Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of list company Worldata/WebConnect in Boca Raton, FL, is grounded in both the postal and e-mail list businesses. An industry leader in developing best practices for e-mail marketing, he is a member of several Direct Marketing Association groups, including the Internet Council. He is an advisory board member for the Association of Interactive Marketing and co-chairs the Council for Responsible E-mail.
DIRECT: How many e-mail lists are out there?
SCHWEDELSON: There are 3,000 to 4,000 permission-based managed e-mail lists available. (That compares with 30,000 to 40,000 lists available in the postal marketplace.) The number has grown about 200% in the last 12 months. From what we can forecast, that rate is not slowing at all. Gone are the days of these giant databases that were used purely because of size. That’s not the game anymore. Now marketers want to know how targeted can I get, what is the source of this name and, of course, how much does this list cost.
DIRECT: Why such growth?
SCHWEDELSON: Everyone is looking for additional revenue streams, and list rental is a very strong potential revenue stream. Also, because the idea behind permission-based e-mail has widened to include double opt-in as one option among many, including single opt-in and negative opt-in, list owners who may not have had a real commodity two years ago now do.
DIRECT: Are permission-based lists better?
SCHWEDELSON: Opt-in lists are still performing the best, and causing the least negative response.
DIRECT: What do e-mail lists cost?
SCHWEDELSON: If you are paying the rate card on an e-mail list for rent, you are doing something wrong. E-mail list rental is a highly negotiable area. Consumer e-mail lists range from $50/M to $200/M. The price on consumer CPMs are dropping on a daily basis.
DIRECT: Why?
SCHWEDELSON: There are so many lists available and the lists available are not high quality. Unfortunately, that’s opened up the cost-per-acquisition in the consumer space, which is not available in the business-to-business space. Consumer lists are much more negotiable than B-to-B lists. BTB is holding fairly strong where lists cost $175/M to $300/M.
I think one of the biggest developments that is going to take place has to do with list brokers not having been allowed to receive their commission on transmission fees [for sending e-mail broadcasts]. There’s a transmission and tracking fee ranging from $25 to $115 per thousand. Up until now, list brokers have not been allowed to receive commissions on these transmission fees. In the next six to 12 months, you’ll see that changing. It’s phenomenal the level of responsibility the broker has compared with the postal list environment. The list broker is not just the media planner and media buyer, but has become the fulfillment house, service bureau, lettershop
