E-mailers Starving for Customer data

Ten years after embracing permission-based list building—albeit, often at gunpoint— mainstream marketers are still starving for data on their e-mail customer files, according to a new survey.

Thirty four percent of 422 e-mail marketers surveyed by JupiterResearch on behalf of e-mail service provider Silverpop said a lack of customer data is the No. 1 challenge they face in their e-mail marketing programs.

Ironically, the permission aspect of e-mail marketing is probably a significant part of the reason why customer data on e-mail addresses is so scarce.

“The point of opt-in is a delicate time in the relationship between the sender and recipient. It’s easy to scare off a potential subscriber with a long laundry list of questions about their habits and personal information,” said Elaine O’Gorman, vice president of strategy for Silverepop. “Most sophisticated marketers test their opt-in forms religiously to maximize this balance, and we’ve seen opt-in rates literally double by, for instance, eliminating a single question in a form.”

She said marketers are increasingly turning to alternative data-collection methods after getting people to opt in to e-mail programs.

“We’re seeing a lot more use of surveys and polls, for instance, to help fill in sparsely-populated data fields,” she said.

O’Gorman added that the complaint she hears most often from marketers about their e-mail programs is that they’re unable to match their e-mail data with other data sources from within their own companies—often due to a lack of management-information-systems resources needed for such a project, or a common element in the data.

She also said that except for companies with an extremely strong background in traditional marketing, most companies do not use third-party data sources to augment their e-mail addresses.

“There seems to be a feeling that e-mail data is different in some way from direct mail data, whether it’s because direct mail tends in many cases to be household-based or because e-mail marketers simply aren’t familiar or comfortable with the data matching services out there,” she said.