Acxiom Corp. subsidiary Direct Media Inc. (DMI) is expected to unveil its e-mail marketing service under a new name at the Direct Marketing Association's Net.Marketing conference and exhibition in Miami this week.
Launched in July as Acxiom Preferred Mail, the new name will be Acxiom/Direct Media E-Mail Campaign Management (ECM).
Regina Brady, head of interactive at DMI, Greenwich, CT, said the company also will formally unveil its e-mail list of 200,000 names gathered through DMI's catalog-request service, Catalog Link, at www.cataloglink.com. The Catalog Link list “is significant because it's consumer-oriented where so many of the lists out there are hi-tech,” she said.
Brady said e-mail lists under management at ECM will include 275,000 subscribers to IDG Inc.'s TipWorld series newsletters at www.tipworld.com, 50,000 subscribers to Software Magazine and 18,000 subscribers to Client Server Computing magazine from Sentry Publishing Cambridge, MA, and a 60,000-name list called the Software Developers Opt-In E-Mail List whose owner asked DMI not to disclose his name.
According to Brady, ECM also will offer more e-mail services than DMI originally had planned when it launched Preferred Mail in July.
“Rather than focusing on real-time delivery and tracking, we now offer a full range of capabilities and services,” she said.
Among the new services are technical and creative development of collateral and materials, Brady said, adding that ECM is offering e-list brokerage, lead-management and consultation services.
“We've built a series of case histories. For instance, if you're a business-to-business mailer, we know that mailing earlier in the week is better,” she said, adding that by Thursday, response to a BTB e-mailing can drop by as much as half.
Brady said ECM is mailing nine times the volume it did in October. She said its clients number “in the high teens” and include software publisher Symantec Corp., Cupertino, CA; Eddie Bauer, Redmond, WA; and Omaha Steaks, Omaha, NE.
Stephanie Healy, interactive sales manager at Omaha Steaks, said ECM has so far managed one e-mail campaign for Omaha Steaks. The campaign targeted a mix of 10,000 addresses from Omaha Steaks' e-mail house file and 20,000 addresses from Catalog Link.
Five percent of the campaign's recipients clicked through links embedded in the e-mail letter to the Omaha Steaks site at www.omahasteaks.com to get more information on a free cutlery offer, Healy said, adding that there were no negative responses that typically follow an e-mail drop.
“We're pretty happy with it. We saw a spike in sales, and I think it got more people comfortable with our site,” said Healy, who is planning a Father's Day campaign with DMI.
John Samuel, marketing manager of interactive media at Eddie Bauer, said DMI has delivered 10 campaigns to a house file of Eddie Bauer's customers' e-mail addresses since September. Samuel declined to say how many of its customers' e-mail addresses Eddie Bauer has.
Samuel said typical click-through rates have been from 2 percent to 6 percent.
“More importantly, we see a surge in business during the weeks that we mail,” said Samuel, adding that Eddie Bauer plans to increase e-mail marketing to customers this year and expand the program to include customer acquisition.
