When it rains, it pours: in the last 7 days we have been contacted by two different groups for information on email append services in China. It's serendipitous, especially since I think the last request we received was over half a year ago. Most people have realized email append is awfully difficult and with little return. Plus, laws in many places around the world now require that a user have double confirmation when they first join an email list.

Both email append and reverse email append are ways companies help to fill in the gaps in their consumer marketing databases. In the former, a company has lots of information on a consumer, but they need the email address. In the latter, the company has an email address, but needs more information, such as a postal mailing address.

The success rates for acquiring appended information hover around 10-15% around the world — I've seen some companies claim much higher. In China I've seen numbers hovering around 3-5%. We have never directly offered this service (and we do not plan to directly provide it in the immediate future), primarily because most clients have much higher expectations of the results, so in the past we sent potential clients to specific companies and kept a very large distance from the results because clients were always disappointed. Better they be disappointed with the other company than with us.

They were disappointed in the initial findings — perhaps, at the very best, only 10% of their database was successfully appended. But they were more disappointed in the results of marketing to that acquired appended database. Though we frequently cautioned against emailing to the list — both for the company's brand and legal implications — clients invariably plowed on and
tried marketing their services/brands to their list.

The results? Across the board incredibly low open rates, and those that were opened had low action rates. Why? There was no prior Internet relationship with the user. Simple.

What's a solution to the problem? It depends on the purpose of the appending. Does the client a) want to append so that he/she can then do an email marketing campaign or b) want to append so that he/she can have a more complete picture of who exists in that database. It's usually because of 80% of the former and 20% of the latter. In general, the client's database administrator should immediately start acquiring email addresses via online signup forms, using double confirmation to ensure quality. The specific solutions are varied.

I don't know when we'll get another request for this type of service in China, but one thing is clear: the "smart" companies have for years already been collecting full data on their consumers so that when an Internet connection is made between the brand and the consumer, less is lost in translation.