E-mail Prospecting Can Still Hit Gold

Don't tell Robert Rosenthal the e-mail list rental market is dead.

Conventional wisdom has held it for some time: That since the dot-com crash of 2000 and passage of the Can Spam Act of 2003, e-mail is good for retention, not prospecting.

However, Rosenthal's Maynard, MA-based direct response ad agency Mothers of Invention (formerly Passaic Parc), was able to generate conversion rates — defined here 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 precise targeting no doubt helped drive the effort's success.

The campaign — sent to about 20,000 chief information officers at companies with revenue from $100 million to $1 billion — was aimed at generating leads for Extol Business Integrator, software that, according to its creator Extol International, allows companies to integrate business information systems without the manual coding normally associated with such projects.

“Want to deliver faster results with integration?” asked the headline. “Start by addressing a hairy problem.”

Under the headline was a graphic of a middle-aged senior executive with a monkey on his back. “That monkey on the back represents manual coding used to connect isolated applications,” began the body copy.

“Actually, it's a chimp,” said Rosenthal. “Monkeys are so little, and we figured no one would notice the difference.” He added that the image was a computer-enhanced combination of two stock images. “We had to look at a ton of chimp shots and a ton of executive shots to pull this off.”

Under the executive/chimp graphic, the ad invited recipients to download a free white paper that promised to show how to cut integration time by 50%.

“Extol has a platform that literally can cut the time required to integrate these applications by 50% to 90%,” Rosenthal said. “If you're a CIO, the hairy problem is that you've got people in your organization with a mentality oriented toward manual coding. Until you get that monkey off your back, it's going to limit your business opportunities.”

The ad also offered the first 100 respondents free tickets to “King Kong.” “We figured as long as we've got this monkey thing going, why not ride on the [movie's] coattails?” said Rosenthal.

The campaign went to 20,000 addresses on five rented lists, said Rosenthal, who added he was not allowed to name the lists' sources for competitive reasons. Testing was confined to those lists, he said.

Because of the length of time required to sell the high-ticket integration software, it's too early to measure the campaign's final results. However, the download rate indicates promise, especially since one sale will more than pay for the effort, said Rosenthal.

Moreover, he said, the idea that e-mail is only good for retention “is a bogus conclusion.” Direct marketers who believe rented e-mail lists can't be used for prospecting probably are basing that judgment on their own failed attempts, he said.

“Eighty percent of what is going out [via commercial e-mail] is mediocre to shit,” he said. “The reality is that for a lot of advertisers, when we have good reasons for going to e-mail, we're still getting response via e-mail that are as good or in some cases even better than direct mail response. Only, of course, the cost is less.”

Rosenthal isn't the only DMer who's 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 said that like everything 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 firm's e-mail rental business began to pick up significantly about six months ago.

Goldstein theorized that one reason for her company's pickup in e-mail rentals is that a large percentage of technology marketers — the bulk of IDG List Services' customers — are more comfortable with e-mail than postal mail.

“For a lot of the marketing people who came up through the dot-com era, e-mail was their medium of choice,” she said. “They don't have the acumen or the affinity to deal with the production aspects of traditional direct response.”

She added that DMers are getting better at sending relevant e-mail. “I'd say overall, they're getting smarter. The other thing is they're taking more advantage of e-mail's measurability.”