email harvesting

Finding old customers emails

[otnot]

HI:
I have a brick and mortar buisness and for the past 20 years have been collecting their addresses. What I would like to do now is to find these customers emails. Is there a way to to find them?

Thanks in advance

[hannamyluv]

There is a type of service called email appending. They can take a list of physical addresses and try to match them to a database of email addresses. It has to be handled very carfully as email appending done incorrectly can be considered spam. You can expect about 20-30 percent match most of the time and then maybe a 30% acceptance to being mailed after that. It's a pretty common thing for people to do when they don't have an intitial email list to start out with.

I would also say you could try a postcard campaign. Basically, set your site up to focus on collecting emails with an incentive (maybe a contest of some kind) and send a postcard to all your past customers telling them about the site and the incentive.

[otnot]

Hi hannamyluv:
Thanks for the information and suggestion. In the past I have done snail mail promotions but it is quite expensive and the returns are quite low. I was hoping that maybe there was a company that offered this service.

Thanks

[hiker_jjw]

Just throw the phone number into Google.com and you should be able to find the Web sites, if they exist. It can be pretty time consuming, but it can be worth it if you have the time or have someone you can pay minimum wage. ;)

Cheers,
Jeff

[hannamyluv]

Just out of curiosity, in the brick and mortar, do you have a method for collecting emails? Say a sign up list or having your register people asking for the email when a customer is paying for their purchase?

[Lord Majestic]

It has to be handled very carfully as email appending done incorrectly can be considered spam.

I'd say (and in some countries like UK its the law) that if customer did not provide you with original email in the first place then "appending" those emails and sending email is spam. I'd think twice and some more before trying to get into something like that as the last thing you want is customer backlash against your firm.

[otnot]

hannamyluv:
We provide a shipping service to visitors and they provide not only physical address but now they provide an email address as well.

[hannamyluv]

I'd say (and in some countries like UK its the law) that if customer did not provide you with original email

A decent email append service these days will match Company A's database against their own opted-in database and will then mail the subscribers on behalf of Company A. The email append service then asks those people if they would like to also recieve email from Company A. It is all legal and not spam, if done correctly, but it can still cause a backlash so it must be done delicatly.

[Lord Majestic]

It is all legal and not spam, if done correctly, but it can still cause a backlash so it must be done delicatly.

The flip coin of doing it delicately is that you won't get many emails. The best way to do email marketing is to build your own genuine database of people who wish to receive information on certain things from you. People forget that they given permission even to specific companies, not even talking about companies these original companies sold their email lists to (legally or not).