E-mail data services provider TowerData announced yesterday it has patented its e-mail change of address service.
TowerData claims access to 11 databases containing 250 million records of the names, postal addresses and e-mail addresses of people who have consented to receive third-party offers.
The company matches clients’ lists of undeliverable addresses to its partners’ databases and looks for deliverable e-mail addresses whose owners match those of the undeliverable addresses.
As a result, unlike other ECOA service’s such as that of Return Path and FreshAddress, TowerData’s doesn’t require the address holders to volunteer their information, according to TowerData’s president Tom Burke.
“Asking people to volunteer their information is too much,” said Burke. “You can’t get enough data to have a meaningful impact.”
He claims his service can match 10% to 15% of the average company’s undeliverable e-mail addresses to new addresses. The price of TowerData’s ECOA service varies by the number of matches and the size of the database, but averages out to about 30 cents per match, Burke said.
When TowerData’s ECOA service finds a match, it sends a Can-Spam-compliant e-mail to the address holder on behalf of the list owner. If the e-mail doesn’t bounce and the address holder doesn’t opt out, it is considered a match.
“These are people who have previously expressed an interest in hearing from that marketer,” Burke said. “We don’t look at this as customer acquisition. We look at it as retention.”
TowerData’s patent number is 7,254,573.
