Pivotal Veracity announced yesterday the availability of tools for direct marketers to monitor and improve the deliverability rates for their e-mail campaigns.
The 9-month-old Sarasota, FL, firm said its technology improves DMers' deliverability rates from the industry average of about 70 percent to near 100 percent. Pivotal Veracity's tools vet e-mail campaigns before they are sent against spam filters and blacklists; tracks delivery into in-boxes, spam folders and bulk folders; and offers tips on solving delivery problems.
Pivotal Veracity's deliverability technology can be used with any e-mail delivery platform. The services' monthly subscription runs from $1,000 to $5,000, depending on e-mail volume.
Deliverability is the No. 1 concern for e-mail marketers, according to a study by Jupiter Research. The researcher estimates false positives cost U.S. businesses $230 million in 2003 and expects that to reach $419 million in 2008. The cost increase will come from increased e-mail volume, Jupiter said, with block rates actually declining from 17 percent to 10 percent.
Pivotal Veracity takes on Return Path, the incumbent deliverability service used by many top e-mail service providers.
Dierdre Baird, Pivotal Veracity's CEO, said her company's technology suite is superior to Return Path through its comprehensiveness. For example, its eContent Scorer analyzes how campaigns would fare with 10 spam-filtering methods versus just SpamAssassin for Return Path, she said.
“There's no way to take this data and slice it and dice it to solve real problems,” she said.
For now, Pivotal Veracity offers clients just tracking and reports, not consulting services like Return Path's deliverability audit.
“That service component is going to be important to us as we work with more marketers who do e-mail in-house,” Baird said.
Pivotal Veracity provides its monitoring and reporting services directly to companies like retailer Harbor Freight Tools and through direct marketing partners that include Exact Target, The Hauser Group and Eclipse Direct Marketing.
Baird said she expected Pivotal Veracity to become a tool for marketers to benchmark the performance of their e-mail service providers, who, she said, do not provide enough granular information about deliverability problems.
“It is, in a sense, an audit,” she said.
Pivotal Veracity also offers a more advanced service with additional analytics capabilities for marketers to identify deliverability trends, such as whether the time of day a campaign is sent affects delivery rates to a particular ISP.
