E-Merging And We Knew It All Along

With this article I realize that I’m finally consciously building New Economy business relationships. Yes, I’m going to share some new realized knowledge. Ten years ago, I would have been keeping this a corporate secret and actually benefiting on the short term.

But that was then and now as a true follower of the latest initials (which I think as I write this are ECRM) I’m more concerned with building a relationship and not the immediate dollar. I do understand that if I do this correctly the dollars will truly follow. If not, at least my industry associates may benefit.

Email merge-purge, not just email dupe elimination has come of age. This is not the big moment of this article, hang on (with the Xmen out in the movies I feel like Stan Lee). Last month I gave some tips on how to avoid the look and feel of spam because email merge-purge was not yet available. Now I can show how it can be done, today, and by all!

First, the main deterrent to email merge-purge has been the reluctance or refusal of most list owners or managers to send their email files to the varied transmittal houses to perform a rather simple merge-purge procedure. Security and permission decisions have kept many companies from sharing this data or emulating the procedures and etiquette of the postal world.

Here is a standard scenario. A mailer is about to rent a number of email lists from a number of list owners, managers or email database houses. Of course, they are using one of several experienced list brokerage houses ( and with the further experience of email list acquisition). We will also assume that all of the lists selected are Opt-in permission based, yada yada yada (no joke here). Now the question becomes, if each house is transmitting their particular files, how can a merge-purge occur?

This is how.

But, before I continue, everyone with a license to Group1 software or Postal Soft or the marketing sales execs from those companies really listen because these are new benefits to your software and new sales’ opportunities.

The mailer’s broker working along with their postal service bureau must create an “algorithm” based on say positions 1,3,5,7 and 9 of the email record. Follow that with the inclusion of special characters if they fall into those positions like @ and “.” (dot). Once you have a standard formula the following steps are taken. I want to give special thanks to my own colleagues for assembling this procedure for me.

Using conventional (Group 1or Postal Soft) Postal merge/purge software for this procedure:

1 - Have each of the several email list managers use the "algorithm" based on the actual email addresses. Remember to include all special characters. The output should be an encrypted file based on the standardized formula. This file is sent to the mailer’s regular merge-purge house or an email center ready to do a merge-purge what is in fact a simple merge-purge.

2 - Using conventional merge/purge software, load the data into a merge/purge project.  This allows the service bureau to assign list codes, priorities and the inclusion of house and suppress files without any of the outside providers sending the actual email record.

The provided data would be loaded into the "last name" field of a conventional name and address record layout.  The "first name" field would remain blank, and the balance of the "postal" information would be populated with a constant dummy address.

This allows all records to be identical except for the email algorithm (now contained in the last name field).

The next step is the real ‘benny’ of using merge-purge software instead of just a dedupe.

3 - Merge/purge software does not dedupe on a straight match key (which has been all that's been available so far for deduping email addresses).  Instead, it looks at the elements of the "name and address" information and creates a numerical threshold to determine if two or more records are duplicates.  All things being constant in the address data, the threshold would be calculated on the email algorithm data.

Based on the same tight, medium or loose criteria that has been at the core of postal processing for years, the software would evaluate that email addresses (or email algorithms) should be considered duplicates. This is where merge-purge companies vary and the artist emerges!

4 - The software outputs its standard files (unique mail files and a file of "duplicate groups”) as well as providing the gamut of merge/purge reports (summary reports, detailed list interaction reports and list-by-list matrix reports) as well as being able to provide computer verification to the list managers and list owners.

5 - The clean data would then be extracted on a list-by-list basis and the email algorithms (only) would be sent back to the list managers.

6 - The list manager would in turn match the algorithm back to their master file, extract the actual email address and transmit on the records that survived from the merge/purge.

I realize that in recent weeks several Email merge-purge houses have been announced and they too should be considered. However, the above methodology allows experienced and valued vendors to involve themselves in this new arena. It also permits the same reporting structures from the postal world to be used for another direct marketing channel.

The benefit to me is the standardization not by one coding structure (we never had one matchcode) but by a system that we all know works. And by employing a group of brokers and service bureaus that had respect for lists long before list was spelled with an e.