It may have been said, but i’m not sure it’s completely sunk in that everybody in this country is available over email. The population of email addresses is not only accessible but between a network of databases can be cleaned and verified as well. I’m talking about a full census, also known as a complete enumeration, where every single person is counted. An estimate would not suffice for this task.
It’s worth noting for accuracy that there’s an estimated 9% of the population that has never sent an email. We don’t know what those folks are buying or reading. And bless them for keeping privacy alive. For the rest of the 300 million or so people in the United States, an incentivized email analyst could make you a list of everybody. There’s just no constructive reason to have an email list with the entire US population. What purpose could that serve? I mean the whole purpose of email and email marketing is to only cull what you need. By targeting those individuals most likely to buy the product, one can get more per dollar spent on email advertising than any other means of communication. The more targeted your list the better. Ultimately you want a 1 to 1 ratio of email records to conversions. You would send one email and get one sale or conversion for every email sent if not more when considering a customer's lifetime value. The closer to that ratio the more valuable is the effort.
But, efficiency aside, if getting the lowest cost per acquisition was not a factor I could compile an email list of the population. The effort could cost around $500,000 to fund spanning a couple of years. That’s with no luxurious accommodations. Funds would be used to pay primarily the data sources, hire an amiable group of analysts, clean the data, and sync those results to something like the national census confirming everyone has indeed been counted. Proving the task complete might take a year by itself. Even a census has its limits where considering those limitations a count of emails may even prove more inclusive. The most opportune of these is the expectation that US Census workers are to count every person through face-to-face interviews or through questionnaires. In the 80’s and still today counting in some areas wrought considerable fear to those tasked with the job. Back then census workers were afraid to travel to the poor inner cities and so the US government acquiesced their count was off by at least that number [source: Weinstein & Pillai]. There is considerably less fear reaching out to someone over email or phone, but then you must get them to respond back in order to be counted.
These would be the obstacles in completing an email list of everyone in the United States. I’m thankful actually I don’t have such a task. Instead, I’m asked to compile a list of a only a couple hundred thousand who might be most interested in purchasing a car or requiring a loan to improve their financial standing. If you are not in need of the entire us population but requiring something more precise, I can most likely help in this regard.