Meanwhile, many who have scientifically tested direct mail reply cards that ask for the donor's e-mail address, have noted that this can reduce the direct mail response to that appeal. Therefore, nonprofits are caught in a Catch-22: if they ask for e-mail addresses in a direct mail appeal, they risk losing revenue; if they don't ask for e-mail addresses, they can't grow their e-mail file.

E-mail address appending offers hope to nonprofits. It works just like any demographic append or, for that matter, NCOA. You submit your file of names and postal addresses to a service bureau. They attempt to match your file to theirs. When they find a match, they append the e-mail address on their record to your record. You pay only for the e-mail addresses that are appended (generally from $.25 to $.75 per address, depending on the vendor and the quantity of names you submit). The e-mail append vendor has collected these e-mail addresses through opt-in solicitation. That is, your donors have agreed to receive e-mail from the vendor and willingly provided the vendor with their e-mail and postal address.

That doesn't mean, however, that your donors granted the vendor permission to give their e-mail address to you. Some privacy advocates have a problem with this. Nonprofits care about whether or not their donors will be offended if they start receiving unsolicited e-mail from the nonprofit. In addition, e-mail append isn't perfect, so it's possible that the e-mail address that is appended doesn't belong to the donor after all.

One solution proposed by some e-mail append vendors, and apparently approved by the DMA and some privacy proponents, is to have the vendor send an e-mail to the donor. The e-mail requests the donor's explicit permission to receive e-mail from the nonprofit (opt-in) or, at least, allows them to respond and refuse to allow the vendor to provide the e-mail address to the nonprofit (opt-out).

Of course, the nonprofit can do this last bit, too. It can take all the appended names, add them to their file, then send one e-mail message to each address that acknowledges how they got the donor's e-mail, and requests permission to continue to send them. This permission can also be opt-in (which might yield 1% to 25% response) or opt-out (which will probably produce less than 10% negative replies). In other words, inertia rules. In either case, prepare for the one or two cranky responses from privacy nuts that threaten lawsuits, bombings, removing your Internet service, or sending your mother's address to child pornographers.

Let's crunch some numbers. There are about 110 million households in the United States. If an e-mail append file has 22 million households with e-mail addresses, then they should, theoretically, find a match for 20% of the addresses on a list you send them. However, address matching isn't perfect (I bet your database isn't perfect either). Typically, only 80% or so of your addresses would match addresses on their file even if they had every address in the U.S. So, if the vendor has 22 million households on file, they may find an e-mail address for 16% of the addresses you send them.

So if you send the vendor a file with 100,000 postal addresses, you may get back 16,000 records with e-mail addresses. If you send them a special e-mail, you'll probably find 10% of these addresses bounce. Hopefully you've negotiated some deliverability guarantees with the vendor. Of the 14,400 delivered, 1000 may opt out of future mailings. If you required each of the 14,400 to opt in before you sent them future mailings, you might only get 1000 to 3000 e-mail addresses with permission. While the smaller number of opt-in names may produce a higher rate of return than the larger number of e-mails added via opt-out, your final return will be based on the difference between them, and the cost of sending e-mails to your list. The option that works best for you is the one that fits your organization's privacy policies and budget.

Recently four firms announced the introduction of large e-mail append files. Here's a quick summary of them, taken directly from their press releases and web sites:

CoolSavings Takes "High Road" in Permission Debate with New MatchMaker Product

Company's e-mail append service remains one of the few to ask for consumer permission

CHICAGO, IL - July 29, 2002 - CoolSavings, Inc. is helping leading national companies utilize the Internet to better market to their customers through its new e-mail append service. Titled MatchMaker, this innovative new product enables companies to add permission-based e-mail addresses to their existing house list in order to enhance marketing efforts, improve ongoing customer communications and realize greater cost-efficiencies.

The process is simple. Companies provide CoolSavings with their database of current customers, including physical addresses, and CoolSavings cross-references the list against its own database of consumer e-mail and physical addresses. After matching records, CoolSavings then asks permission from the two companies' common customers encouraging them to opt-in to receive e-mail messages from the client company. After the consumer actively checks a box to receive the communications, their e-mail address is added to the client's house file. This last step is extremely beneficial to companies concerned with maintaining customer privacy. CoolSavings is one of the only E-mail Append service providers that offers a privacy-friendly consumer opt-in option, as opposed to the more prevalent 'opt-out' model, which requires consumers to actively remove themselves from the client's database within a specified time period.

About CoolSavings
CoolSavings is an online direct marketing and media company that provides smarter solutions to connect marketers to their target consumers. Combining industry-leading analytics and incentive technology with superior customer service that emphasizes a consultative approach, we enable a wide variety of advertisers to identify their best customers among more than 20 million registered members and drive more effective campaign performance. CoolSavings' popular media property, coolsavings.com, is ranked the #1 coupon site on the Internet according to the Jupiter Media Metrix May 2002 report.

FreshAddress.com, who attended the recent DMA Nonprofit Conference, offers its own twists. Besides a standard e-mail append service, they then send an e-mail (prepared by the nonprofit) to the matched addresses. Bad addresses and those who opt-out are removed from the file before it is returned to the

1) A copy of your existing database is sent to FreshAddress.
2) When a valid email address is matched to a record, it is added to your new Online Database. 
3) After the initial match we will supply you with a match report; this report shows the individual and household level matches.
4) You then supply the copy for the first e-mail message that we will send out as an opt-out mailing to the newly appended names. The message will require an HTML link with a text backup.
5) After the initial message is sent out, opt outs as well as bounces are removed before you receive the file back.

