Looking at new ways to engage your audience
There’s been an interesting confluence of events the past couple days. First, on the SIPA Marketing Listserve yesterday, Jennifer Kern, research director for Modern Distribution Management, asked if there is “a method to quantify the dollar value of an email address.”
Bob Brady, president and publisher of Fortis Business Media, LLC, quickly responded: “I like to look at revenue over the first 90 and 120 days, and the first year,” he wrote. “Given the nature of e-marketing, it doesn’t make sense to look at just the first transaction.
“To the extent that we’ve been able to track it, we’ve found that the numbers can vary considerably depending on source. We’ve struggled with keeping track of original source as the names migrate from the email system to the fulfillment system. It seems like it ought to be easier than it has been, but, among other issues, list hygiene has plummeted as self-registration via the web becomes the data entry norm.”
And then today there’s an offer from The Washington Post’s daily coupon service called The Capitol Deal: a free pizza from Papa John’s just for registering with the service. So that’s a substantial cost to pay for each email. The value, of course, will remain to be seen. SIPA members haven’t gone as far as offering free pizza, at least to my knowledge—unless that “free white paper” I just quickly glanced at really said “free white pizza.” But the question of what should be given away perpetually hovers.
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David Baker, global vice president of product/solutions for Acxiom, wrote a very thoughtful piece about email value yesterday on emailINSIDER, a blog on the MediaPost site. He suggests that the real answer requires a whole new way of thinking, and he gives a six-step formula. The gist of Baker’s theory is that you must take all factors into consideration when figuring this out, from security scares to retention rates, from the influx of mobile to can you sell ads to this audience.
It’s not easy, he writes. “It takes a business mind (get out your MBA hats). It takes industry insight. And it takes a brave person to drive this through a company continually barraged with new channels and cool new toys. But if you take it on, it will evolve your thinking and ambition!”
Another aspect in this equation is what happens when a data breach occurs. Epsilon suffered a huge breach earlier this year—of email addresses and names—involving companies like Target, Chase and Marriott. Wrote Larry Dignan on ZDNet: “Symantec and McAfee say that details of the Epsilon breach remain sparse and that you should be on the lookout for an influx of spam. The bigger question is what’s an email address worth. Research has shown that the cost of data breaches continue to rise.” He cites the Ponemon Institute that found that the U.S. cost of a data breach was $214 per compromised record or $7.2 million per event. Wow.
Comments for this article brought up other good points. Even when you unsubscribe from a list, your information will most likely remain in that database. Only your access to that information was stopped. And for that reason, maybe companies don’t get the best email addresses from people. It certainly can become a quandary.
Back to the pizza. The Capitol Deal is getting tremendous publicity from this offer and even went so far as putting a wrap-around on today’s front section of the Post. So I guess they have done some kind of numbers run for this—$10 a pizza versus just how much they can expect per every 100 email addresses or so. Either that or they figure they’ve got nothing to lose. Their website right now says “25,269 claimed,” and the number seems to be going up about 1,000 every 10 minutes.
That’s a lot of email addresses. Stay tuned.
