immediate concerns most nonprofits raise when considering an e-mail append.

1. I’m afraid an e-mail append will make me spam!
This fear speaks to the difference between a good e-mail append and a bad one. The early days of e-mail append certainly generated a few horror stories. Fortunately, the industry has really learned from its mistakes. Today, most reputable vendors send welcome e-mails on your behalf — on their own servers — and only return the valid e-mail addresses that did not opt out of e-mail communication. This way, when you start e-mailing these addresses, you’re in the good graces of your donors and the Internet service providers.

2. I’m afraid I’ll be wasting my money!
According to the article “Get An Email Address, Generate Income,” in the April 15 issue of The NonProfit Times, the average worth of an e-mail address on your file is $7.86 a year, per Convio’s recently published benchmark study on e-commerce between July 2006 and June 2007.

In fact, many nonprofits bring in $5 to $10 in contributions for every $1 spent on e-mail append processing, according to the article “Email Append: Hot online strategy or too hot to handle?” in NPT’s March 15 edition. Considering that you can append multiple e-mail addresses for $1, there is a low level of investment required to find out how valuable your e-mail addresses will be — and the research is in your favor.

3. I’m afraid I’ll anger my donors!
An e-mail append that gives your donors the chance to say no (opt out) to hearing from you via e-mail shows your donors that you respect their preferences.

Complaint rates for e-mail appends often are as low as half of 1 percent. Ask your vendor if it uses the Direct Marketing Association’s Email Preference Service list. What’s more, if you work with a vendor that has an aggressive suppression file, taking out those people who have hit the spam button or complained on e-mail appends for other clients just might whittle your list down to your friendliest donors.

Remember, these people are your donors because they care about your mission. Sending them e-mail updates between fundraising efforts is a great way to show them that you don’t just write when you need something, but that you value their participation. In reality, e-mail will strengthen your donor relationships, not weaken them.

4. I’m afraid an e-mail append will hurt my direct-mail program!
Think of it this way: There are two organizations in the same field — one has sent you a mail piece, and the other has sent you a mail piece and e-mailed you a reminder and an e-newsletter highlighting its successful use of donations. It’s likely that the organization making the extra touch will stick out in your mind. What’s more, many nonprofits are doing matchback analysis to keep track of how online and mail campaigns are working in tandem — and are thrilled with the results. In an increasingly competitive market, e-mail can bolster your direct-mail results.

The good e-mail append
Here are some questions you’ll be glad you asked your vendor and the answers you should be looking for:

Q. Is the database permission-based?
A. E-mail addresses should never be guessed or deduced. Your vendor might not be able to reveal every source of the data, but it should be able to confirm that every e-mail address has opted in to third-party e-mail messages.

Q. Are you CAN-SPAM compliant?
A. Breaking the law generally is a bad way to kick off a fundraising campaign! Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 to protect consumer e-mail rights. Make sure your vendor complies!

Q. Do you send a welcome message or just add the data to my file and ship it back to me?
A. If anyone offers to slap some e-mail addresses onto your file and then hand them back to you … run like the wind! A welcome message protects your server score with the ISPs and ensures that you only add valid, permission-based e-mail addresses to your file. Plus, no one wants to pay for bad e-mail addresses.

Q. What is your typical match rate?
A. This will help you set realistic expectations and strategies for your campaign. It also is an opportunity to find out if your vendor can do a name and postal address match. If it is able to link postal information, this typically increases the number of ways you can find a new e-mail address.

Q. Do you have a multivendor approach?
A. No vendor has all the e-mail addresses in the United States. See if your vendor is able to check your file against multiple databases, remove duplicates, and handle the process for you and your staff.

Q. Do you charge based on all matches or just valid matches (post-welcome message)?
A. Again, no one wants to pay for bad e-mail addresses. Make sure you find out up front if the vendor charges for every match found or for every valid match returned to you post-welcome message.

Q. Is this a household match or an individual-level match?
A. A household match is an e-mail found for the postal address of your donor. An individual match is linked specifically to your donor. If your cause is political or controversial, an individual match is critical.

Q. What type of a suppression file do you use?
A. Ask the vendor if it maintains a suppression file of complainers, bad addresses or spam-button pushers. Also ask if it uses the DMA Email Preference Service file as suppression.

Managing your expectations
Before you pitch the e-mail append to your boss or your board, make sure you are managing your expectations, which means avoiding these common fantasies:

Fantasy No. 1: I will immediately make money!
Yes, the average value of an e-mail address on your file is $7.86 a year. Yes, many organizations are recovering five to 10 times what they invested. But this did not happen with one e-mail; nor did it happen without a strategy. When you mail a 48-month lapsed donor, what type of response rate are you expecting? Look at your audience, and determine realistic response rates. E-mail is a fantastic way to cultivate your lapsed donors at a low cost.

