We start with official voter records obtained from states, counties and towns. These are matched against commercial databases, including credit reporting bureaus. All of the databases used practice the highest standards laid out by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), the Council for Responsible E-mail (CRE) and the Association for Interactive Media (AIM). These practices include obtaining permission from the individual to share their e-mail address, and checking the lists continually against the DMAâs E-mail Preference Service, a national list of individuals who do not wish to receive e-mail solicitations (similar to the Do Not Call List for phone solicitors).
How good is the data?
E-mail addresses obtained through us are matches against entire records in both the voter file and the commercial databases; that is, the records include name, mailing address, and e-mail address. Once the match is made, everyone on the list is sent an e-mail saying that campaigns and interest groups would like to contact them. The recipients can opt out by clicking a link or replying. This process is also used to clean out bounces.
Clients can select e-mail lists of congressional districts, state senate and house districts or other geographic query. Email lists can be sorted by party, gender, voter history, and other criteria.
We have matched the New York State file 5 times since 2004. 55% off the total e-mails were added this year and 15% in 2007.
Is this Spam?
No, spam is unsolicited commercial e-mail. Political e-mail is exempt from the CAN SPAM laws; however, we comply with the law as a matter of policy and use only permission-based lists. A client's e-mail message must have the name of the sender and reply email address included.
Will my e-mail message be blocked?
If a company is not white-listed, they will probably be spam blocked, especially if receiving a high number of bounces (over 20%). If you will notice a very small numbers of opens in a particular e-mail address (e.g. no AOL opens), then the message is being spam blocked. However, the servers we use to send our messages are "white listed" with the major ISPs (AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.) so our messages are not filtered or spam-blocked.
What Does the "Open Rate" Mean?
The "Open Rate" only captures a fraction of the number of people opening the e-mail. It captures people who open their e-mail while they are online and opening their e-mail in a web browser. So it will report people who open in a Yahoo or HotMail account, but does not record e-mails that have been downloaded by Outlook or G-Mail. To make things confusing it will report AOL subscribers who read their mail online but not those that use a flash session. An e-mail list with a large number of at work e-mail addresses will tend to have a lower open rate simply because more of those e-mails go to Outlook. A general rule of thumb is that the open rate accounts for a portion of the actual opens.
The Open Rate is important because it provides a relative measure of number of people opening an e-mail. An e-mail with a 10% open rate is being opened by more people than one to the same list with 5%. That allows you test messages very effectively.
When looking at an open rate, keep in mind that the percentage of the email recipients are different readers of each message being delivered. One of customers sent out a large number of messages to their list, and although none of the individual messages had better than a 10% open rate . at the end of the campaign 60% had opened messages. Givven the nature of open rates, that would indicate almost total saturation.
