What The Email You Didn’t Append Cost You

The email that you appended cost you $0.50. The email that you didn’t append cost you $50,000. Don’t even venture to calculate the negative ROI. It would depress the best of us marketers to work this math.

But then the story of most companies, retold in a myriad ways, runs a similar motif. There are costs and then there are opportunity costs. Costs that are visible to the human eye, or perhaps the human mind are purported to be the costs worth bearing. The rest are best left by the marketing decision maker as costs in the domain of conjecture.

Common sense decisions mostly call for the abandonment of adulthood. So sink into the state of childlike simplicity and ask the question. What could that email you didn’t append have cost you? You had Susan B, Marcus C and John D from companies X, Y and Z respectively in your database and you could only had the email of Marcus C, whom you reached out to with your emails and updates on a regular basis. That’s 33% and bit more of your target audience that you hit. And that’s 66% and a bit more of your target audience that you missed. And that’s perhaps also an indicator of by what margin you missed out on growing as a company.

So treat your marketing math with a pinch of the real, the purported and the conjured. This could have well been a different story for a marketer with a fuller database. Unappended records could well be the dots that trough into the sinusoidal abyss of your company growth chart. Well I’m dealing in hyperbole here, but consider it an earnest attempt to drive home the most obvious point that some of us may have failed to see.

Let’s keep this simple. Do not consider appending your database a luxury, but think of it as a pressing necessity.