Is Your Database Holding You Back?

How to Create a Culture of E-Mail Collection in Your Organization

These are not the heady times of the past when you could take a flyer on an untried marketing tactic. Sales are thinner, margins are slimmer and subsequently, marketing budgets have been slashed. It’s time for a new marketing approach — one that applies e-mail.

Don’t spam a list of millions. Instead, use a conservative, proven approach of mining your present customer and prospect base, using e-mail to do it.

Why Collect?

E-mail marketing is beneficial because:

1. According to the Direct Marketing Association, the costs for e-mail marketing will be one-tenth to one-twentieth of the cost of direct mail.
2. You can be timely. E-mail gets results fast — within three days of delivery.
3. Talking about results, you see it all: Who opened it, clicked on it, and so on. This is great for sales follow-up.

So what’s holding you back?

It shouldn’t be funding. E-mail marketing might cost a few cents for each e-mail deployed — a lot less than a stamp. Usually, a lack of e-mail data stalls an e-mail marketing campaign, because the only way to touch contacts is with an e-mail address.

So where do you find those addresses?

If you operate an agency management system, they are typically in the reports section. Access your customer list and select the “export” function. Most systems export simply to a Microsoft Office Excel file.

Look in your contacts and in your own e-mail inbox. If you’re using a program like Microsoft Outlook and maintain contacts, exporting is a piece of cake. Go to File, select Import, Export, and follow the instructions.

You also can cut and paste e-mails from messages you’ve received. This is tedious, but it is still a good way to put together a list of customers, or to supplement a list.

Requiring E-Mail

As a backstop, create a culture of e-mail collection in your agency. Set your agency management system to require an e-mail address. Demand employees ask customers for an e-mail address. You have to communicate with customers and prospects, and e-mail is the most economical way to do it.

There are more sophisticated and costly ways to obtain e-mail addresses. If you have a decent sized list of contacts but they do not have addresses, you can “append” them. However, appending may only grab about 20 percent to 40 percent of the contacts, and there is a one-time cost associated with it.

You can supplement appends with a phone call to each client. Your phone call should be along the lines of, “This is the Blue Insurance Agency. We are just updating our records… can I have your e-mail address?”

If you are in a retail location and get foot traffic, set up a display offering an incentive, like two movie tickets, with the entry requiring an e-mail address. Then, enter the contacts into an Excel file each week or month.

Also offer the incentive by inserting an entry form in each renewal going out the door. Snail mail may beget an e-mail. Try one or all of the methods until you build a reasonable size database. As few as 50 or 100 contacts may be enough. Just don’t wait so long to start that it’s too late.