USA Today has issued a “clarification” to its November column that attacked 21st Century Marketing’s e-mail appending service, epend.
The clarification, issued Nov. 24, retracted its original statement claiming that a match rate of customer names at business address of 20% to 40%, meant that the remaining names were sent unwanted e-mail.
The statement read, “This match rate does not mean that 60% to 80% of the e-mail sent by the company goes to the wrong address….rather single, confirming [opt-in] e-mail is sent only to those 20% to 40% of customers, and of that e-mail sent, more than 99% is accurate, and less than 0.4% does not reach the intended recipient.”
The clarification also reported that 21st Century “does not use the intrusive process known as ‘dictionary spamming’ to ascertain these e-mail addresses.”
“The original article was misreported,” said David Schwartz, president of Farmingdale, NY-based 21st Century Marketing. “For them to put this [clarification] out is for them to say as carefully as they can that they made a mistake.”
USA Today columnist Elizabeth Weise reported on and wrote the column which was reported on DIRECT Newsline Nov. 5.
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