E-mail Prospecting Can Still Hit Gold

Don't tell Robert Rosenthal the e-mail list-rental market is dead. Conventional wisdom has had it for some time—since the dot-com crash of 2000 and passage of the Can-Spam Act of 2003—that e-mail is good for retention, but not prospecting. But Rosenthal's Maynard, MA-based direct-response ad agency, Mothers of Invention, formerly Passaic Parc, was able to generate conversion rates—defined as the percentage of recipients who downloaded a free white paper—as high as 13% in a business-to-business campaign using rented e-mail lists. Visually grabbing creative, an enticing offer, and a highly targeted campaign no doubt helped drive the campaign's success.

Rosenthal isn't the only direct marketer who has concluded that e-mail is viable for prospecting, according to Deb Goldstein, president of Framingham, MA-based IDG List Services, the list management and brokerage unit of International Data Group. Goldstein says that like everything else in the commercial e-mail industry, her company's e-mail rental business suffered greatly during the dot-com crash and the economic slump that followed, but the company's e-mail-rental business began to significantly pick up about six months ago.

Source: Multichannel Merchant

For more information, please contact:
Howard Sholkin
howard_sholkin@idg.com
617-239-7882