FreshAddress’s Email Appending and Email Change of Address Services Repair the Broken Connections Created by Lack of Email Addresses
Newton, MA (March  7, 2011) Ace Hardware, the largest retailer-owner cooperative, has 4600 stores and generates approximately $12 billion in revenues. Ace’s company-wide loyalty program called “Ace Rewards” rewards its shoppers (members) “every time you shop.” In an effort to cost-effectively promote its products and services to its Rewards members, Ace realized it needed to grow its email marketing program.

The Problem:

Because the Ace Rewards program had begun before email was as widely used a marketing channel as it is today, Ace had a low percentage of email addresses in its 20 million member Rewards database. Looking to rectify this problem, Ace’s marketing department distributed an RFP (Request for Proposal) to 5 – 6 leading vendors of email database services. After careful diligence and testing, Ace chose FreshAddress to be its email database partner based on FreshAddress’s superior match rates, accuracy and performance during the testing phase as well as its reputation for unrivalled client service and email expertise.

The Solutions:

Ace began utilizing FreshAddress’s Email Appending and patented Email Change of Address services to fill in the gaps created by missing, bouncing, and inactive email addresses in its email list.

B2C (Business to Consumer) Email Appending

The majority of Ace’s customer database contained names and postal addresses but lacked email addresses. By utilizing FreshAddress’s Email Append technology and service on a quarterly basis, Ace hoped to gain guaranteed deliverable email addresses for up to 25+% of its postal records.  FreshAddress’s match rates and reputation for data accuracy derive from its proprietary internal database of over 600 million opt-in records, multi-source matching against the opt-in databases of other leading providers, and its comprehensive email list hygiene, permission messaging, and double-scrubbing process.

On the first Email Append Ace performed using FreshAddress, Ace was able to match 15.8% of its customer file. Since then, two additional quarterly appends have unearthed a combined total of 31% more email addresses for Ace Rewards members.

ECOA (Email Change of Address)

Given that typical email address attrition rates are approximately 30% per year, many of the email addresses that Ace had collected were out of date or no longer in existence, causing many of them to bounce or, worse yet, to have turned into spam traps. FreshAddress’s patented ECOA (Email Change of Address) technology updates 8% to 15+% of the bouncing or inactive email addresses in a file. Then through its automated quarterly processing, FreshAddress clients...