Email appends are one of the fastest ways to fuel your transition from offline marketing to online email marketing. Over the years, many stories have been told about email appends; both success and failures. In today’s reality, email appends still prove to be a viable and successful initiative, if you know how to manage the process. Safeguarding your reputation and your current email list is critical when running this process.

Make sure your next email append is as positive as can be by following our eec-approved email append checklist.

Vett prospective Appends Vendors (AV) in Advance of the Project
1. AV’s Permission Policy – Verify the the AV has permission to email the names on their global append file, ask for links to their optin pages and take the time to review them.
2. AV’s Opt-out Policy – The AV should enable the recipients to optout of all append mailings (not just yours). Ask for a copy of the language they include in their emails and the url to their optout page.
3. Run reputation checks on AV’s IP in advance. Ask the AV for the specific IP address they will use to deploy your permission pass. Then ask your Deliverability Service Provider to run a reputation check on the IP. If you do not have a DSP, minimally check to see if the IP is on any blacklists here www.dnsstuff.com
4. Run reputation checks on the AV’s URL domains. Ask the AV to share what domains they use in any urls that will be included in the permission pass and ask your DSP to run a reputation check on the domains for you.
5. Run a deliverability test in advance of the permission pass to ascertain whether mail from their IP is being blocked, deleted, placed in the spam folder or being allowed into the inbox at the top ISPs. Some reputable AVs such as AcquireWeb and Fresh Address can arrange 3rd party deliverability auditing through a recognized DSP; whatever you do, do not permit the AV do the auditing themselves as this defeats the purpose.

Matching & Permission Pass
6. Addresses you submit for Appends – Ideally these should be customers who have purchased or transacted with you in some meaningful way within the last 6 to 12 months max.
7. Match Logic – Insist on Individual level matching and not household level. Be extremely wary of the vendor who touts high match rates.
8. Use an Opt-in Permission pass instead of opt-out. Consider that if less than 1% of these names complain to their ISPs you are spamming them, you may find that your emails to the other 99% gets blocked so it is definitively in your financial best interest to be conservative.
9. Don’t use your primary domain in the URLs but setup a new domain/redirect specifically for the permission pass and subsequent mailings to the names. If recipients complain that the email is spam to their ISPs, you may find that your core domain is now on a URL blocklist. The implication is that the next time you mail your real customers from your ESP or inhouse systems, all your emails may be blocked because the ISP has associated your domain with spam.
10. If you insist on using opt-out, ensure you track deliverability (what arrives, what is placed in the inbox, what is placed in the spam folder) on the live campaign across all major ISPs/domains. For those ISPs were your delvierabability stats show Missing or Spam Folder placement, do a second opt-in pass before adding the names to your file.
11. If using opt-out, give recipients at least 1 week to opt-out before adding the name to your file.
12. Request copies of the AV’s mailed and bounced statistics by domain and insist that no names that bounced are included in the file they give you.

Mailing the Appended Emails/ Adding them to your housefile
The greatest risk to you comes after you take possession of the append emails and begin mailing them. Unknown User Rates and Spam Complaints can result in both your domains and IP being blocked. Its critical to isolate the emails from your core housefile and to transition them to your core mailing platform only after a measurable indicator of interest (opens/clicks/orders). 2 ways to do so:
13. Mail them from a different IP address than you do your core housefile.
14. If possible, use a vanity domain (instead of your primary site domain) in the URLs in the emails you send to these addresses while they are isolated on a separate IP.