Marketing services provider Q Interactive has launched a service the company claims can deliver high-quality e-mail leads without irritating consumers and resulting in spam complaints.
About two months ago, Q Interactive began applying a technique to e-mail that it developed to serve ads on its network of mainly publisher Web sites.
Q Interactive claims its new service uses more than 1,600 unique elements—including demographic, geographic, behavioral, and transactional information and category interests—to adjust content, relevancy and frequency of the messages it sends to prospects on behalf of clients.
If the claims are true, the service has certainly come at an opportune time. E-mail inbox providers, such as Yahoo and AOL, have consistently cited consumer spam complaints as the No. 1 gauge they use to determine whether or not to block incoming e-mail as spam.
As a result, some marketers’ reputations have suffered online as a result of overly aggressive behavior on the part of people selling or generating leads on their behalf. Also, Internet service providers are increasingly monitoring the domain names that appear in messages that draw complaints and blocking all mail containing those domains. Consequently, overly aggressive mailing by affiliates can result in all mail from a particular mailer getting spam blocked.
Q Interactive CEO Matt Wise said his company’s e-mail marketing technique limits complaints and makes e-mail prospecting viable.
“What we’re saying is you can now use e-mail again as a mass medium for prospecting and you won’t have all these complaints from ISPs and consumers because every consumer will have opted in to the original brand and is expecting some e-mail, and a targeting engine has figured out what’s actually relevant to them,” he said.
He added the company has access to close to 20 million addresses collected on its CoolSavings site and on behalf of publishers such as Knight Ridder, who have partnered with Q Interactive on a revenue-share basis to generate income from their e-mail files and their registration processes.
Besides keeping the messages relevant, Wise said the company keeps response rates up and complaints down by rarely sending e-mail to anyone who hasn’t interacted with the brand in some way within the previous 120 days.
“We don’t do mailings to legacy files or old files,” he said. “We’re really looking for people who are still engaged with the brand.”
Under this business model, Q Interactive negotiates with advertisers and sends the messages on their behalf, but the messages arrive under the brand of the publisher. “If the consumer unsubscribes, they come off of our database, but they are also taken off the database of the original publisher,” said Wise.
The model stems from an ad network Q Interactive launched two years ago in which consumers registering at a newspaper site are served ads based on information they provide during sign-up.
“That advertising network exploded and is now the vast majority or our business,” said Wise. The ads are delivered using a proprietary piece of technology Q Interactive calls its TrueConversion Engine.
“Why it works so well is that we have such a high volume of people coming through the system that every three hours the system learns more from what happened during the previous three hours,” said Wise. “So we’re constantly learning what offers appeal to what user segments.”
Wise said the company currently processes more than 500,000 registrations a day over about 1,000 Web sites.
Wise claims that Q Interactive’s ad-network system is getting people to respond to at least one offer an astounding 50% of the time.
