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An Introduction to Auditing Your Email Audiences

Organisations such as the BPA have been providing auditing services for magazines and event audiences for many years. Providing advertisers with independent evidence that your audience are who you claim them to be is an effective point of differentiation and extremely helpful when selling your proposition to would-be advertisers. Associating your offering with a credible auditing organisation conveys images of trust, essential for first time advertisers unsure of your corporate reputation and credibility.

Email newsletters are fast becoming an integral part of many organisation's offering to advertisers. With low unit costs, infinite scalability and massive flexibility, sponsors are paying to appear on everything from regular "event updates" through to information-packed newsletters. Historically, the draw back with using email as a channel was that it was not auditable- a significant hurdle when attracting new sponsors.

Whilst the business case for auditing is clear, the rapid emergence of email newsletters mean that organisations faced some headaches- can you audit an email newsletter?

The answer is yes, and Adestra have been working with a number of publishers to implement auditing on their email newsletters.

Overview

Every time an email is broadcast, it is distributed through an email mail server. On sending, Adestra record who the email is to be sent to, and with which communication. Using our technology, each email address we broadcast to is individually tracked allowing us to match all replies.

From automated bounced addresses through to individual responses, Adestra's mail logs contain all information about the broadcast. This information is then analysed by your auditors who will verify your audience and provide you with a statement in the usual way. Getting started

• You must be using a reputable email service provider to broadcast your messages.
• The email service provider broadcasts your email messages ensuring all information about the sending is recorded for easy access by the auditor
• The email service provider presents the email broadcast 'logs' to the auditor
• The auditor analyses the information
• Auditor validates your audience statements

Adestra provide welcome tactical advice and input on our client's email marketing program. For more information about how we can work together with you to improve your email marketing, please visit www.adestra.co.uk/email_marketing and ask us about our email marketing services

Paul Crabtree is presently Marketing Director of Adestra (http://www.adestra.com), a UK based digital marketing agency that specialise in inbound and outbound email, fax and SMS broadcast solutions. Adestra's client portfolio includes many UK based publishers including Janes Information Group, Informa, Lexis Nexis, OUP, Blackwells and others.

Previous to this role, Paul was responsible for heading-up online marketing for Informa Telecoms' publishing division working on a portfolio of reports, newsletters, ad-led vehicles and the industry portal telecoms.com.

Paul will draw on his 5 years of focused experience in working in online marketing for publishers.