Which email address do you ask for?
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on October 10, 2007
Today at iMediaConnection, Chris Lovejoy suggests asking for a second email address when people subscribe to your email lists. So you have a backup if you can't deliver to the first address.I'll leave you to consider the pros and cons of that because the article got me thinking on another topic...
Which email address do you encourage people to submit to you?
This could have important consequences for your success.
Not all email addresses are created equal, even if the human behind them is the same. Most of us have more than one email account. One might be for "work," another for "home." One we might check regularly, another just occasionally.
A B2B marketer would perhaps like to get a "work" email address that is checked regularly.
Your sign-up language can encourage people to submit the kind of address you want. It's as easy as writing "main email address" or "work email address" beside the relevant form field.
But is it as simple as that?
In the past, webmail addresses, for example, had a bad reputation. Free email address services were pretty flimsy, had strict limits on how much email you could store, and churned rapidly. So marketers wanted work addresses in their database, not Hotmail or AOL addresses.
It's different today (or is it?) For a start, the likes of Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL and Windows Live Hotmail now have robust, quality webmail services in place with plenty of storage capacity.
These webmail services are increasingly used as "main email accounts." Additionally, we also know that the work/home separation is blurred. People read work email at home, forward email between accounts, do consumer stuff while at work.
The big webmail services (responsible for 500+ million email accounts) are a deliverability challenge, but at least there is some clarity in terms of what you need to do (or not do) to reach inboxes there.
This is not the case with "work" email addresses, where each corporation might have its own customized set up of various anti-spam and email management systems.
On the other hand, if large proportions of your list are controlled by single webmail account providers, then the potential downside of a deliverability problem with any one provider is much higher than if your email addresses are spread out among many different account providers.
Another issue: work addresses churn, too, as folk switch jobs. Are work addresses more permanent than those "throwaway" free email addresses?
I'd welcome any insights you might have on this topic, particularly...
Do you care which email address people give you? And do you do anything to encourage subscribers to submit the "right" one?
Tags: email marketing, email addresses, webmail, free email, email deliverability
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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