Software Firm Tightens Up E-mail Efforts

A developer of a service to protect intellectual property has pulled a 6% response rate with a small e-mail campaign to generate leads.

Brand Defense Ltd. spent about $10,000 last November on two waves of e-mail to top executives at magazine and newspaper publishing companies. The circulation for each mailing was roughly 150. The cost included creative.

The result? The firm generated nine leads, which it turned over to its sales force, said president Sheridan Chambers. If only one lead buys the $1,000-a-month program, the effort will have paid for itself.

That beats the response of a much larger campaign to outside lists the month before. In that effort, Brand Defense sent out 150,000 e-mails to a wide range of companies that might fear theft of their electronic material, including publishers, television stations and audiovisual firms. The response rate was zero.

So the motto now is “Keep it small,” Chambers said. In December, the company sent out an even tinier prospect mailing to research analysis companies. The response had not been calculated at deadline.

Founded only a year ago, Brand Defense has landed just under 100 clients, and has a prospect database of 250 firms, according to Chambers.

The company expects to gross $3 million this year, and will probably spend more than $450,000 on direct marketing.

Since last May, the San Antonio company has also been running direct response space ads in such trade magazines as IP Worldwide, and telemarketing to general counsels and other legal staffers at prospect firms.

Brand Defense used its own prospect database for both of the small e-mailings.

The firm provides lawyers with tools that can assist them in catching and possibly taking legal action against violators.

For about $1,000 a month, Brand Defense will scour the Internet in pursuit of misuses of a company's online assets and will send out notifications to the other party, asking them to take the questionable material offline.