How to Build a Qualified Email Database?

Email remains an important and preferred channel for companies to communicate with customers and prospects. A true war chest, email marketing is today the most effective means in France for acquiring and retaining customers.

Certainly, for communication, brands already have their e-commerce site and social networks as a showcase. However, email marketing is an excellent way to carry out communication operations with customers and prospects. With email marketing, internet users don’t need to connect to an external platform – as with social networks – to receive communications from your brand. This reduced step promotes the average open rate of an email, which is estimated at 41%, according to Experian Marketing Services for France!

To succeed in a good email campaign and deliver the right message at the right time, there are a few tips to follow. Several solutions exist to allow companies to build a qualified email database. Let’s review them in this article to help you define the mailing strategy for your company.

Why Implement an Email Marketing Strategy?

Email marketing allows you, through “sending a newsletter”, to communicate with your audience about new offers, to expand your target and simply make yourself known. It’s an excellent way to meet your conversion and loyalty objectives. Developing an email marketing strategy ensures an increase in your commercial performance. But for that, there are still some tips to follow.

The Right Time to Send Your Communication

There is no good or bad time to send your emails, it all depends on your audience. This is why we recommend doing A/B testing and analyzing your results in order to discover the relevant moments for your target. Note that, on average in France, the open rate increases by 20% for communications sent by email on Tuesday!

Personalizing Your Message

The newsletter is a good way to stand out in the market. To go even further and break all records, personalize your communications. Figures indicate that email personalization leads to much higher statistics than “mass” emailing. According to a study by Lifecycle Marketing: “emails that display a personalized subject line generate a 50% higher open rate”.

However, it’s not necessarily essential to mention the names and surnames of your contacts, the real key lies in personalizing the content of the message. Don’t hesitate to target the messages you send based on your audience’s previous purchases, for example.

But before implementing your strategy, you need to build a qualified email database. There’s no point in sending millions of emails if you’re not addressing the right target!

What is a Qualified Database?

A qualitative email database is a database that is regularly updated. For this, you must constantly sort and analyze your results: open rates, click rates, etc. It’s important to identify “ghost” internet users and their reasons in order to remedy this situation.

An updated database allows for good deliverability (no erroneous or dead addresses) and a base made up of prospects that correspond to your personas (marketing targets). The more qualified your database is, the more positive returns you will have to your email campaigns: mailing open rates, click rates on call-to-actions, and good conversion rates (sales).

Similarly, a database composed of qualified contacts allows you to prevent your promotional emails from ending up in your prospects’ spam folders. Finally, a qualified database also means respecting GDPR rules (General Data Protection Regulation). Therefore, be sure to respect these two modes of data collection: opt-in and opt-out.

Opt-in consists of obtaining your target’s agreement before distributing the advertisement. For this, a mention is addressed at the time of information collection such as: check this box if you wish to receive commercial communications.

On the contrary, opt-out is a technique used to send a message without prior consent from the recipient. At the time of information collection, you will find a message like this: “check this box if you do not wish to receive commercial communications.”

1 – Collect your own qualified opt-ins to build your email database

Multiply the possibilities of obtaining qualified opt-ins

To quickly build a qualified database, you need to multiply the opportunities to collect data. For this, you have two channels to rely on: your company’s website and your social networks.

These two platforms allow you to create opportunities that encourage your prospects (and subscribers) to leave their contact information, including the one you’re looking for: their email address.

How to collect qualified data on your website and social networks?

Several marketing techniques allow you to request email addresses from your prospects:

• Lead magnet (or prospect magnet): this technique consists of offering an attractive incentive, in exchange for which the prospect agrees to leave their contact information via a form. It is generally high-quality content. This marketing technique is widely used in B2B with content such as white papers or customer testimonials to obtain qualified contacts.
• Discount coupon: “sign up for the newsletter and receive a 10% discount on your first order”. This communication technique is quite common on e-commerce sites and allows, in exchange for a discount, to easily obtain qualified email addresses. The prospect who wants to order online has every interest in subscribing to your newsletter to benefit from this discount.
• Alert “back in stock”: under your product pages, always remember to put a field to leave an email address in case the product is out of stock. In exchange for notifying the internet user of the product’s return to stock, you collect one more email address for your database!
• Exit pop-up: this marketing trick allows you to ask for the prospect’s email address before they leave your site.
• Chat tool: via your online contact module, you can ask for the contact email address to send the response if support is unavailable.
• Contest (with landing page): this is a good way to use your social networks to obtain the email of your subscribers and prospects. Contact registration can be done via a form embedded directly on your social networks or redirecting to a dedicated landing page.
• Ambassador programs: A real marketing lever that aims to recruit individuals to participate in the development and promotion of your product or service offering. Trustt is a community marketing tool that allows you to collect qualified and segmented opt-ins. Thanks to an ambassador program implemented on your website, the Trustt software allows you to directly contact your target consumers!

The effectiveness of your data collection strategy relies on repetition, the variety of requests to leave an email, and communication channels: website, Instagram account, Facebook page… Regardless of the collection method, you will need to comply with GDPR rules. Specify how you will use the data and always leave the possibility at the bottom of the mailing to unsubscribe from the distribution list.

The advantages of building your email database with your own data

With these methods, you don’t depend on any third party for obtaining your data. Moreover, you ensure their qualification: internet users who provide their email addresses are interested in your company, your content, your products, and they are willing to receive your communications. This comes from a conscious action on their part, so they will not be surprised to receive your newsletters and commercial mailings.

However, this method can be tedious, especially if you lack traffic on your company’s online site or brand awareness. In this case, and particularly if you’re just starting out, other solutions to obtain qualified contacts are available to you.

2 – Rent or buy a database

Renting or purchasing a database is a quick solution for building a commercial prospecting file.

Renting a database involves using an external provider who has the data and makes their email file available. The provider can also handle the technical aspects and sending (routing). Thus, on the company side, you just have to define the marketing target and the commercial message of the campaign (subject of the mailing, content). If you already have a solution for sending your newsletters, in this case you can directly export the rented database into your emailing tool. This solution allows you to communicate en masse, but you do not own the millions of emails used.

On the contrary, purchasing a database allows you to own the obtained prospecting file. Similarly to renting, you go through an external provider who will supply you with a file of qualified contacts based on criteria you have defined beforehand (marketing target, prospecting area…).

You can then use this database as much as you want. The downside to this is the freshness of the data : 20% of databases are no longer up-to-date after one year. Without renewing the database, you will quickly encounter errors during your sending, such as obsolete email addresses. You will therefore need to regularly repurchase new files to keep your database up-to-date and will be dependent on a third party.

3 – Use a Specific Tool for Data Collection

If you already have your customers’ emails, collected during their online orders; it is more complicated to obtain those of people you don’t know yet: your prospects’ emails.

There are ad hoc tools that allow you to collect email addresses on your website. With the Trustt tool, you can set up an ambassador program on your online site that allows you to collect qualified and segmented opt-ins from your visitors.

Users of your site, whether they are customers or prospects, can leave their contact information to become potential ambassadors for your brand. This technique allows you to collect qualified data that you will own. You can then use this data for your email campaigns and to send targeted messages!

Now that you know how to build a qualified database, you can move on to the next step: the content of your email campaign.