Finding Your Customers After They Change Their Email

At the 85th Annual Direct Marketing Association conference, an independent study by third-party research firm NFO WorldGroup indicates that email addresses are changing at the rate of 31% annually. The survey concluded that the majority of consumers lose touch with personal and professional contacts and favorite web businesses.  So what are the tools that let you keep in touch?

The Survey
The survey, conducted in August 2002, updates a similar study by Return Path and NFO WorldGroup from September 2000, which identified a 32% annual rate of email address churn. The results are based on responses from 1,015 consumers from NFO WorldGroup’s online panel of U.S. email users over the age of 18. The panel is representative of U.S. online households. Personal email changes are mainly driven by ISP switching (50%), address changes (12%) and consumer efforts to avoid SPAM (16%). Work email addresses most often changed due to new jobs (41%) and ISP changes (18%).

Solutions
There are very few online resources that can provide some help for those looking to stay in touch with their online customers.  One company stands apart from the others and provides its services to magazine publishers, catalog and e-commercesites and ISP's.  This company, Return Path , is a name registry for consumers and a service for web site publishers that keeps track of email addresses. Users register their former and current emails without charge and the company maintains the directory as a free service. Return Path has approximately 4 million addresses stored in its linking database. The company also markets its service to media firms, publishers, e-commerce operations and other entities with large e-customer traffic.  With its recent acquisition of Re-Route Inc., Return Path adds mail forwarding capabilities for customers that change their email addresses AND notification of changes to the email sender.

Other organizations tout their wares as a great way for consumers to establish a universal web presence. One company, Global Name Registry, is the registrar for the .name domain extension (ex. John.Smith.name).  Global's solution for consumers is to register a personal domain name. The company markets its services as providing a lifetime email address that simply redirects incoming mail to a current email account. A word of caution here, while it can provide that function, the .name extension is not any different in this regard than personally registering a .com, .net or other domain name and may be more expensive.  A free HotMail account from Microsoft or Yaoo! mail account, chosen by tens of millions of email users, is an alternative to personal domain names.  They provide the same function for consumers, but can be a nightmare for web site publishers, as users can create new mail accounts at any time - without charge.

The Best Resource of All
Probably the best way to keep in touch with your company’s online customers is to ensure that you have their physical address and contact information! When a customer changes his or her address, you can safely bet they have completed a forwarding request. The US Postal Service will be pleased to forward your mailing along with the rest of that customer’s mail!