Fantasy No. 2: An e-mail address will be good for all time!
E-mail updates are critical to the health of your file. When’s the last time you considered mailing a file that you hadn’t NCOA’d in the last six months? Out of the question, right? Well, it’s estimated that people change e-mail addresses at a rate of 20 percent per year. Continuing to e-mail addresses that ISPs have bounced back to you is a recipe for spam.

Side note: How does an e-mail update work? Similar to an e-mail append, you send a file of hard-bouncing e-mail addresses to a reputable vendor. It will search its permission-based databases for new e-mail addresses linked to your records. Then the vendor will send a “welcome back” message to those e-mail addresses on its server. It will return only those e-mail addresses that are valid and have not opted out of hearing from you at this new e-mail address.

Fantasy No. 3: If they didn’t opt out the first time, I don’t have to use an opt-out link in the future!
Not so fast. Giving donors an escape hatch in every e-mail is the best way to keep them from hitting the spam button. DMA guidelines [see box above] require that you give your donors the chance to opt out with each e-mail.

The final question
Why do you need to e-mail donors? Donors are critical to the health of our organizations, but it’s not an exclusive relationship. They are donating to other organizations and, increasingly, are being approached online for gifts.

In fact, FY 2009 budgets for most direct marketers, on average, have planned for a 55 percent increase in e-mail prospecting budgets, according to the article “Less for More” in the June issue of Direct. Staying at the forefront of your donors’ minds with e-mail has gotten much easier — and far more critical.

Plus, didn’t you hear? The average yearly value of an e-mail address on your file is $7.86!

The DMA's E-mail Append Guidelines

The Direct Marketing Association (The DMA) offers specific guidelines for appending e-mail addresses to consumer records. The DMA’s Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice must be adhered to as a condition of membership in the association; unresolved violations place companies at risk of expulsion and attendant publicity.

"E-mail has proven effective as a vehicle for communication between ethical businesses and consumers," said Patricia Faley Kachura, vice president, ethics & consumer affairs, The DMA. "We’ve adopted guidelines that outline the appropriate ways to approach consumers in order to establish effective e-mail relationships."

The guidelines as published in The DMA’s Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice, are as follows:

Guidelines on E-mail Appending to Consumer Records

Definition of e-mail address appending: E-mail address appending is the process of adding a consumer’s e-mail address to that consumer’s record. The e-mail address is obtained by matching those records from the marketer’s database against a third-party database to produce a corresponding e-mail address.

A marketer should append a consumer’s e-mail address to its database only when the consumer gives a marketer permission to add his or her e-mail address to the marketer’s database; or

1. There is an established business relationship with that consumer either online or offline; and


2. The data used in the append process are from sources that provided notice and choice regarding the acceptance of receiving third-party e-mail offers and where the consumer did not opt out; and


3. Reasonable efforts are taken to ensure the appending of accurate e-mail addresses to the corresponding consumer records.

A marketer should not sell, rent, transfer or exchange an appended e-mail address of a consumer unless it first offers notice and choice to the consumer.

All messages to an e-mail appended address should include a notice and choice to continue to communicate via e-mail.

Marketers should have in place appropriate record keeping systems to ensure compliance with these guidelines.

Welcome Email Message Guidelines

By Don Monell

Your Welcome Message is your first-online-impression to your customers. It is an opportunity to proactively open up a new channel of communication that is convenient and cost-effective.

We have put together guidelines to make your Welcome Message a positive experience for your customers, while also staying in compliance with federal and state regulations.

Welcome Message Objective

To introduce your customers to email communication and the benefits of receiving email from your company.

To openly state what kind of information you want to send them via email (receive special offers, newsletters, information, discounts, etc.)

To let your customers know you respect their online privacy and offer them an opportunity to opt out from receiving future email from your company/organization.

To verify the deliverability of each email address.

Message Requirements

From Line: in the email message that clearly states your company/organization name.

Subject Line: that is relevant to the subject matter of the message. You want to grab your customers attention, but in a way that is not misleading or deceptive.

A clear statement as to how to opt-out from receiving future email and an unsubscribe link that will appear at the bottom of your message and will allow your customers an easy method of opting-out from future email communication.

Your company/organizations postal address must appear at the bottom of the message.

Recommended

An introductory statement that clearly expresses why you are contacting the customer (Fill out the form on this page to have sample permission letters sent to you for review).

State a clear benefit that motivates the recipient to continue receiving your emails. Customers are more likely to welcome a message that seems relevant and offers value.

Keep the message brief. If you need to go into more detail on something, you can offer a link to your website or special offers page.

