SLOWLY BUT SURELY, postal lists containing e-mail selects and appends have begun appearing on the market.
Some mailers are testing these combined files. While no great success stories have been reported yet, research suggests strong potential. A study done by AMR Research Inc., Boston, said 61% of direct marketers that followed up postal campaigns with e-mail reminders pulled in response rate lifts of as much as 10% from what they would have received through just one channel.
Greenville, NC-based Overton’s is one marketer that has begun capturing e-mail addresses from inbound callers, as well as adding an e-mail append to existing catalog buyer names.
Brian Moen, marketing director, says the boating and water sports cataloger has gotten a response between 0.3% to 0.5% to e-mail marketing tests it began in January.
“We’re trying to find out how our customers like best to be contacted as part of our customer relationship management strategy,” he says, noting recent customers are particularly responsive to e-mail offers.
The company is still reviewing the results of the e-mail trials, but Overton’s may start testing e-mail as a prospecting tool later this year, Moen says.
Overton’s is using MarketsOnDemand’s e-mail append service, which debuted last fall. It provides marketers with standardized e-mail addresses for their customers, and delivers the initial e-mail campaign to the newly appended lists.
Following the anthrax scare, some marketers were concerned people wouldn’t open mail they didn’t expect to receive. This led some mailers to precede their postal mailings with e-mail notices so consumers wouldn’t be surprised or alarmed, says Michael Della Penna, vice president of Bigfoot Interactive, New York.
Some are finding success with the combined postal/e-mail files. For example, Della Penna says a large automaker recently got a 12% response rate using such as file.
One thing helping give rise to the popularity of these combined files is that the number of available permission-based e-mail lists is reaching critical mass, says Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of Worldata/WebConnect, Boca Raton, FL.
He estimates there are as many as 5,000 permission-based e-mail lists now. “And if you take in all the spam garbage out there, there are probably 10,000 e-mail lists,” quips Schwedelson.
The emergence of these files might also benefit list companies by giving them another product to offer, suggests Georgianne Rossi, vice president of list management at Direct Media, Greenwich, CT. The list manager/broker recently launched Multichannel Marketing, a service that offers combined postal and e-mail lists at a 20% discount off the regular prices of both.
Publishers especially have begun dealing in these combo postal/e-mail lists, says Rossi. For example, Rubin Response Management Services is offering New Architect magazine’s 73,401-name opt-in e-mail subscriber file.
In a business-to-business environment, postal/e-mail files can help improve list hygiene by helping marketers determine who the proper contact person is, says Rob Sanchez, senior vice president at Merit Direct, Stamford, CT. He’s seen strong growth in e-mail lists since the end of last year, including increased use by B-to-B catalogers and major corporations.
Nevertheless, a certain degree of skepticism about the paired lists remains.
“They’re still a testing mechanism and not proven yet for effectiveness,” says Ralph Drybrough, president of Merit Direct, Stamford.
“Of course you’ve got the differences — e-mail is instantaneous and land mail has a number of problems associated with it.”
One problem is that a lot of companies have separate postal and e-mail databases that aren’t necessarily used for the same purposes, notes Karen Talavera, vice president of marketing at MarketsOnDemand, Chicago.
“There’s been a lot of hype about the coordination of direct and e-mail lists but nobody’s really having any success with it yet in terms of contributing to their ROIs,” says Schwedelson.
“After 9/11, the thinking was that marketers would first send an e-mail that would be followed up by a direct mail because with anthrax, people would be afraid to open their mail,” he explains. “That didn’t happen. Now, postal and e-mail lists are each performing well on their own, but not together.”
Another issue is pricing. Generally, e-mail lists are more expensive than postal files, but there’s some disagreement about where e-mail list prices are going. While some list managers and brokers maintain they’re holding steady, others see them falling.
Meanwhile, firms like MarketsOnDemand are lowering e-mail file prices to bring them in line with postal list costs.
For example, the firm has evened postal and e-mail rental prices for the Corebase consumer database at $75 per 1,000. That’s down from $120/M for e-mail and $75/M for postal.
Interest lists now cost $85/M for e-mail and postal, down from $130/M for e-mail and $85/M for postal. Career files are $85/M for both, down from $260/M for e-mail and $130/M for postal. Web site member lists from registrations on MarketsOnDemand’s network of Web sites is $95/M for both, a drop from $180/M for e-mail and $100/M for postal.
“Nobody was selling e-mail lists on the rate card anyway, so we thought we’d just reflect what’s going on in reality,” says Talavera.
And this may be just the beginning.
Schwedelson predicts that by year’s end, e-mail and postal lists will wind up costing about the same.
“It’s a matter of supply and demand,” he says.
Overall, though, combined postal and e-mail lists have created a buzz.
“There’s a lot if interest, but I wouldn’t say it’s a big trend yet,” says Rich Baumer, president of VentureDirect Worldwide, New York, noting he does realize the potential market. “We’re seeing more and more clients requesting them.”
“Marketers like the idea of being able to target customers in two ways by first sending an e-mail and then a postal, or vice versa,” says Baumer.
“Marketers are looking for the most efficient ways to prospect and retain customers,” adds Talavera.
And so, apparently, is the industry. Bigfoot is working with the Direct Marketing Association to help develop best practices standards for combining postal and e-mail lists. These guidelines will be released at the DMA’s net. marketing show next month.
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