• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, September 7, 2004

In the last year, despite increased in-box vigilance, marketers have been hugely successful at obtaining valid email addresses for consumers who agree to receive online promotions. This is among the chief findings of a quarterly tracking report released Tuesday by email marketing giant Bigfoot Interactive.

"In general, deliverability rates are going up," says Al DiGuido, CEO of Bigfoot Interactive, who says his firm sends out "hundreds of millions" of e-mail messages each month on behalf of clients such as the weekly newsmagazine Newsweek, telecom MCI, and airline Alitalia.

Overall, 92% of emails sent by Bigfoot in the second quarter of 2004 were delivered--meaning they reached the in-boxes of consumers who chose to receive e-mail messages from specific marketers, according to DiGuido. The company declined to say how that percentage compared to last year.

The near-perfect delivery rate comes at a time when consumers and companies are increasingly developing firewalls and spam filters. But, ironically, some industry experts attribute the near-perfect delivery rate to opt-in consumers to the recent, widely publicized anti-spam legislation. The theory is that consumers are now more confident that they can provide valid email addresses to certain companies, without also landing on endless mailing lists.

"People are more likely to opt-in when they know they can opt-out," says Bill McCloskey, CEO of Emerging Interest, which has been developing a media tracking system for commercial email marketers.

DiGuido says that Bigfoot's financial services clients, such as JP Morgan Chase and Capital One, have been particularly successful at persuading customers to sign up for email notices. "Financial services organizations are on the leading front," of harvesting client information, he says. In the second quarter of this year, emails regarding balance transfers were delivered 61% more often in the second quarter of this year than 2003--an increase DiGuido attributes to better record-keeping on the part of banks. Bigfoot says it sent out several million balance transfer offers in the second quarter, but refused to give a precise number.

The figures about delivery refer only to emails that actually make it to consumers' accounts--not how many are opened. DiGuido says that balance transfer offers are "getting better open rates" than last year, but declined to provide any numbers.