E-Mail List Broker: Acxiom Direct Media

If you do searches in various search engines on "e-mail lists" or "e-mail marketing" your request will turn up many sources that have lists to rent. You’ll notice that some companies will take your order online and send your message out immediately or within the next day. There is no need to talk with anyone and no one screens what you are sending. Some vendors can only send your message to an entire list and cannot do a merge-purge.

But we’re dealing with a highly technical medium, it seems highly absurd to work with technologically limited vendors. My message to you is go for the best! Work with the most technologically advanced company that you can and one that is professional in its approach to list management.

Let me show you what I mean:

Acxiom Direct Media is one of the leading list brokerage firms in the United States. They’ve started up an Interactive Division headed by Regina Brady who was formerly with CompuServe. The combination is powerful because Brady knows all about online users and how to reach them through direct marketing; Acxicom has invested in technology solutions provided by Bigfoot (http://www.bigfoot.com) that give Brady a better than state-of-the-art platform to work with.

Carey Catala who works in ACXIOM’s Interactive list rental area gave me an online tour of the company’s back end operations. All the activity and results of e-mail campaigns are visible to clients on Acxiom’s password protected website. Each e-mail message sent out has tracking mechanisms in it, on every clickable link and in the addressee field. These allow Acxiom to tell its clients accurately what happened to each message, how many people clicked on each link in the message, who those people were, and which messages failed or bounced. The statistics are highly scientific. Clients don’t pay for mail that is not sent.

"It’s important to work with a company that maintains its lists well," Catala emphasized. "Clients should find out what kind of list hygiene practices a company has. Can it do merge-purges? Does it keep an up-to-date suppression file? Does it deduct for the bad addresses or just charge you upfront for the whole list regardless of bad sends?"

"Right now," Catala said, "it’s really hard to coordinate mailings when you’re working with various lists from different sources. There’s no cooperation between list providers. Most list managers/owners require the mailing to go out through their own providers – the trust just isn’t there. To keep this market growing, as an industry we need to be able get to a point where list management companies and owners recognize third party providers for e-mail transmission just as we do with postal mailings and letter shops."

Without unified standards, Catala explained, it’s impossible to be spontaneous. It can take days to work with different companies to get a mailing out to lists from different sources. Messages have to be redone to meet the varying standards and submissions to other providers may not all go out smoothly.

What Results Can You Expect

Catala could not give actual campaign results for Acxicom clients but she did speak in general terms about what typical results are for certain types of campaigns:

"If you’re a reseller with a high ticket item, you’re going to see about a 1 percent response rate. As the price goes down, of course, you’ll see the response increase.

"If you’re a software publisher offering an upgrade to existing customers or a publisher seeking renewals from subscribers, the response is usually between 10 and twenty percent, sometimes even higher. The opt-out rate in these campaigns averages around 3 percent.

"When publishers personalize and pre-populate (pre-format) their renewal screens and all the recipient has to do is hit the submit key, I’ve seen magazines reach very high renewal rates on second, third and fourth efforts."

Regina Brady reported other interesting findings from a mailing Acxicom did for the Crutchfield catalog, marketer of electronic equipment, car radios, stereos, etc. "Our message began with a personalized salutation and told the reader that the writer of the message, a company employee, hoped he was not intruding. If the reader wanted to opt-out, those instructions were placed in the opening paragraph of the letter. The letter went on to describe new products and services that were available via embedded hotlinks.

"The letter engendered so much positive reaction. People actually wrote personal notes back saying they would be pleased to hear from Crutchfield again soon. We received a nice amount of click-throughs and the sales data was much more than we expected," Brady reported.

I think we did well in this campaign because of a good creative process," she concluded. "Personalization definitely boosts response with a company name in the From: line and opt-out instructions at the opening of the message."

(Contact: Acxiom/Direct Media 203-532-1000)

Excerpted from "Beyond Spam: E-Mail Marketing That Works" a special report published by E-Tactics, Inc., 1998