Elusive Email Addresses

April 22, 2008


Ever wished you had a better email list to target?

A look inside the 2007 DMA Response Rate Trends Report reveals some powerful insights. The one that stood out to us was the effectiveness of email in the business-to-business market segment. According to the report, direct mail lead generation campaigns average a 1.38% response rate with an average cost per lead around $65. Compare that with email campaigns’ 1.79% average response rate and an amazing $7 cost per lead. Wow.

So why doesn’t everyone move their entire budget into email instead of direct mail???

The most common answer: Lack of accurate customer information. Most companies don’t have accurate (or any!) email addresses for their customers much less their target market. Purchasing an email list is fraught with problems; bad data, spam concerns, availability, expense, and of course a purchased list will rarely perform as well as one organically compiled over time.

The solution

Using direct mail and a PURL landing page can be a very effective method of building your email list. PURL landing pages help you learn about your customers by creating a dialogue with them. One of the first questions (and one of the most valuable) you should ask is “How do you prefer us to communicate with you?” and its cousin “what’s your email address?”. These simple questions can help you increase the efficiency of your marketing both through cost savings and higher response rates… coupling an email campaign with your direct mail campaigns will actually increase the overall response rate. Of course that assumes you have an email list to target!

The benefits of having a quality, organically compiled email list may even justify an entire campaign with the simple goal of capturing as many good email addresses as possible. Some sort of promotional give away usually does the trick and builds good will towards your brand at the same time. PURL landing pages make managing the responses easy and painless.

The following article describes how JDA Software has improved their sales and marketing efforts by utilizing PURL landing pages.

Read the article here:
JDA Software Gets "Purl"sonal