Under Pressure to Get Your Message In Front of
More of the Right People?
Like all marketers, you’re under growing pressure to cost-effectively get your message in front of more of the right people – those who want to hear from you because what you have to offer is highly relevant to them. Brand building, lead generation, and revenue growth all flow from that initial, relevant customer engagement.
Print, broadcast, online advertising, social media, and dozens of other traditional tactics exist to get your message out – but most are expensive, not sufficiently targeted, and hard to measure. The challenge is even greater if your ideal customer has a very specific demographic or psychographic profile that is hard to reach through traditional communications channels. Or maybe, like most marketers, you just need more than your existing programs are delivering.
The New Weapon for Reaching Precisely-Targeted
Audiences and Building Your Subscriber List
Future
Flow
Media
The Promise (and Challenge) of Email
Marketing
Targeted email advertising continues to grow in
popularity as one of the top investment priorities
for almost all marketers in companies of all sizes
and types:
• 98% of B2C and 85% of B2B marketers regularly use
email marketing (Forrester)
• 89% plan to increase or maintain their email
marketing budget in 2012 (MarketingSherpa 2012
Email Marketing Benchmark Report)
Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising
Most Lists Are Too Small
Most marketers report that their house email address list is simply too small to generate results on the scale their business requires, they cite growing their subscriber base as their #1 priority, but only a small fraction have a mature process for achieving this (MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report).
Best-in-class email campaigns generate response rates on the order of 1-10%. That means companies of even modest size may require a quality list of hundreds of thousands of subscribers or more – an extreme stretch goal for most. The popular tactics for building house lists are many: email newsletter subscriptions, forward to a friend, offline events/ trade shows, social sharing buttons in emails, registration for downloads, registration during purchase, online events/ webinars, paid search, co-registration programs, and more. So many tactics, so little time! A mix of these tactics should be an ongoing staple in your email marketing program but they all have one thing in common: they are painstakingly slow in building up your list from scratch. You need results now.
With overcrowded inboxes, subscribers have rising expectations of relevancy and a shrinking tolerance for
communications that miss the mark, in fact, an email address list’s lack of relevance is the #1 reason people unsubscribe. Most marketers recognize that the ability to segment their email address list and precisely target their audience is the #1 factor affecting email campaign performance, but they also say this is their top challenge. Only 28% of email marketers are successfully sending relevant communications to segmented audiences; the remainder are – to varying degrees – spamming their unsegmented list with generic messages (MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report). Depending on the collection method, most lists have little useful data beyond the email address itself. What you really need is a comprehensive view of your prospect’s demographic and psychographic profile – data like: age, gender, marital status, home ownership status, occupation, income, hobbies, purchase habits, interests, and more. Without a comprehensive view, you cannot precisely deliver content and relevant offers – precisely what subscribers are eager to receive.
Most Lists Are Stale
After all of the effort to build your house list, email data typically has a shelf life of only a few months before it becomes stale and inaccurate. Many house lists are made up of much older data. It’s not uncommon to discover 30% or more of the email addresses are irrelevant or undeliverable. With so few companies making a significant investment in ongoing list maintenance and cleansing, it’s no wonder deliverability and response rates are so often disappointing.
Many Lists Are Not Strictly Permission-Based
Many in-house contact databases, particularly in B2B settings, are not fully permission-based. They are often compiled over time from online directories, primary research, business cards from trade shows, and other sources that lack explicit email opt-in confirmation. Lack of care in using these lists exposes you to the risk of falling afoul of anti-SPAM laws. Not a great way for you to initiate customer relationships.
Most Lists Lack Enough Data
to Support Precise Targeting
Only 28% of email marketers are
successfully sending relevant
communications to segmented
audiences; the remainder
are – to varying degrees –
spamming their unsegmented
list with generic messages
(MarketingSherpa 2012 Email
Marketing Benchmark Report).
Let’s face it, email list rental suffers from a bad reputation. Too many disreputable list purveyors push cheap, large databases of stale email addresses that were gathered using
questionable practices – definitely a case of buyer beware! It’s easy
to see why many marketers have kept away. Fortunately, email list
rental has recently experienced a rebirth. Led by companies like Future Flow Media, Hyper-Targeted Email Advertisinghas emerged as a powerful, high-integrity marketing strategy to reach large, receptive audiences.
