E-marketers…90 days to go to Black Friday!

Today EuroDirect announced the launch of E~mail Exchange in a bid to counter the next major threat to the Direct Marketing Industry following the recent ER Opt-Out.

Likely to have a devastating effect on the available data for e~marketing far more so than the ER Opt-Out, the EU Electronic Communications Directive dictates that all commercial e~mails sent from the 1st November can only be targeted at consumers who have "opted in" to receive them. With the introduction of the new 'Double Opt-In' (DOI), the e~marketers' ability to acquire third party e~mail data for customer recruitment will be severely restricted.

Building on the major success of the Data Exchange and its known ability to provide supplementary data to compensate for missing names and address data resulting from the Electoral Roll legislative opt-out, EuroDirect have now developed E~mail Exchange in preparation for October 31st 2003. By adding e~mail data to the consumer universe already created, Data Exchange has now taken on a new dimension, creating an exciting proposition for businesses looking to safeguard the future of this channel to market.

E~mail Exchange provides a unique members only club for shared data, originally created from over 90 million independently contributed consumer records, now enhanced with a critical mass of compliant consumer e~mail addresses from trusted sources. E~mail Exchange as an extension of Data Exchange links e~mail addresses to postal addresses enabling over 150 attributes to be made available describing the lifestyle and purchasing characteristics of your e~consumers, providing conventional targeting and credit pre-screening in an e~commerce environment.

Our e~mail targeting now has the ability to include such intelligence variables as Date of Birth, Income, DM Responder, Directorships, Shareholdings, Credit-card Holder, Presence of Children, CAMEO Classifications and credit pre-screening services to provide an example of how e~mail communications can now be targeted with increased accuracy.

Secondly, by linking e~mail addresses with postal addresses, E~mail Exchange can facilitate multi-channel marketing, providing an integrated data source from which e~mail, Direct Mail, Telemarketing and Door-to-Door Canvass channels can support each other.

EuroDirect are providing two levels of membership to the E~mail Exchange:

Contributing Membership - For companies that contribute a minimum of 100,000 name, e~mail address and postal address records, in exchange for a variety of benefits including access to the E~mail Exchange universe for prospecting along with access to a wide range of variables for improved targeting and a range of e~marketing services such as the launching of e~mail communications programmes, website compliance, assistance with DOI programmes and data quality audits, profiling, data selection and response analysis.

Funding Membership - For those companies who currently cannot contribute data to E~mail Exchange, the Funding option provides the ideal means by which members can receive all of these benefits for a minimum financial commitment.

EuroDirect, as a subsidiary of Skipton Building Society are already highly regulated by the FSA and are recognised as a highly trusted and respected player in the marketplace. With numerous blue chip companies already contributing data, EuroDirect are progressing a dialog with additional clients who have a major presence in the e~marketplace, with a view to sharing their e~mail data within the E~mail Exchange consortium.

Heading up the E~mail Exchange is Industry guru Peter Edgar, who has been appointed to champion these developments. With over 25 years of experience in the Direct Marketing, e~Marketing and Credit Industries, Peter has a distinguished career history. Amongst his professional achievements, Peter has headed up Equifax UK as Managing Director of Commercial Information. More recently he was the Managing Director of an E~mail and Internet Solutions provider, from which he has brought a wealth of e~marketing and e~commerce expertise to EuroDirect.

Peter Edgar comments: " The inevitable changes surrounding the 'Double Opt-In' mean companies could lose access to the majority of their e~commerce prospects, many of whom will be active consumers. We have introduced E~mail Exchange to enable our Members to gain sustained access to the consumer mass e~market as a major part of their e~mail data contingency plan."

John Dobson, Managing Director, EuroDirect, adds: "In today's economic climate it is important that a company's marketing efforts to generate new business are not frustrated by more regulation. It is equally important that consumers do not have their marketing communications automatically censored. We should support systems that respect their freedom of choice and most of all their privacy on chosen subjects".