State a clear benefit that motivates the recipient to continue receiving your emails. Customers are more likely to welcome a message that seems relevant and offers value.

Anchor Computer Announces Improved Phone Append Match Rates

To respond to the dynamic changes in the Phone marketplace, Anchor can now Append both Consumer and Business telephone numbers in one pass. This provides better match rates with lower processing fees.

(PRWEB) May 20, 2009 -- Anchor Computer, Inc., a leading provider of data and data processing services is pleased to introduce a new Consumer/Business Combination Phone Append and Verify service. This is an exciting new addition to its ever expanding Phone Data Services.

"Phone append clients by adding consumer phone append to their business phone append jobs are achieving up to a 37% lift in match rates and consumer phone append clients by adding business phone append are achieving up to a 20% lift in match rates", stated Nancy Atwood, Vice President, E.Commerce Services.

"We are excited about being able to offer our clients Consumer and Business Phone Append and Verification processing in one pass, and most importantly with blazing fast turnaround times". She continued, "Our comprehensive suite of Phone Appending, Verification and Reverse Phone Appending products all with customized intelligent matching (CIM) are designed to meet all of our clients phone data needs".

Anchor provides a complete array of Data Processing, Database Marketing Services and Software to the direct marketing industry. For more information on all of our services, please visit www.AnchorComputer.com, call 1-800-452-2357 or email us at E @ AnchorComputer.com.

To Append or Not to Append?

I called Julie at Fuel Interactive when I read her post to congratulate her for offering this positive approach to email append. When I spoke with her she gave the reason she provides this service to her clients, "Because, it works!".

By Julie Dural on April 27, 2009 4:37 PM

Many email marketers tend to shudder at the words “data append”. The idea of dumping hundreds or thousands of unknown email addresses into a list that you worked so hard to compile ‘legitimately’ can be terrifying.   If that’s the case, where do the benefits lie? Are they worth the risk of numerous Spam complaints, bounces and unsubscribes against your reputation? If done properly, the answer for the client or your company is yes.

As a person outside or new to the email marketing industry, it’s important to know exactly what a data append is. Many in the industry feel it is a “black hat” way of doing email marketing, but many also swear by it to get a multitude of names on your list quickly. An example of a data append goes like this: 

I fill out a form when I stay at a hotel with my first and last name, address, city, state, zip etc, but I leave out my email address. A data append service goes through the guest history and finds all names that are not listed with an email address. They then do a mass search to find their email address based on their name and address and send a custom “opt-in” form to this collection of email addresses.  

From there, the append service takes those that did not bounce or unsubscribe from the append and delivers the results. It’s easy, it’s legitimate and it does eventually get more business. However, there are additional steps that may seem tedious but are extremely beneficial to the overall health of your email database. I’ve learned to do at least one more “cleansing” of the list before adding it in with your regular database. 

In our most recent data append, we originally received over 50,000 addresses. Before mixing these names with our regular database, I sent out a regular email offer to this appended list. Unlike the original email that was sent, which was simply an opt-in message (ie. “We would like to extend our offers to you in the future”), we now offered them an actual resort special.  By the time the unsubscribes and bounces were filtered out the second time, we brought our numbers down to 47,000 names. 

The Ultimate Test – Does the Append Bring Return?

When I added the appended names in with our regular database, I put them under the segment called “append” so I could track how well it performed compared to the existing database.   The results came back strong for the appended list. The percentage of bounces and unsubscribes were the same as compared to the regular database, and the clicks and open rates fell at about average for the travel industry.

Results were as follows:

2/23/2009
	Appended List	%	Regular Database	%
Bounces	84	0.6	231	0.6
Unsubscribes	31	0.2	58	0.1
Total Opened	1833		7942
Unique Opened	1244	8.5	4922	13
Total Clicked	467		2222
Unique Clicked	327	2.2	1457	3.8

 

It’s important once again to note that while a data append can be beneficial to your client or company, remember to use caution before simply dumping the names into your database. A few tips for appending:

Label the appended names under their own segment and keep an eye on their performance.

If the appended list is very large, add in names a few at a time as you send emails.  This way, you don’t run the risk of being blacklisted if there are a lot of bounces and unsubscribes that result from the initial send.

Be sure to choose the right data append company. Do some research and don’t just choose a service based on price. Remember, your reputation is at stake.

Focus on selling the person on your email list with your opt-in message. Let them know that you have the best intentions to satisfy their needs as a consumer and make it clear that you appreciate their business in the past.

Email Segmentation for Higher ROI - Website Magazine

I'll admit it. The reason I'm linking to the Segmentation blog is because it is one of the most productive data append service Anchor Computer provides. Forgive me for being so self serving.

Email Segmentation for Higher ROI - Website Magazine

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