The From Line

It has long been accepted as an industry standard that list purchasing is a big no-no. However, as we know, there is always an exception to the rule. I came across a recent ClickZ study that looked into one company’s journey with a purchased list of email addresses. The results were unexpected, to say the least. The company sent the same message at the same time to two separate lists, one organic and one purchased. For all comparisons but one, the opt-in subscribers yielded better results. But when it came to the click-to-open rate, the data from 2010 to 2011 was quite surprising. There was only a 6% gap between opt-in and opt-out click-to-open rates in 2011. So what does this mean? Well, it looks like consumer habits are changing to reflect the shift in marketing to the email inbox. It’s possible that customers are becoming more trusting of senders, even if they don’t recognize them. I’d venture to guess that consumers have more confidence in the purity of messages that appear in their inbox, mostly due to recent SPAM laws and email filtering/importance ranking. Yes, these are intriguing results, but remember, this was only one study of one campaign sent by one company.