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Maybe a Decent Answer to 'Where Can I Buy Names?'
7/26/11
By Ken Magill
The first question people new to email marketing ask is: “Where can I buy email addresses?”
And when someone who’s been around for a while tells them they can’t buy email addresses—or at least not from a reputable company, anyway—they get incredulous.
Some even go so far as to ignore advice not to buy email addresses, purchase a list and, of course, get screwed.
Then they learn: The only legitimate way to prospect using email is to rent permission from list owners who must send offers to their subscribers on advertisers’ behalves—an incredibly clumsy proposition.
What’s worse, the lists generally have few or no so-called selects, or address-holder attributes from which to choose to target specific recipients.
Enter Seattle-based Marketfish. The three-year-old company has developed what is apparently a unique solution to email-list rental’s inherent hassles.
Marketfish represents 40 list owners with more than 200 million email addresses and offers an automated platform marketers can use to search the files using 93 different selects and compile a list of their preferred target—homeowners in Florida with household incomes of $100,000 or more, for example.
“I was a buyer [marketer] for 18 years so I built this system from the perspective of a buyer,” said Dave Scott, founder and chief executive of Marketfish.
Among his stints as a marketer was one as vice president of marketing for PeopleSoft, one as senior vice president of marketing for Intermec Technology and most recently one as chief marketer for a startup he declined to name.
He said Marketfish is able to offer so many selects because it uses data appending services, the process where data providers take the list and match it to names and addresses they have on file to enhance the addresses with more information, such as household demographics.
“Most lists come in with three to five selects,” said Scott. “We have the ability to append every record that comes into our database.”
Marketfish requires list owners to supply proof of permission and then monitors their spam complaints.
“If they get complaints they can’t resolve, we disable them,” he said.
The list owners determine rental rates, which range from $13 per thousand addresses to $487.50 per thousand.
However, “advertisers can counter offer on the CPMs [costs per thousand],” said Scott.
Advertisers also don’t have to rent entire files, he said. If a search returns more records than the advertiser wants, they can limit the amount of money they’re willing to spend to trim the file.
Once an advertiser settles on a list or—more likely—a combination of segments of different lists, the advertiser uploads their creative and their suppression file and Marketfish sends the campaign.
“We suppress [eliminate addresses of people who have indicated they don’t want email from that advertiser] for free,” Scott said.
Marketfish also just inked two deals aimed at providing its file owners free list hygiene services. Using an outfit called LeadSpend’s email validation technology and impressionwise’s online messaging analytics, Scott claims Marketfish is able clean data before campaigns are sent out, taking hard bounces from an average 10 percent down to below 2 percent.
“No matter how good people think their lists are, they’re never as good as they should be,” he said.
When each campaign goes out, the messages state why recipients are getting it, according to Scott. “We clearly expose the name of the list owner,” he said.
To combat list fatigue, list owners determine how often their files can be rented, said Scott. For example, if a list owner caps rental frequency at, say, once per month, every time the file is rented, it is taken out of the system for a month.
The files on offer at Marketfish include a wide variety of business-to-consumer and business-to-business lists, such as Golfer’s Guide subscribers, DealBreaker.com’s Wall Street Professionals list and the Facility Management & Maintenance list.
Author’s note: Marketfish is the first company to make me say “wow” in as long as I can remember. Anyone out there have any experience with them? If so, I’d love to hear about it. KenMagill_at_gmail.com.
Comments
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Date: 2011-10-12 16:29:33
Subject: The Marketfish Platform
You know what, great questions guys, thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify. We append data for a reason. Appending data allows us to provide highly targeted third party lists to advertisers. We strongly believe that this of great benefit to the list marketing industry as a whole. Using these highly targeted lists allows the advertiser get their offer into the hands of the customer that wants that offer. For example, appending the third party lists on our platform lets advertisers send offers for cat food to cat food owners, not just to general pet owners. This makes the recipient happy, because they get the offers they want. The advertisers are happy, because they should see an increased response rate to their emails.
As far as opt-in status, we don’t own the lists on our platform; we just rent them out to advertisers. Opt-ins are performed by the list owner, and we display that opt-in status prominently on our platform. This allows you, the advertiser, to pick a list with the opt-in status that you want. We’re completely transparent with our business practices. I’d be happy to field more questions, simply email me at dscott@marketfish.com. Or head to our website www.marketfish.com and take a look at the platform for yourself.
Date: 2011-08-03 14:46:04
Subject: Epending
Epending is another word for "scraping email addresses and sending to them without permission." It's evil.
Date: 2011-07-28 12:22:33
Subject: Email list hygiene and reputation
Putting aside the known problems of blasting email offers to non opt-in addresses, the other huge issue here lies in the potential damage to one's reputation by sending out offers to files with possible spam traps, malicious email entries, or those with "this is spam" complaint trigger fingers.
With the majority of email deliverability issues stemming from hygiene problems with the underlying list, email offers blasted to just a couple of wrong email addresses can result in blocking and blacklisting issues that can bring down one's existing email program.
In the email list rental world, "buyer beware" is a term used by anyone who has tread these waters in the past. If you're wedded to the idea of email list rental for enhancing your customer acquisition efforts, there are some critical factors that are necessary (note: necessary, not desirable) if you want to have a chance of making this succeed for you:
1) The email list should be hygiened by a reputable third party provider, experienced in cleaning lists to maximize deliverability for their clients. And be sure not to use a "pinging" provider as this is a risk not worth taking, even if offered to you for free.
2) The target segment must be carefully selected and matched to your requirements.
3) The marketer should have brand name recognition and an impeccable reputation
4) The offer needs to be compelling - Groupon would still be an unknown deal marketer if it hadn't figured out that 50% discounts sell.
5) The subject line and creative need to be enticing
So wade in the waters of email list rental very carefully. And if you decide to jump in, be sure that all of your monies and effort are not wasted by sending to an email list that hasn't been cleaned thoroughly.
Date: 2011-07-28 11:12:30
Subject: Marketfish
I have to agree with Andrew. Ken is my go-to source for news/views in this industry, but we counsel our customers to run the other way from email append and rental. I don't care how lily-white the opt-in process the renter/appender claims. If a person wants to get YOUR emails they should be smart enough to know how to get to your store/website and give you their email address. Anything else is running a big risk. And if you work with an ESP like ExactTarget (we do) you click a box every time you import a file saying these people have given YOU explicit permission to email them. My guess is that Marketfish uses a negative opt-in like most appenders/renters.
I just don't like it.
Date: 2011-07-27 14:01:32
Subject: Marketfish
I used marketfish about 2 months ago in 2 separate email campaigns. Their system is simple to use and the summary you gave above is spot on.
Date: 2011-07-27 11:00:24
Subject:
If Ken Magill stands up and says something is good, it typically is. However, anything short of a susbscriber stating that they want mail from a particular sender (direct opt-in) doesn't work well in my experience. At best it does more damage than good. I'm with Andrew. Knowing that they're doing append doesn't inspire confidence. Ken, I look forward to reading about any feedback you get about Marketfish.
Date: 2011-07-26 12:33:57
Subject: Wow is right.
E-mail list segments generated by epending? "Wow", indeed.