E-mail lists have something in common with racehorses and purebred dogs—where they come from matters. The data source from which your e-mail addresses are culled is generally known as your list pedigree. Your e-mail list pedigree will directly affect the success of your e-mail marketing campaign, from deliverability to ROI. If you purchased an unauthenticated e-mail list from an unreliable source, you now know why your campaign is foundering. The solution is purchasing a list from a company that vets the addresses through reliable e-mail sourcing practices.
The Importance of an E-mail List Pedigree to Campaign Metrics
The bottom line is that a strong list lays the foundation for a strong campaign. The converse is equally true—an unreliable or weak list lays the foundation for a weak campaign. An e-mail list with a strong pedigree may cost you more, but the extra expense is an investment that will actually lower the overall cost of your campaign. Sending to reliable, accurate e-mail addresses will ensure the highest delivery, open, and click-through rates for each campaign.
Understanding First-Party Sourcing Practices and Why They Matter
A DMD e-mail list comes with an unimpeachable list pedigree because we use first-party sourcing. This means that our contact information is coming directly and voluntarily from healthcare professionals (HCPs), who give their information to our partner publishers. For example, our primary e-mail sourcing comes from co-registrations on medical publisher websites and newsletters.
We then go a step further and authenticate each registering user’s information against the American Medical Association (AMA) Physician Masterfile. The Physician Masterfile contains certification and contact information for nearly every medical doctor (MD) and doctor of osteopathy (DO) in the United States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and some Pacific Islands. In total, the Physician Masterfile contains information for more than 1.4 million doctors, residents and medical students. At DMD we also know that today’s HCPs aren’t just doctors, which is why we also authenticate addresses against the National Provider Identifier (NPI) database.
Getting HCPs’ Most Current and Preferred E-mail Addresses
HCPs supply their contact information to our publishers for the purpose of receiving medical-related emails. Once we have HCPs’ e-mail addresses, we compare it to the others they have provided on various websites we support to ensure consistency. We also verify domain names. Domain verification refers to the practice of comparing the domain of an HCP’s e-mail address—the part of the address that comes after “@,” such as “@stjudeshospital.com”—to his or her practice setting.
Of course, keeping your e-mail list up to date is critical to your campaign’s success. Unused or bad e-mail addresses hurt deliverability as well as open rates. To ensure that we have the most current address, DMD provides our publishers with an e-change-of-address system to help them stay in touch with their HCP user bases.
If you want to know where you’re going with a particular e-mail list, you first have to know where it came from. An e-mail list is only as good as its source. DMD sources its lists from credible publishers that obtain HCP e-mail addresses voluntarily from the HCPs themselves. Those addresses then undergo rigorous validation processes to yield the highest quality, most reliable e-mail list in the industry.
Send us your latest HCP e-mail, and DMD will conduct an e-mail performance analysis for you and your team. Click here to register for a free email performance analysis
