10 elements to check when building your mailing list

… in order to make sure you don’t show your contacts a big blooper. We got a real fail in our inbox this week. In response to the elections newspaper “De Tijd” wanted to promp their contacts to visit the website. And something went wrong there.

To make the content as relevant as possible, De Tijd diversified their email message based on the data in their database. A contact received a beautiful message where he is asked to find out how the voting behavior of his city matched the voting behavior of Flanders (Belgium). How does Susteren compare to the voting behavior of Flanders? The only problem is that the city Susteren isn’t located in Flanders, but in The Netherlands. Didn’t they take country into account when they made their selection? Or don’t they include country in their database?

10 elements of a comprehensive database

Besides country there are a lot of extra elements that you need to take into account to build a strong and effective list. We put some examples in a list…

1. Try to collect a name and first name for every email address in your list. That way you can prevent your salutation from missing the point.
2. Pay attention to the gender of your contacts. That will come in handy when you’re sending messages for Father’s Day or Mother’s Day.
3. Are you also trying to collect the postal code, city and/or country for every email address? That way you can send out correct regional campaigns. De Tijd went wrong there.
4. Are you also asking for the birthday of your contacts? You can get an extra conversion by sending a discount coupon or code with anniversaries.
5. Do you collect the physical address of your email contacts? Interesting to combine online and offline for a specific campaign. Then you want to make sure to drop your postal mailing in the correct letter box. From mary_14@provider.com you can’t really get any hints.
6. Are you asking your contacts for their preferences or interests? I won’t be interested in nursery room decoration when my son is 17 years old. If you haven’t collected their interests at subscription, you can always ask them to update their preferences via a landing page. The more you know, the more relevant your segmentation will be.
7. Are you collecting special or meaningful dates to trigger automated campaigns? And we’re not talking about birthdays again. Age of children, wedding anniversary, maintenance of the car, the moment you book a vacation, …
8. Are you also collecting the purchase history of your clients? That could be very interesting for segmentation and upselling as well.
9. Put the most recent purchasing date in a separate field. It will teach you how recent a client was active. Interesting information if you’re planning a reactivation campaign.
10. The last purchase is also the most interesting one, because it’s the purchase they are most likely to remember. So you best collect that information in a field in your database as well. Ideal for quick upselling campaigns without complicated selections.

Another extra tip

These ten tips will help you build a comprehensive mailing list. If you use this wisely, you can create almost every segmentation possibility. But you have to think about it carefully!

Are you collecting other data in your database? We love to hear about it, to make our list even better!