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.

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