The Brainsnack
Number 19

Winning the Inbox battle for relevancy.
Keeping your email marketing viable.

By Tom Barnes
May 30, 2003

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Inbound email harvesting

Say you want to start a newsletter. Email harvesting is critical. I'm not talking about spidering for addresses either. How you harvest means everything; each time someone sends you mail that address should be captured and converted to a permission address at a later date. We used to love the theory of “double opt in" but that technique is losing its validity. In our opinion, permission is not enough anymore--believe it or not.

Names and addresses are propagating everywhere. Data appending is hot, and efforts to stop it are falling flat. The only sure way would be to get people involved in a dialog with you is for them to start it--for them to send you an email and put your address in their address book.

More work to be sure, but a dialog requires two-way communication. Spam killing software will demand it. You're going to need an inbound strategy of some kind to maintain the health of your email database. Without it, data attrition will be invisible and devastating. Your ability to plan and measure will vanish without warning.

Low barriers to entry, lowered expense, and a savvier consumer make it harder now than ever to use the email channel--but you still can. You MUST give people a contact name and create reasons for them to engage you actively and repeatedly. Reconsider your online forms and consider an inbound method to collect addresses with a mailto: command instead. Confirm contact with an email response and click through activity to assure you customers identifies you as a trusted relationship to their own email management software.

Email is still a great way to communicate with customers, but is now—officially--a horrible way to prospect. So before you launch any email program make sure it's about customer retention and not about acquisition. And even then, don't assume it's working until you can verify that with metrics other than open and opt-out rates.

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