E-mail: Court Your Prospects

Seven dating tips to grow your list through successful co-registration

May 2007 By Josh Perlstein

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Of all the tactics marketers can use to grow their business, one always rises to the top: Market to your house lists.

A marketer’s house lists are made up of individuals who overtly have requested to receive communications. They are customers and warm prospects. They should be the most responsive group a marketer can reach with a message.

To put it simply, they are people who have asked to have a relationship with your brand. Relationships are not to be taken lightly. In today’s cluttered media marketplace, reaching a group of individuals who have raised their hands to show interest in starting a relationship with your brand is increasingly valuable. However, there are three major concepts that need to be considered here:

1. How do you find the most qualified individuals to invite into a relationship?
2. How do you best deliver on that relationship to create maximum shared value between brand and individual?
3. How do you scale your effort to an optimal volume?

Marketers are faced with the challenge of finding the best methods and tactics to grow their in-house e-mail, telemarketing and postal lists. When starting these relationships through online, permission-based acquisition of prospects’ and customers’ personal information, marketers achieve the best results by testing multiple tactics and tweaking accordingly. First, they should identify the right online tactics to test. These typically include online display media, search, co-marketing partnerships, viral programs and co-registration (the act of riding along with someone else’s registration).

I’ve found that co-registration, when strategically planned and flawlessly executed, is always one of the hands-down winners; it brings in the greatest volume of opt-in individuals in the most efficient way, and provides the best ROI. Co-reg (as it informally is called) commonly is priced on a cost-per-acquisition basis, meaning a marketer only pays when it receives a new individual (incremental to the current in-house database) who meets the quality criteria it specified.

The quality of the individual registration information captured via co-reg often is questioned in today’s marketplace. Co-reg’s negative reputation with regard to data quality likely persists due to the consistently poor practices many marketers and co-reg providers apply to their campaigns.

But through the development of best practices, the co-reg process can be optimized so that it is on par with the drive to a marketer’s own Web site to register. A few basic best practices that marketers—and the providers they work with—should use for successful co-reg are listed below. For ease of understanding, I often liken it to dating: Before you get married, your prospects will want to date you first.

1. Capture co-reg leads on good Web sites: You are only as cool as the crowd you hang out with. Go where your customers are. For example, Williams-Sonoma can capture good quality registrations from cooking-oriented sites, and Pampers from sites that feature information and services related to caring for babies. Keep in mind that your customers also frequent general Web sites, too—you shouldn’t ignore those in order to expand your universe. Look for affinity with your desired audience.

Be careful, as many co-reg providers offer “blind” networks, which do not disclose the specific sites on which your offer runs. If you care about the quality of the registrations you are buying, know where your offer is running. This consideration has increased importance if the brand is conscious of image or cares about the added branding impact co-reg can provide.

Additionally, many promotional co-registration sites abuse the e-mail addresses captured, sometimes mailing an e-mail address up to 20 times per day. If you are trying to build a relationship, stay away from those sites.

2. Target your offer: Find your ideal mate. Many sites allow targeting of your offer to specific demographic, geographic or behavioral segments. This permits you to screen out unwanted individuals from viewing or taking your offer to register. For example, Dove may only want to offer its relationship program to women. Golfsmith would be focused on golfers; and Allstate Home Insurance, homeowners. This is all possible in co-reg.

Additionally, many sites offer response, best-customer and good-credit models that can be applied to co-reg. You can use these targeting options to optimize co-reg lead quality.

3. Validate your registrations: Make sure your date is honest about who he is. Whether you rely on the co-reg provider, your agency or a third party for validation of records, ensuring that you have accurate information on a registration is a simple component of successful co-reg. You want this supplier to verify address, e-mail address and phone numbers of your co-reg leads. And be sure to negotiate a valid record clause into each contract that states you only pay for records that are real and deliverable through multiple channels.

4. Make a prospect work for your relationship: Play a little hard to get. The best quality co-reg leads come from offers that require the prospect to proactively complete questions to be added to a list. The more time a prospect spends with your form, the more qualified and responsive he becomes. One of those proactive questions must capture the prospect’s overt permission to receive your communications.

In co-reg, you also have the opportunity to ask questions that will help you better segment those registrations. Segmentation and customization allow you to send the most relevant messages to your prospects and customers, helping you to start the relationship on the right foot. For example, Gap might ask what styles or categories a consumer is most interested in. Likewise, if you have multiple e-mail programs, such as one for “Clearances and Specials” and a newsletter for valuable tips and content, ask the consumer which communications she would like to receive and how. Or if an insurance company plans to call its co-reg leads, then it should ask about the best time to call.

Marketers that want to be successful with a co-reg program should be prepared to continually test their question volume, content and combinations to optimize the quality of their leads.

5. Make your intensions clear: Be a good communicator, be true to yourself and don’t kiss and tell. Remember to always be overt about your intentions. Show your audience a sample of the communications they will be receiving. Tell them how, and how often, you plan to communicate with them. Tell them you intend to call them, if the phone is part of your strategic communication plan. Ask for the opt-in, perhaps separately from your offer. Clearly state that you’ll transfer and keep personally identifiable information safe, and that you will not share, rent or sell this data to anyone without their explicit consent. Also provide a link to your privacy policy.

6. Use co-registration for new relationship-building methods, too: Don’t keep taking your date to the same place. Mobile, desktop applications and social networks are newer ways to build relationships between brand and customer. Co-registration can be used to capture permission to communicate with folks via their mobile devices. Or ask someone to download your custom instant messenger device/RSS feed, or to become a friend on MySpace. If you plan to use these methods to enhance and strengthen relationships, then leverage your co-reg process to start these relationships, too.

7. Put your best foot forward: First impressions are crucial. To better connect with these new leads, communicate with registrants immediately and in a meaningful way. If you are building a relationship, give individuals something of value, such as helpful information or a sneak peek at a new site update or product launch. If you are a merchant, provide consumers with an immediate, exclusive offer that will lead them to convert soon.

Follow these co-registration best practices, and new leads quickly will value their relationship with you.

Josh Perlstein is president of Response Media, a Ga.-based provider of both offline and online marketing services. He can be reached at joshp@responsemedia.com or (770) 220-5086.

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