In the e-mail age, most people don't just say the word "spam" -- they spit it out like it's a bug caught in their throat.
There are few words dirtier than the popular description for the mountain of unsolicited, unwanted e-mail that hawks everything from prescription pills to pornography. Eric Melka of Got Corp. is as allergic to the word as the next guy, which at first blush might seem strange for the chief executive officer of a company specializing in e-mail-based advertising.
Montreal-based Got sends out mass e-mails on behalf of businesses -- with one very important difference. Anyone on its list has specifically asked in advance for the ads.
It's what's known as "opt-in" advertising, and unlike the scattershot excesses of spam, it is legitimate.
Eric Melka is an e-mail advertising specialist that abhors spam, really. (John Morstad/The Globe and Mail)
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Got's Campaigner software has helped small companies as well as giants such as eBay Inc., Home Depot Inc. and others sell products and keep track of their customers. CHUM Ltd. uses it to advertise sales and marketing initiatives (and send out Christmas cards), Cricket Communications Inc. to market its cellphone products, and American Apparel Inc. to promote its clothing line.
Yahoo Inc.'s small business list-building software is, in fact, a repackaged version of Got's Campaigner. Canadian Wildlife Fund uses Campaigner to send out its monthly newsletters.
"The e-mail medium can carry anything," Mr. Melka says. "Sure, there are abuses, but just because there are things out there that are downright nasty or mean, it doesn't mean the medium is wrong or bad."
For Got, the difference between "opt-in" e-mail campaigns and spam is crucial. The company is winning customers precisely because it bills itself as the anti-spam solution to e-mail-based advertising.
Opt-in e-mail campaigns have a 10- to 20-per-cent response rate, double that of a spam e-mail campaign, Mr. Melka says.
The key in Got's case, he explains, is that all respondents on his company's list have "double opted in" -- that is, they have asked twice to receive whatever correspondence Got sends out on a customer's behalf.
For this, it charges companies a fee ranging from $25 a month for 2,500 e-mails, to $8,000 a month for four million e-mails. Got says it has more than 8,500 clients worldwide and sends more than 10 million e-mails a week.
Montreal-based La Vie en Rose used Campaigner to help sell its selection of bras, panties and, believe it or not, a men's thong the company introduced last year. It was Stephan Lafond, a graphic designer and a 10-year veteran of the lingerie company, who discovered Got's product a little over a year ago. The company has since built up a list of roughly 60,000 "opt-in" subscribers who shop either on-line or in one of La Vie En Rose's 95 stores.
Mr. Lafond says the company usually has two mailing campaigns every month detailing coming sales and promotions. "Every time we use it we see a boost in sales, usually by about 30 per cent. When we used Campaigner to advertise the megathong [the thong for men], "our [on-line] orders doubled."
Businesses using Got's Campaigner provide a list of e-mail addresses to which they want to send correspondence, or they use the Campaigner software to build their own lists from scratch. Of course, anyone with a list, an e-mail program and basic computer knowledge can launch an e-mail campaign, but it's the management of the campaign -- the fine line between solicited correspondence and unsolicited spam -- where Got's expertise comes in.
When Got works with a new client, the company checks that customer's e-mail list against its own list of bogus addresses, known complainants and e-mail addresses that have been "screen-scraped" from Web pages. Got then does a controlled mail-out to the e-mail addresses on the customer's list, and monitors the number of positive and negative responses, the number of bounce-backs, and the percentage of people who actually read the e-mail. This information is then relayed to the client.
Got handles the mail-out, including the bounce-backs, the complaints and the non-responses. For their customers, this saves time and bandwidth. Given the number of shady Internet-based companies out there, however, it's also part of Got's business plan that involves being scrupulous about who it accepts as clients.
"I have to make sure you are legit," he says. "You might not know what the spam rules are," Mr. Melka says.
"We get people who lie all the time," Got's Tracey Ades adds, so "we have to say no." Some prospective clients have huge address lists or requests to send messages many times to the same people, indicating that their business practices may be questionable.
"The bottom line is, did the person request this?" she adds. "We don't want spam complaints because that affects our business. There are only a handful of Internet service providers in the world, so we have to have good relations with them."
Special to The Globe and Mail
