There was a time when business visiting cards were the most valuable forms of contact information and having a rolodex with as many phone numbers and postal addresses meant you had all the data you need to do some serious selling. Times change. While contact address, contact phone number, contact name and contact title still make up most of the contact information a business to business marketer or sales person needs, its still incomplete without one of the most sought after pieces of business contact data needed today. Contact email. 

While it is one of the most important data fields for a contact record in anyones CRM, its also perhaps one of the most guarded bits of information which is well protected and not easily available. This probably explains why in so many organizational CRMs you will see a blank in the contact email field. The amount of marketing messages directed towards a business professionals email address as well as the stricter spam regulations has lead to companies as well as individuals being more cautious about their email addresses and also why several lead sources that are used to populate CRMs with contact information dont come with an email address.  

However if you have good customer data which you can’t make use of simply because its missing that crucial contact email, then its time to run your data through an email acquisition or email append process and enrich your data so its complete and ready to use whether for email campaigns or just good enough to communicate to an individual via email. Remember, your marketing and sales contact data is only valuable to your team when it is complete!