How email list rental works
Rental lists are available on a per-use basis. You supply the email creative and let us send the email on your behalf to protect subscriber privacy and ensure anti-SPAM compliance. Campaigns should drive recipients to your landing page where you can obtain prospect information and permission, thereby building your in-house list for additional follow-up and marketing. To achieve this, list rental campaigns typically offer a product promotion, sweepstakes, registration for a free seminar or white paper, or simply a request for more information.
In contrast with list rental, some list owners and brokers sell lists and provide customers with the actual database of names and addresses. Those lists always lack explicit subscriber permission and using them will likely expose you to anti-SPAM penalties.
Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising with Future Flow Media
Future Flow Media is at the forefront of the reinvention of email list rental marketing. Over the past 2 years, thousands of leading companies have discovered how Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising, with the assistance of a high-integrity service provider, enables precision delivery of relevant messages to large audiences of eager recipients.
Critical technical, business, and social media developments over the past couple of years have been combined and harnessed by Future Flow Media to enable Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising:
• The development of business relationships with a very large number of reputable permission databases and opt-in paths, such as major magazine publishers and popular websites, to provide access to a truly huge, aggregated database of high-integrity opt-in subscribers who want to receive relevant offers and content.
• The explosion of available personal information, thanks to social media and other public or permission-based sources, and the
development of technology that integrates with these sources to automatically expand subscriber profiles to include over 150 fields
of detailed demographic and psychographic information – data that enables sub-segmentation and precision targeting like never before.
• The development of technology to automatically validate and cleanse data, so that large subscriber databases and all of the
associated profile information is refreshed and updated every 30-90 days.
Broad Reach and Precision Targeting:
Revisiting Email List Rental
Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising with Future Flow Media
Permission Integrity
Scale Ability to Target
Recipient Relevance Accuracy and
Freshness
Deliverability Open and Click
Performance Service Level
100% Permission-based Guarantee. Subscribers are gathered by reputable companies, such as major publishing brands, using the strictest permission-based practices that are fully compliant with anti-SPAM laws. Many have been through a double opt-in process, where
the user didn’t just sign up on a whim, but confirmed that they wanted
to receive relevant messages from companies such as yours.
70 million consumer subscribers and 51 million business subscribers
aggregated from hundreds of reputable partners
Sophisticated, automated mining of public data such as credit rating agency data and social media are used to cross-reference and
expand each record to include 150 demographic and psychographic profile fields. This allows rifle-precision targeting by age, gender,
income, residence location, home-ownership status, occupation,
purchase tendencies, hobbies and interests, and much more. Never have marketers had the ability to select prospects with such specificity.
Massive size of aggregated database and ability to precisely target means recipients receive only relevant messages
Automated email cleansing that checks email validity and refreshes all
profile data, enabling massive databases to be refreshed and updated every 30-90 days
100% Delivery Guarantee. All email list rentals are based on “delivered” totals, not just sent emails
Superior performance, averaging 10-15% open rates and 1-2% click rates with best-in-class results reaching 20-25% open rates and 3-5%
click rates
Gold Service Level Agreement: rapid response, performance optimization advice, best practices advisory, full QA, and extensive reporting. Because the actual list is not seen, a reputable, trustworthy list rental partner is crucial to success.
Questionable email gathering and scraping practices.
Millions of subscribers from unknown, disreputable sources Load up the bazooka and blast away
List saturation and lack of relevance leads to high recipient fatigue and annoyance Data is generally older than 6 months with a high percentage of undeliverable or irrelevant addresses
You pay for all emails but less than 70% delivery may be achieved
Typically less than 6% open and 0.5%
click rates
Cumbersome paperwork, poor response, little expertise on best practices, spotty QA and performance reporting
Traditional Email List Rental
The following table explains how
Future Flow Media’s Hyper-Targeted
Email Advertising delivers:
• Absolute subscriber permission integrity • Vast audience reach
• Precise targeting thanks to 150 subscriber profile attributes
• Recipient relevance
• 100% subscriber data accuracy and 30-90 day freshness
• 100% email delivery
• 50% or greater boost in open and click performance
Applications
The usage of Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising is growing dramatically and thousands of companies from fast-growing start-ups to Fortune 500 leaders are successfully using it to quickly get their messages in front of huge and relevant audiences.
