Enhancing Your RPE (Revenue Per Email) with Email Append

Much has been spoken about the right metrics to measure the success of your email campaigns. With the emergence of RPE as a key indicator, new studies are now revealing ways and means of shooting up this measure. While industry pores over relevant steps in campaign and post campaign stages like screening lists, improving opt in efficiencies and managing bounces, most people tend to overlook one key pre campaign step – Email Appending.

Before you work out the math, let me explain a bit about Email Appending for the benefit of the uninitiated. To put it in simple terms, the process of Email Appending is nothing but adding missing emails to your internal database. This does not involve harvesting emails through secondary data but it entails running a search against a file containing a large volume of contact records and finding relevant matches. This is usually done through reputed agencies who hold huge inventory of opt in contact data that have been acquired through CAN SPAM compliant methods.

Now for the math; let’s assume that you have a list of 20,000 contact records of which you are sending an email campaign for selling a calling card to 10,000 contacts which have emails. RPE is calculated as
RPE = Revenue Generated/ (Email quantity sent – Number of bounces)
So if you have a high bounce rate of 10%, you would have a total of 1000 bounces, meaning that 9000 emails would have been successfully delivered
Assuming you have a conversion of 2% (after factoring in the read rates) and your unit cost is $200, you would have a total revenue through the campaign of
Revenue = 9000 * 2/100 * 200 = $36000
So the RPE would be
36000/9000 = $4

Now if you put up the other 10,000 contacts for email appending through a credible agency, you would get a net result of close to 50% appended emails with a 100% delivery guarantee. (This is a guarantee which is offered by the top email appending service providers)

Substituting the values with the same conversion rate, Revenue would be
Revenue = [(15000 – 1000) *2/100 * 200] = $56,000
So the RPE would be
56,000/13500 = $4.15

So, not only does your overall revenue increase through an email append process, your overall RPE increases too. So your minimal investment into an email appending service is totally justified by the significant increase you gain in your revenue and RPE.

Marketers would do well to keep these factors in mind, while calculating their ROI on email marketing and fix their internal lists with an email appending service.