Multiple Email Addresses for Customers Can Hurt Response

As marketing databases mature, they inevitably accumulate more data, perform more slowly, and—if you’re not careful—can impact your bottom line with poor targeting and reduced response rates. One glaring culprit is over-soliciting consumers that have multiple email addresses.

As email usage evolves, more and more people have multiple addresses (I use four on a regular basis). Practically everyone in the workforce has both a work email address and a personal address, and – as people become increasingly savvy to the wiles of marketers – they create multiple personal addresses for different purposes: registering on a website, signing up for a newsletter, order confirmations, and of course, the one they actually use for exchanging emails. Further, it’s not uncommon for companies to set up generic email addresses, such as admin@mycompany.com [2].

Over time, these addresses can creep into the marketing system and skew results. A common cause is from order confirmations, specifically consumers using a different email address from one order to another. Here’s a simplified example that shows what I mean: ...