Tech Crunch 50: AdRocket: Will It Restore the Luster to Email Marketing?

Hey, I'm not saying email is on a gurney right now, but few would question the idea that email sponsorship -- not CRM but sponsorship -- has been getting deemphasized by many marketers of late. The key issue relates to lower sales results from such ads, as email marketing has always been disproportionately used by DR marketers. Those DR guys don't mess around. If it isn't working, it's cut from the plan on that day.

AdRocket is an email ad customizing service that analyzes the interests and habits of email recipients and serves them emails with text ads that met their interests.



Here's how they describe it:

AdRocket’s relevance algorithms process non-personally identifiable interest, demographic, or behavior data about your subscribers. We generate specific targeting meta data per subscriber then retrieve the most valuable performance-based text ads from our network partners.

AdRocket is a targeting and optimization network, not an ESP or email sender. We insert ads into your existing email communications as they are sent by your own MTA or ESP. Unlike with image ads, which are not visible in up to 50% of email clients, AdRocket’s targeted text ads are seen in every email opened.

After emails are sent AdRocket tracks all click behavior and can report on it back to you. We apply the data to improve our relevance on the next send.

As a text only solution this won't help companies trying to serve banners in emails, but that's OK. Most email banners are static gifs, and response rates tend to be rather low. Why NOT shift the focus to targeted text ads.

The other side of this is that DR marketers could use this platform to serve mroe effective links in THEIR OWN CRM campaigns. That is intriguing as well.

As a DR tactic, this is worth a look.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.