Email continues to be a dominating force in the online marketing industry. While technology has infused itself into virtually every other aspect of online marketing, email seems to be the one that has barely moved in two decades. Recent advances in affordable marketing automation are exciting, but acquisition, permission and SPAM still lead the challenges of the industry.
Building great content and a relevant email is the easy part… the most difficult part is still acquisition. Building a great marketing list can be incredibly difficult. With high volumes of SPAM, consumers rightfully guard their email addresses and are hesitant in sharing it. Enticing someone to overcome this can be quite a challenge, so what’s a marketer to do?
In December, Red Herring announced ividence among their Global 100 innovation award winners. ividence is the first standalone acquisition email ad exchange, uses behavioral targeting technology to match email offers to the best records, so that list owners can “send less and earn more,” monetizing their lists with integrity while advertisers see a positive ROI.
Here’s an example email… the advertiser is Ford and the list manager is Connect with Life, a site that connects consumers with Real Estate, Home Maintenance and Auto dealers.
This isn’t simply a third-party advertisement. The content is carefully designed and closely matched to the audience to ensure the list manager isn’t at risk of losing the subscriber. Because the content is closely matched to the audience and vice versa, ividence is achieving very high click-through rates through a patent-pending scoring methodology, called @rank. The @rank is used to provide the highest quality record for the price a marketer is willing to pay.
The multivariate scoring incorporates:
- @brand affinity – This score measures how close a profile is to an industry or a brand. This index is used for targeting and pricing list segments and profiles.
- @campaign quality – This score is based on the performance of acquisition campaigns run on the ividence network. You can benchmark your campaigns against your history and the average market performance.
- @potential – This ratio reflects the number of emails that can be delivered to the right target over a period of time. It is correlated to the mechanism of permission marketing and marketing pressure.
Advertisers and list managers are both given insight into the statistics – a funnel diagram (the above example doesn’t show the optional conversion tracking) and a dashboard with all the key performance indicators.
Most importantly, subscriber data is kept private and not attainable from the publisher. ividence works hard to ensure that publishers are provided with great content that their audience will appreciate… and advertisers are exposed to relevant subscribers who will want react to the offer. ividence also works to achieve superior email deliverability.
