Ziff Davis taps Bamboo Cricket for e-mail response

Ziff Davis Media is gearing up to run a back-to-school e-mail campaign to promote PCMag.com.

The push, which will go out to a yet-to-be decided number of the publisher's database's several million names, will include a combination of promotional e-mails and newsletters tied to PCMag.com. The publisher has joined forces with online customer service firm Bamboo Cricket to help clean its lists for the push.

“We've integrated Bamboo Cricket on the back end so that all of these e-mail campaigns that go out, any responses back to the campaign go through their system,” said Steve Sutton, general manager of interactive at Ziff Davis Media.

Ziff Davis sends about 50 million e-mails each month from newsletters to promotions. With so much e-mailing, Sutton said that Ziff Davis is working with Bamboo Cricket “to keep our customers happy and to keep us CAN-SPAM compliant.”

Bamboo Cricket's Email Inbound Management sorts and filters consumer e-mails that respond to marketing campaigns to handle customer service, unsubscribe requests, change of address and CAN-SPAM compliance.

“Customer names are very expensive because of [the costs of] buying and maintaining lists,” said Barbara Westhorpe, president of Bamboo Cricket. “Marketers can only get so much revenue from a name, so if you are losing names from your database unknowingly, it is a net revenue loss.”

Unsubscribe and change of address requests are processed by Bamboo Cricket support staff directly.

“[Bamboo Cricket] handles situations when there is a response directly to the e-mail that doesn't come through our CRM department,” Sutton added.