Bigfoot Offers More Info on Reception E-Mails Get

Information such as how many users hit the “report spam” button — and how marketers’ campaigns measure up against others in their industry — will soon be available to clients of email marketing services provider Bigfoot Interactive as part of its email platform.

Bigfoot will provide similar information from a number of ISPs to its clients, with AOL the first one currently on board. The ISP feedback measurement tool, integrated into Bigfoot’s Direct Response E-mail Application Manager (DREAM), will be released in April.

The tool will be an extra module clients can turn on and off and comes at an additional fee which the company has not yet set.

“The new tool does three things,” said Michael Della Penna, chief marketing officer of Bigfoot. “It incorporates information AOL has been sending us free for years — how many users hit the ‘report spam’ button — into the platform. It then explains how well this compares to the number of complaints for the industry in general, based on information in Bigfoot’s database. Finally, it rates the number as good, acceptable or bad, based on Bigfoot data, and suggests ways to improve performance.”

Clients will also be able to download the information, Della Penna said.

“We’ve been doing this for about two and a half years,” said Nicholas Graham, AOL spokesman. “We provide this kind of feedback to all legitimate online parties including other ISPs such as Microsoft, Yahoo and EarthLink, as well as ASPs, bulk mailers, Web hosting companies and other online stakeholders.”

The DREAM platform already has a range of standard offerings for Bigfoot clients such as open rates, clickthrough rates and conversion rates.

“Layered on top of the information from the ISP is a benchmark analysis. If you’re a leading consumer package goods company, say, you’ll get statistics showing how your results compare with other clients,” Della Penna said.

If complaints run low, say as few as 1,000 complaints per million, a client would likely qualify to participate in an enhanced whitelist program, and Bigfoot could guide the client in this direction. If complaints ran high, say 3,000 complaints per million, Bigfoot would counsel the client on additional best practices such as changing the message or switching to double opt-in, Della Penna said.