He Sees You When You’re Mailing

If your company has put it in an e-mail, chances are Bill McCloskey’s company knows about it.

McCloskey runs Email Data Source, a New York company launched in 2003 that monitors and sells intelligence on the e-mail activities of 10,000 companies and 18,000 brands.

The result is a database of millions of non-spam commercial e-mails that goes back to August of 2003, searchable by any number of criteria, including content, brand, sender, receiver, words and phrases in the subject lines, and types of ads contained in newsletters.

McCloskey likens his service to Nielsen//NetRatings’ AdRelevance, a service offering online media buyers and sellers the ability to track who is spending what on online advertising, and where they’re spending it.

Email Data Source also clicks through all the links in incoming e-mail and categorizes them by where they lead. As a result, a subscriber can find out, say, how many times the e-mail newsletter Daily Candy carried ads that led to automotive sites last year.

Direct marketing list managers and brokers are using Email Data Source to monitor competitors’ activity.

For example, Jeanniey Mullen, partner, senior director, e-mail marketing for OgilvyOne worldwide, used the service to determine that some e-mail lists her client wanted to rent were getting hammered by offers from the competition.

“The perfect, targeted list for them [the client] was getting over-mailed,” Mullen said. “We recommended some almost-perfect lists. The client did a test, and found that the almost-perfect list had a 60% higher response rate than the perfect, but over-saturated list.”

Using data from Web traffic monitoring service Alexa Internet, Email Data Source can also provide information on how a company’s Web site traffic correlates to its e-mail efforts.

“For instance, we know that every time L.L. Bean puts out an e-mail with a big red banner saying ‘Summer Sale’ they get a gigantic response,” said McCloskey.

He founded Email Data Source in his garage after he failed to find an e-mail intelligence provider at the request of a colleague. “When I couldn’t find anybody, I realized there must be a market for this stuff,” McCloskey said.

Email Data Source employs about a half dozen telecommuters who sign up for e-mail lists using thousands of addresses to monitor what mailers are sending. These employees often sign up for companies’ lists under multiple profiles—constant allergy sufferer versus seasonal allergy sufferer, for example—to get a comprehensive picture of companies’ outbound e-mail efforts.

The one major drawback to the company’s business model is that since the employees aren’t making purchases from the companies Email Data Source tracks, the company isn’t tracking what merchants send to their customers.

However, McCloskey said Email Data Source will track companies’ e-mails to customers if a client asks—and, of course, pays—for it.

Marketers who sell products and services through affiliates are also using the service to monitor people who are sending e-mail out on their behalf. “If you start getting complaints about your brand, you can check to see what’s going on,” said McCloskey. “Did they change your creative? If they did, you’ll know it.”

So far, Email Data Source has about 100 clients, according to McCloskey. The company recently received an undisclosed amount of funding from a group called New York Angels Inc. and moved into new offices in downtown Manhattan.

The service runs about $25,000 a year.