You are only charged for the number of email addresses that we are able to successfully match and deliver. For under 100,000 addresses matched, the cost is $.40 each. It drops as the volume increases, to a lowest rate of $.20 for over one million records appended.

(Editor's note: They claim to be averaging 15% - 20% match rates, though they don’t say how many households they have in their database.)

New Yesmail Append (tm) Offers The Largest Opt-in Network for Appending Email Addresses to Offline Databases

Marketers can successfully get the email data they need while ensuring a positive customer experience

June 24, 2002 (Chicago) - Yesmail, Inc., announced today the availability of Yesmail Append, an email appending service designed to enable marketers to seamlessly migrate their valuable offline customers online by matching email addresses to their existing customer files.

With more than 42 million email and postal addresses, Yesmail Append has the largest network of 100 percent opt-in names available for email append. Additionally, Yesmail's reply management process manages bounces, unsubscribes and any replies that may come in from the first message, including customer service and change of address requests, to ensure a positive customer experience.

"The Append service is a natural extension of Yesmail's commitment to online relationship marketing," explained Dave Menzel, Chief Executive Officer for Yesmail. "Email append provides a lucrative opportunity to build online relationships, enable multi-channel marketing and increase customer lifetime value. With our append service, Yesmail now offers clients a variety of solutions to effectively integrate email into their overall marketing and communication strategies."

Yesmail Append is built on privacy standards designed to protect customer privacy and brand reputation. Yesmail Append's match process meets and exceeds the guidelines of the Direct Marketing Association, the Association for Interactive Marketing and the Council for Responsible Email.

In addition to Yesmail Append, Yesmail partners with other email append solution providers to give marketers access to an additional 40 million records. Yesmail's collective options offer solutions from simple email append to more sophisticated needs, such as file manipulation and managing multiple files. The options are designed to help marketers achieve the highest match rate possible for their customer database.

"Working with Yesmail, we have been able to identify email addresses for customers that we previously were not able to contact via email," said Paul Chartrand, Assistant Vice President of Online Marketing for Countrywide. "And we have generated positive results and feedback from customers. Yesmail's process puts the customer first by asking for permission to contact them and then protecting the degree of privacy our customers have chosen. Additionally, working with Yesmail, we can easily integrate these customers into our ongoing email program which enables us to market to them in a more effective and efficient manner."

About Yesmail
Yesmail, Inc., a leading online relationship marketing company, specializes in the email channel to provide leading-edge customer acquisition and retention solutions to Fortune 2000 corporations. Yesmail helps companies increase performance of the email channel through a combination of self-serve or full-serve email technology, data solutions and strategic services. Companies can build their customer base, gain valuable customer insight and increase loyalty to ultimately drive more revenue. Founded in 1995, Chicago-based Yesmail is a majority-owned operating company of CMGI, Inc, with offices in New York and San Francisco. For more information about Yesmail, visit www.yesmail.com or call 1-877-YESMAIL.

(Editors note: According to an article in DM News, Yesmail plans to charge 25 cents to 75 cents per matched name for its appending service depending on quantity, with no run fees or setup charges. The company claims it will turn around file matches within 48 hours.)

AptiPend(TM) Services to Match Email Addresses to Marketer's Postal Customer Addresses and Postal Addresses to Email Customer Addresses

SAN FRANCISCO, June 20 - Taking advantage of its rapidly growing consumer database, Aptimus Inc. today announced AptiPend, its entry into the data append business. This new service enables marketers to identify email addresses for their existing customers and establish a new and efficient method of communication with those customers.

AptiPend services will also enable marketers to identify postal addresses for their existing email customer databases for broader communication options.

Aptimus has a consumer database with approximately 20 million email name and postal address combinations.

Through AptiPend services, Aptimus will compare its clients' database files with the Aptimus TransAction Masterfile to identify common customers at a household or individual level. Aptimus will then send a notification to the matching consumers prior to providing marketers with their email addresses. Any consumers preferring not to be contacted via email by companies they do business with will be excluded from the files delivered to Aptimus' clients.

Aptimus is a member of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), and closely adheres to all DMA standards for consumer privacy.

About Aptimus, Inc.: Aptimus is the leading online direct response network. We provide high volume performance-based customer acquisition solutions for major consumer marketers. Aptimus presents direct response offers from our advertisers across an ever-expanding network of distribution partner web sites and email channels. Our primary offer presentation formats include cross-marketing promotions at the points of registration, purchase, login, or other transactional activities on web sites, as well as email campaigns leveraging the Aptimus TransAction Masterfile(TM) of opt-in email addresses. At its core, our process is facilitated by the Aptimus Direct Response System(TM), which is our proprietary and highly scalable offer-serving platform, and includes our patent-pending Dynamic Revenue Optimization(TM) technology that automatically determines the best marketer offers for placement on each distribution partner's Web site. This approach strikes a unique balance between the client marketer and web-site publisher to assure the highest response rate for our clients and the highest financial return to our distribution partners, while placing the right offers in front of the right customers. Aptimus has offices in Seattle and San Francisco, and is publicly traded on Nasdaq under the symbol APTM.

August 2002