I had lunch with a very interesting group of people the other day including the CEO of a software company.  Their product is a platform with applications in many verticals, but until recently their e-mail marketing has al lbeen based on lists of 200,000 plus people in the right sort of job function.  He was telling me that recently they started moving to targetting specific verticals with campaigns based on success stories for the product in that industry, using about 2,000 e-mail addresses for a vertical.  The objective is to get the user to open the message and repspond by clcking through to your web site for more information.

Using this technique they find they get about a 5% response rate.  Resending the message to the remainder at a different time of day gets you another 5%.  Resending with a slightly altered subject line gets you another 5%.  To those who still haven't responded, they send a message saying "OK this isn't for you but can you refer me to a colleague" - that gets them 5% response rate.  Then they send a final "sorry for bothering you, we won't contact you again" message, which apparently gets better than 5% response most of the time.  I would never have guessed that this level of persistance would deliver such great results - overall they get a "response" from about 25% of the people they contact!

The really clever part is that they use real-time tracking to monitor when the message is opened, and when people click through to the site - even to the level of which pages they are looking at.  If possible, they then call the prospect (using the telephone number from the same database as the e-mail address) while they are still on the website.  This apparently gives a huge boost to the number of calls that get connected (i.e. past the gatekeeper, not hung up within the first few seconds).

The company using this approach 10 years old and employs about 35 people - so it's not a giant in the industry.  I wonder what some of the companies I have worked with in the past could have achieved if they had really pushed marketing campaigns like this...