With the roll-out of high speed broadband and the continuing successful growth of online businesses, more and more consumers are using digital channels to research products and services, make purchases and communicate with friends, family and the organisations that they trade with.

To ensure that you are able to keep in touch with your increasingly digital-savvy customers, UKChanges has developed an Email Append service that allows you to add current, deliverable email addresses to your offline customer contact records, or alternatively find offline contact details that relate to the customer email addresses you have collected.

Data for the service is gathered through selected partner organisations, including Internet Service Providers (ISPs), detailed consumer surveys and magazine publishers. All email addresses collected for inclusion relate to UK individuals and have third party opt-in for marketing. This ‘permission’ is further supported by a soft opt-in service that is operated in conjunction with the different data suppliers.

Email Append jobs are processed in two stages. Initial counts of the number of email addresses that are potentially available can be run through UKChanges>online or the bureau. When the user decides to buy the data a branded email is sent to each email address by the relevant data supplier. This process provides the recipient with some information relating to the user company, as well as the opportunity to opt-out of receiving further communications from that organisation. After a 15 day response period the net file, minus any bounces and those individuals who opted-out, is merged back in to the user’s database for future campaigns.

The Email Append file contains more than 16 million unique email addresses, with a slight slant towards a younger, urban profile. The base file of email addresses is constantly cleansed through the soft opt-in process, with UKChanges receiving regular refreshes of the corresponding offline data to maintain matching accuracy. Through testing of the service, initial average match rates are in the region of 6% to 8%, with varying levels of drop-off through the soft opt-in processes.

Adding email addresses to your existing customer records will enable you to reduce communication costs such as print, postage and returns handling, whilst also creating the opportunity to increase the frequency of messages, easily tailor content according to user preferences or purchase history and increase levels of return on investment. Digital communication channels also offer the chance to reduce the environmental impact of your customer and prospect communications.