• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 24, 2005

E-mail list manager ReturnPath is rolling out a new service that will let marketers target e-mail promotions by sending them only to those consumers who have clicked-through on similar offers in the past.

The service, which ReturnPath's PostMasterDirect arm intends to offer for free at present, is premised on the idea that consumers’ past behavior predicts whether they’ll respond to e-mail offers.

In a test of the service last month, ReturnPath e-mailed a retail music offer to 6,500 Web users who indicated they were interested in receiving music-related e-mails--and to 6,500 other Web users, gleaned from a general customer list, who had previously clicked-through on e-mails containing music offers. Twenty-one percent of those who had previously clicked on music promotions clicked on the test offer, while only 9 percent of those from the group that said it wanted to receive music promotions clicked through, said Michael Mayor, president of ReturnPath’s list division. But, cautioned Mayor, such results aren’t always going to happen; another version of the same test showed click-through rates of 12 percent for both groups.

JupiterResearch analyst David Daniels said that targeting e-mail subscribers based on their behavior is not yet commonplace. A JupiterResearch report released in January, based on a November 2004 survey of 680 companies, showed that just 35 percent of e-mail marketers used click-through data when deciding which customers to send promotions to. “Across the board, the sophistication of the marketers is not what it should be,” Daniels said.