BRISTOL, PA. Company personalizes bulk e-mailing campaigns

With personalized bulk e-mail, TargetX has seen revenue skyrocket.
BRISTOL, Pa. (AP) -- Last year, Greater Philadelphia Food Bank thanked its donors and volunteers via e-mail, offering them complimentary Philadelphia Flyers tickets.
The messages were personalized, even though it was part of a mass e-mail campaign, so that each person thought he or she was the only one receiving the offer.
That personal touch is a marketing tool fashioned by Bristol-based TargetX. It propelled the company to No. 9 on the list of the top fastest growing companies in the Philadelphia area, as named this year by the Wharton Small Business Development Center. The company's revenue has grown by 684 percent in the past three years.
"Even those institutions and companies that are legitimate marketers don't want to do spam. It's still important for them that they send out what appears to be targeted messages based on the information that they have for people," said Ray Ulmer, vice president of communications for TargetX.
eXpress service
TargetX's main product is a Web-based service called eXpress, which lets users target e-mail campaigns to a specified demographic, such as age, educational major, geographic location or interests. The service also allows users to personalize the mass e-mails with features such as greeting the recipient by name.
"That is one of the magical things about a system like this ... you can send it to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people and still maintain that personal feeling that you want and people seem to enjoy," said Ulmer.
Users decide the clients and personal information that will be targeted by the databases, said Ulmer.
TargetX, which was founded in 1998, originally rolled eXpress out to colleges and universities, which quickly found uses for it in recruiting prospective students, existing students, and alumni to events and receptions. Its use has grown to include nonprofit organizations and educational publishers, said Ulmer. Among the company's 120 clients: Columbia University, the American Cancer Society, Ohio State University, the Greater Philadelphia Food Bank and Oxford University Press.
"This provides them the opportunity to have an ongoing, online dialogue with people. It's not just blasting out an e-mail and going on with something else -- it's sending them information that is really relevant and important to them," said Ulmer.
New features
The company's newest product, eXpress 6.0, provides users with an instant spam check, which helps them determine how likely their e-mail is to get kicked back by spam filters because of its wording. Another new separate service is e-mail analysis, which provides a 75-point critique of an intended e-mail from everything from the subject line -- whether it will draw attention -- to technical considerations, such as whether the images and graphics are taking too long to download, said Ulmer.
"E-mail can be such a powerful communication tool and despite the growth of spam, organizations know if they have people who are interested in them and they are sending the right kinds of messages they will continue to read them," said Ulmer.