Email database recruitment

So you have an email communications plan, and you’re ready to think about recruiting customers to your database.

Here are some points for consideration:

- Who will you aim to recruit for the database? How will you recruit them? Can you add a subscribe function to your website, or will you develop a sales promotion where the consumer must subscribe to enter? Can you ask your sales force to collect email addresses for an incentive? Be mindful that the recruitment method you use may influence the quality of the database – i.e. how interested the customers are in your brand and how valuable they are to your business. Sales promotions may generate large number of subscribers, but are these customers all within your target market?

- What different segments will your database include? Will you want to send specific messages to customer groups? If so, what information do you need to collect from them when they sign up? i.e. If you want to be able to send out a message to Victorian customers about a sale or a stock shortage etc, you’ll need to know either their state or postcode information.

- What will encourage people to subscribe? What does your audience want to hear about? Will you allow people to sign up to hear about specific topics – i.e. subscribe to hear only about new clinical trials, or webinars, or promotions, or will you send all communications to the entire database?

Hand in hand with recruitment is a plan for maintaining your email database. Having a database of 5000 customers only to receive 2000 bouncebacks each time you send an email is costly and inefficient. To read more see article: ‘Managing your email database’.