Aggressive holiday promotions drop CPM of lists: Worldata

Worldata released its Fall 2007 List Price Index yesterday, which provides a year-over-year quarterly comparison of list prices. According to the index, the largest postal price decreases occurred in the databases/masterfiles and b-to-c magazines categories with decreases of $11/M (8.09%) and $5/M (4.76%) respectively.

“We saw that there was a very aggressive surge on the part of mailers to get into the holiday promotions this year,” said Ray Tesi, SVP of Worldata. “The aggressiveness of the mailers began to drive the CPM downward.”

Topping the charts in terms of price were permission-based e-mail b-to-b, newsletters and permission-based e-mail b-to-c categories. However, prices of both opt-in e-mail categories reflected a decrease in the actual price of both, while newsletters were unchanged from last year, at $178/M.

Permission-based e-mail b-to-c categories showed the largest percentage drop in straight average dollars, 3.59% to $161/M. B-to-b e-mail lists had a straight average price of $275/M, decreasing $2/M over last year.

“Like we saw with postal, the aggressive marketing is driving these costs downward,” Tesi noted. “The CPMs for e-mail lists have been somewhat high and we're seeing them come down to some normalcy [over the past few indexes]. E-mail is still a viable marketing solution.”

The decreased pricing reflects a decline in the number of responsive b-to-b and b-to-c e-mail lists available for rental, as well as the increased activity of cost-per-action marketing, according to Worldata.

“We are seeing a major push in cost-per-lead marketing,” Tesi said, noting that there was about a $3 difference between consumer and business leads. “In the winter, we will have more of a baseline.”

This is the first index in which Worldata has released baseline data for tracking cost-per-action and cost-per-lead.