• by Ray Schultz , February 14, 2019

Most comments about email lists now focus on customer files, it seems. But Mr. Marketing, a digital marketing specialist, is offering software for brands using purchased or rented lists.

Outreach Manager is designed to help brands scrub, validate and manage large outside lists and send marketing emails.

“We had a system we used in-house, and we thought we might have an opportunity for sale directly to advertisers,” says Matthew Rubin, president of Mr. Marketing.

The objective is to facilitate personalized and compliant email campaigns.

Rubin argues that there is a dearth of such products in the market — thus, many firms are not able to fully harness email for customer acquisition.

The company is now working on streamlining the process, especially for SMBs. 

 “We built a front end, and the goal to have it self-service,” Rubin says. 

The list validation function allows the user to scrub the list before a blast is sent out, enhancing deliverability and the sender score, Rubin claims.

Email lists can suffer from some of the same problems as postal lists, including bad inputting of names, email addresses and other information.

Outreach Manager will automatically place in unsubscribe the address of a person who has already replied or purchased so the advertiser doesn’t “bombard them with the same stupid product,” he says.

“If you’re marked a as spam, it’s a problem — the next time you send, you’re going to get blocked all day long,” he adds.

The company can also resolve name variations for the same email address if it is in more than one list, he adds. And it can also help firms manage in-house lists, Rubin says.

The time may be ripe for renting permission-based email lists—the Worldata Price Index reports declining costs per thousand in many categories. 

Mr. Marketing, which has 16 employees, is based in Charleston, South Carolina and also has offices in Bangladesh and the Philippines. It has 246 customers, Rubin says.

In addition to SEO, which was its first service, it helps with reputation management, mobile applications and web and mobile development projects.