The email marketplace is probably the most frustrating arena to any direct marketing professional who has ever ordered a list (I mean postal list) or appended data to a record for database and later mailing (I mean postal mailing) purposes. Just when the Direct Marketing Association got everyone moving in the right direction on privacy regarding the rental of names (I mean postal), along comes email and everyone is off in different directions.

There is probably a general consensus that some permission is needed by the recipient of an email. This article is not about Opt-in or Opt-out or permission by the consumer or recipient to your emailing. Those issues are being debated and there is no consensus today.

I want to talk about email appending. That is the practice of adding an email address to an existing postal file. Just say no. And yet, it is so appealing, especially to those who have built databases and mailed these targeted, selected names, postally, for years. It is not the same game. Many reputable companies are getting involved in this practice – it is wrong.

It is relatively easy to do.  Here is an example. Take your typical compiled B-2-B list of corporate names. Let's say that they have the president’s name for each company. In our scenario, the company is Acme, Inc. and the president is Peter Jones. Many companies today have their own domain’s, i.e. www.acme.com. If you simply create an assumed domain such as this and append it to the actual street address you’ll be close to realizing a 15% accuracy of domain’s to your street address.

Now, if you’d load those alleged domains into a base and couple them with several different prefixes left of the @ sign such as pjones or peter or p_jones or pj or peterjones most will fail as soft bounces when sent. The non-existent domains will bounce as hard bounces. There will probably be one that actually gets delivered. You’ve just created a real email address that is mailable. It is also the worst kind of SPAM.

No one has given you the right to create that address. The soft-bounces, those that got to a server but had no internal destination were an annoyance to others.

The correct address is an intrusion on the time, machine and intellectual property of the individual or company you’ve communicated with.

It doesn’t matter that the list you started with is a compiled postal or your postal house file- if you do it you are a spammer. There is no easy answer to building a permission based Opt-in email file. Whether you ask for the name on your website or in a postal mailing or through rental opt-in files or sponsorships the operative phrase is “..you must ask”. Some persons say no and that is their right.

Several direct marketing houses are offering appending services. They haven’t thought out the ramifications. If you use these services and get listed on various sites as an appender you are endangering your entire organization’s reputation and marketing position.

There is also a good economic argument for not using this practice. The ‘created’ email name although emailable, may not be the actual ‘used’ email address. I have at last count twelve email addresses. The addresses that would be created from the above description would not necessarily be the active email address I use on a daily basis. In other words, you would have appended an inactive or defunct address that could be received, but not read. Your database would have ‘harvested’ an address that would help ruin your long term ROI and help corrupt your file.

A person who opt’s in on site A can not be assumed to have opted in on all other sites. That is also a form of spam. Several of the more aggressive anti-spam groups are cross seeding files to protect from this very practice.

Direct marketers have always had a secret weapon, we’ve listened to what consumers wanted and hearing their response, we responded in kind. Today, privacy and the ability for a person to maintain their identity and exposure to a technologically open environment is taking center stage. This is not the time for the legitimate direct marketing community to allow our long-term interests to be misinterpreted and limited by others. Therefore, let’s not use every bit of technology when we can build our files in the correct and acceptable formats.