Email Appending Guide (manual append)

Email appending is a process whereby personal, work email addresses are added to an existing contact list.

The process is reasonably straight forward however there are several pointers to remember if you are looking at doing it yourself, mainly around compliance and accuracy.

1. Take a look at the company your contact works for to check whether or not you have another contact at the company with an email address.  If you do then copy the format for your contact.  For instance if you want to find the email for Paul Smith at ACME and are already talking to John Doe by email then check John’s email and copy the format for Paul.  If John’s email is [email protected] then Paul could be [email protected]
2. Once you have guessed the email for Paul you need to check it exists – you can do this by sending an email to it however this can cause you deliverability issues if you are repeating this exersice frequently as the email may be invalid.  Paul’s real email may actually be [email protected].
3. Use an online email validation solution to check the email before you send to it.  There are many different solutions available including our own at emailcleansing.com – this solution will allow you to check the validitity of the email before sending to it.
4. One validated, you can add the email to your contact file.

When following the above process, don’t forget to make sure you comply with G.D.P.R. – you will need to be sure you have a legal basis to process any personally identifiable information.  A personal, work email such as [email protected] is personally identifiable and as a result you would need to comply with G.D.P.R.

Some things to remember about compliance.

• Make sure you have a privacy policy in place
• Make sure you refer to your privacy policy in your email signature when communicating with your contact
• If your contact asks you to stop emailing them then make sure you communicate this with the rest of your team
• If you build up a larger file of contacts make sure you have completed a risk assessment and recorded this in your risk register

Whilst email is an effective communication tool, if you do have a larger volume of contacts, the email appending process can be quite time consuming.  At Emailmovers, we offer an email appending service that may be of value.  If you would like to talk to a member of our appending team about how this service works then why not reach out to us on 0845226718, chat with a member of our team now via the livechat on this website or complete the “Talk To Us” form on this page for a call back.