http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/08/14/bill-kaplan-fresh-address Comments & Reviews of http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/08/14/bill-kaplan-fresh-address/ on StumbleUpon en-us Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:47:46 -0800 Sat, 08 Sep 2007 17:56:31 -0700 http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/08/14/bill-kaplan-fresh-address http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/images/logo_su_36x36.png Tue, 28 Aug 2007 06:21:55 -0700 http://sevenblock.stumbleupon.com/review/12163171/ sevenblock - From the page: "Bill Kaplan of FreshAddress Discusses Counting Emails (And Counting Cards) Alan Rimm-Kaufman, August 14, 2007, at 6:34 am. Categories: Web Marketing, Interviews. bill kaplan, fresh address CEO Bill Kaplan is CEO of FreshAddress, an email database services company located in Newton, Massachusetts. (My home town!) Bill generously shared his thoughts and advice on email best practices in the following email interview. Alan Rimm-Kaufman: Hi Bill! To start off with, youâ€re CEO of FreshAddress. For our readers who arenâ€t familiar with your firm, what exactly does FreshAddress do? Bill Kaplan: FreshAddress is an email database services firm. We help companies and nonprofits â€oeBuild, Clean, & Update” their email address lists. We are the original developer and U.S. patent holder of Email Change of Address (ECOA) services, including the underlying consumer collection technology. Our other core offerings include B2C (consumer) email appending, B2B (business) email appending, reverse appending (i.e. matching name and postal to email address files), email list cleaning & hygiene, and real-time email address validation. A: How did the firm get started? B: Back in â€98, my partner, FreshAddress President Austin Bliss, had a problem â€" he was still in his twenties and he was losing touch with old friends and colleagues who had changed their email addresses! â€oeWhat if you could link someoneâ€s old email address with their current preferred email address,” Austin thought. â€oeThen you could search on someoneâ€s old, dead email address and reconnect with them through their new email address. How cool is that? ” young Austin thought. And so he developed the original ECOA technology to help people reconnect with each other through email. A: How big a deal is ECOA for businesses and nonprofits? Can you quantify the dollar costs and dollar benefits of using a service like FreshAddress? B: ECOA and its sister service, Email Appending (i.e. matching email addresses to customer postal files), have huge implications for businesses and nonprofits alike. Over 50 million people change their email addresses each year, which translates into a 30+% annual email address attrition rate for the vast majority of companies. Losing touch with 1/3 of your customer via email is no laughing matter. The net result is a substantial drain on revenues, which is often accompanied by an increase in marketing costs as companies try to make up the difference through other marketing channels. Email Appending serves a similar function in reverse. By allowing you to connect with your customers through email, you can maximize your e-commerce and store revenues by converting your single channel buyers into multi-channel buyers while reducing your overall marketing expenditures. The cost for the above two services through FreshAddress is priced per guaranteed deliverable email address we return. Depending upon the specific service and the size of oneâ€s input file, the cost per update is typically in the 10 to 50 cent range, often much less than the price of a stamp, which seems to keep going up every time you look. A: Do you have a specific case study you can share? B: Yes, we have many success stories with Fortune 1000 companies as well as nonprofits. One of our clients, a leading PC and peripherals manufacturer, was looking to drive revenues from their bouncing email address file. We ran an initial ECOA project a couple of years ago on a 3 million record undeliverable file for one of their divisions. The results were so dramatic that theyâ€ve since run over 20 additional ECOA projects with us. A: You folks are continually receiving and processing many email lists from many mailers. You see many, many email files. What are the top four problems you observe in your work, and whatâ€s your advice on best practices for mailers to avoid them? B: We have processed thousands of files with upwards of 1 billion email addresses for our clients. Of all the issues we do see, Iâ€d say the top four concerns for email marketers are: 1. Losing touch with customers due to invalid ro changing email addresses 2. Building their email address lists safely and quickly 3. Cleaning up outdated and inaccurate email addresses 4. Improving their email deliverability by staying off of ISPâ€s blocklists and Internet blacklists Our advice on best practices is to work only with the most experienced, sophisticated, and reputable email services providers. The email industry has yet to fully mature and is still littered with fly-by-night companies. The need to build, clean, and update oneâ€s email address database is critical to the marketing success of every company. Your customer database is the most valuable asset you have. Tend to it properly and you will be justly rewarded. A: As someone following the email industry closely, can you give us a few examples of multichannel retailers who youâ€d h]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/08/14/bill-kaplan-fresh-address