In addition to building in-house subscriber lists, the top applications of Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising campaigns include:
• lead generation
• test marketing the response of different audience segments
• test marketing the response to different products/services • testing different value propositions and messages
• brand awareness building
Like all tactics, email list rental is best used as part of an integrated marketing strategy. One popular strategy links list rental email responses to re-marketing advertising, a recently introduced Google Adwords feature. After a recipient responds to an email campaign, Google Adwords can target that individual with specific ads when they subsequently visit other websites.
Industry Usage
Consumer and business marketers in all categories have
successfully used Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising, particularly in situations where precise targeting and greater audience reach are required.
Business-to-Business marketers use Hyper-Targeted
Email Advertising to reach users and decision
makers with specific titles at specific companies or
in specific industries. Some examples:
• Computing and Software: marketing IT products and services to companies of all sizes
• Building, Engineering and Construction: marketing building materials, tools, other products and services to contractors, engineering firms, property managers • Manufacturing: marketing raw materials, products,
services, equipment
• Professional Services: marketing accounting, legal, consulting services
• Healthcare: marketing drugs, products, and services to practitioners, hospitals, and labs
• B2B Financial Services: marketing banking, insurance, investment services
• Marketing and Advertising
Leading Companies Have
Discovered Hyper-Targeted
Email Advertising
Top uses of Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising
by marketers in consumer industries include:
• Entertainment: promotion of TV shows, movies, sporting events, and concerts to audiences within
specific geographic regions with relevant ages,
genders, income levels, hobbies, entertainment
interests, and more.
• Retail: retail stores and retail product
manufacturers (furniture, clothing, jewelry, etc.) • Health and Beauty: marketing drugs, treatments,
drug stores, healthcare providers by specific
medical condition, age, gender, lifestyle factors
• Travel and Tourism: destination tourism boards, hotels chains, individual hotel properties, resorts, theme parks
• Financial Services: banking, investing, insurance
• Consumer Packaged Goods: marketing food and household products
• Telco: marketing telephone, mobile, Internet, cable/ satellite TV
• Real Estate: property managers and developers
• Automotive: the world’s largest car makers
promoting new products and engaging enthusiasts in contests and social media campaigns; local dealerships promoting special sales events to active buyers with an interest in their brand
• Restaurants
• Education: higher education, continuing education, private schools
• Political: promoting candidates and lobby coalitions
Selecting the Right Partner
Since marketers do not have direct access to the email rental list and do not manage the distribution, they must operate with blind faith in their list partner. Clearly a reputable, trustworthy, and responsive partner is critical to campaign success. When selecting a partner, you should look for someone who:
• has a proven methodology for managing and leading you through the entire campaign or media planning process
• spends the time to understand your requirements in order to compile the best fitting list possible • has the expertise to advise on best practices for creative design
• has solid processes for managing the setup and thoroughly testing all aspects of the campaign, including split testing and optimization
• tracks the results and provides detailed analytics
• is painless to deal with – you’re busy enough already and don’t need a provider you have to chase down and
watch over.
Email open and click rates vary due to many factors, including of course the appeal of the offer and the effectiveness of the email and landing page designs. In all cases though, Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising enhanced ability to precisely target specific profiles enables marketers to deliver more relevant messages and realize better campaign performance. Results also vary by industry, with top performers including real estate, tourism, and financial services.
The success that marketers are realizing with Hyper-Targeted Email
Advertising is also evident in the fact that the majority of companies who test it make email list rental a staple in their marketing plans: over 90% of companies that use list rental run more than 3 campaigns a year and the most successful companies run dozens or hundreds of email campaigns each year to promote different products or target different markets with specific messages.
Across thousands of
campaigns, average open
rates typically run
10-15%,
with top performers
routinely achieving
20-25%
while click rate averages
are
1-2%,
with top
performers achieving
3-5%.
The Results
Future Flow Media helps leading agencies and companies get the most relevant messages in front of audiences that are ready to buy. Our Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising is a new class of high-integrity, high-performance direct marketing that combines full-service consulting
expertise, a proven campaign optimization framework, and the world’s freshest, most targetable database of opt-in email addresses.
Find out more at www.futureflowmedia.com
