A recent email campaign we executed to announce the launch of our SAP CUSTOMER & PARTNER MAILING LIST gave us another occasion to be reminded about why we love Out of Office messages.
You can mine OOO messages to bolster the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by growing and enriching your mailing lists. Here’s how:
- Many OOO messages contain names (and quite often contact info) of other people who are responsible for related areas in your target company.
- Some of them will tell you the names of the contact’s assistant and, if you’re lucky, their telephone number and / or email address.
- You might spot mobile phone numbers (not that we advise cold calling to mobile phones), updated titles, among a raft of other useful information in a few OOO messages.
- Lastly, the very fact that you received an OOO message – and not a Non Delivery Notification – reassures you that your contact information is correct. Since accuracy of mailing lists averages around 70% in the high-tech industry, this by itself justifies the efforts of mining OOO messages.
Have a look at these sample OOO messages and you’ll get the picture.
We’re sure that experienced business development executives and other practitioners of email marketing might have many more ways of mining OOO messages. We encourage them to share other techniques by way of comments to this post.
Bottomline: We launched our campaign to a mailing list having 450 contacts and collected 63 additional contacts by mining the OOO messages we started receiving soon thereafter – that’s 14% growth in a span of few hours. We spotted updated information for 20 contacts. At 4.5%, this enrichment rate is commendable considering that we started off with a very high quality mailing list – one on which we’re offering full moneyback guarantee for any inaccurate contact information.
Of course, in all this, let’s not forget the basic purpose of an email marketing campaign is to generate qualified leads and not to grow and enrich mailing lists. To whip up interest in your products and services among companies in your target market and invoke favorable response from them, you need to create marketable items, which provide compelling reasons to buy by packaging your products and services as means to ‘solve pain’ or ‘create gain’. While that’s beyond the scope of this post, you click here to find out more.