Half Again As Much

One of the marketing advantages of living and doing business in the digital, Web-connected world in which we live is the immediacy and low cost of e-mail. But when you’re dealing with 7.5 million e-mail addresses, even the low unit cost of an e-mail broadcast can be substantial.

C.TRAC information solutions works with a large Midwest consumer-product manufacturer that faced just such a challenge.

Over time the company had amassed a database of 7.5 million e-mail addresses. As with most lists, this one had its problems. There was considerable duplication: there were addresses entered more than once; there were multiple addresses from different members of the same household. In addition, there was a need to segment the addresses according to product interests.

C.TRAC then conducted some additional list hygiene on the remaining addresses. This procedure uncovered addresses with missing characters, inaccurate or incomplete domain suffixes and deleted or invalid data. URL addresses were also corrected or removed.

Led by Executive Vice President Gary Seitz, C.TRAC conducted an initial merge/purge of the database. Just by removing the duplications, 45 percent – or 3,375,000 – of the e-mail addresses were eliminated.

At this point, a second merge/purge dropped another two percent of the addresses from the already consolidated database.

During the merge/purge process, additional data was accumulated from the various records. Based on the content, the addresses were assigned product-interest codes which enabled the company to segment their lists according to customer interests or preferences.

“Going through the clean-up also paved the way for the company to do list segmentation according to product interests,” said Gary. “This will enable them to better target prospective buyers and make their list even more productive and economical.”

The rest of the way

The company was now at a crossroads. According to Gary, they could have taken their new, shortened list to a “verification house” to verify the accuracy all the e-mail addresses, or they could run an e-mail campaign and evaluate the results.

To avoid the cost of the verification house, the company opted to run the e-mail campaign. This exercise eliminated a significant number addresses by identifying the bounce backs.

First, there were the “hard bounces” – those addresses which were undeliverable. In addition, however, there were also “soft bounces.” A soft bounce occurs when the recipient’s ISP (Internet Service Provider) refuses the e-mail or does not accept it – where the mail gets to the ISP server, but not to the recipient because of any number of reasons.  Anything from a full mailbox or oversized attachment, to an improperly configured email or even the presence of certain "spam triggering" key words.

All the e-mail addresses with hard bounces or those with two soft bounces or more were eliminated, reducing the total list by about another 800,000 addresses – leaving an even leaner list of 3,175,000 e-mail addresses.

The deployment also yielded those recipients who elected to “opt out” of the mailing – which totaled less than one percent.

In all – including the both merge/purges, the list hygiene and the results from the e-mail campaign – almost half, or 47 percent of the original database, was eliminated. That totaled approximately 3,975,000 addresses. Over the course of about a week, the time needed to conduct these actions, the company went from 7.5 million e-mail addresses to a list of slightly more than three million addresses… with improved delivery.

With the savings realized from the C.TRAC-led improvements made to their database, the company now feels comfortable conducting an e-mail campaign every month.

To deploy an e-mail, the company was paying six-tenths of one cent ($.006) per e-mail address. By eliminating nearly 4 million addresses, C.TRAC saved the company $23,850 on their initial mailing. The company estimated that, over the course of a year, the savings would amount to more than a quarter million dollars.

According to Gary Seitz, “They were able to turn around a list that was costly and not performing and transform it into a list that is now efficient, economical, and revenue driving.”