The irritation with email marketing is not just from consumers whose inboxes are flooded with various deals, offers and requests, but also advertisers driven half-mad by the frustrating manual process of assembling quality email lists.

Scott would know, having previously served as vice president of marketing at PeopleSoft and Intermec Technology. “I’ve been on the buy side… and I’ve generated millions of leads. I know all too well you have go through a lot of bad email lists to find a good one. It’s not surprising to go through a million names and find 20% of the emails are bad. Email marketing is still one of the most cost-effective marketing tools — we hate the process but we love the results.”

The goal of Marketfish is to automate this mind-numbing and time-consuming process by offering real-time data hygiene for email lists. The company has established a “Clean Data Dream Team” through partnering with LeadSpend to integrate its email validation technology and impressionwise for its online messaging analytics.

Before marketers launch their targeted email campaigns, targeted via Marketfish’s segmentation system, the company gives the lists a good real-time scrubbing using more than 60 filters (Scott says the average email marketer uses three to five) ensuring a larger proportion of advertisers’ target audiences receive the intended emails. Now Marketfish is witnessing 95%-99% delivery rates through using LeadSpend’s tech to remove invalid emails and impressionwise’s to kick out non-permissioned addresses and spam traps.

Not only do Marketfish’s data hygiene tools cull lists of bad emails, they also remove poor-performing ones. In addition, Marketfish offers split A/B testing to assist marketers in their targeting efforts.

Currently Marketfish offers 350 clients access to more than 200 million email records posted by 40 marketing list owners for rental — that’s right, these lists aren’t for sale (and the owners have no interest in selling, Scott points out). In turn, marketers don’t have to buy entire lists but instead can rent targeted segments based on 250 demographic categories organized through Marketfish’s 98 filters.

“We’re just a tech company,” Scott says. “We establish communication between advertisers and list-owners.”

When the company was founded in 2008 and then launched in January 2010, Scott thought enterprise companies would be most interested in the list-rental technology. Indeed, enterprise operations make up two-thirds of Marketfish’s clients, but the tool has really caught fire with online marketing agency, with half of Marketfish’s revenue coming from that segment. In addition, half of Marketfish’s clients come back for repeat business. As a result, Scott is moving across country to open a New York office and court even more agency business.

Sure to help in that quest is a $4.5 million Series A round led by Rustic Canyon Partners and Javelin Venture Partners this May, which built on $3 million previously garnered from angel investors.

Marketfish proudly boasts that its practices are in line with the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN SPAM rules, but the company has taken extra measures to highlight data privacy, including appointing David Fowler chief privacy officer. In addition, Scott says Marketfish will be entering new privacy territory through a host of upcoming privacy partnerships.

ADOTAS: Tell us a little about your business, what EdgeTech does and how you measure success with your marketing efforts? Targets? Specific goal outcomes?

MURRAY: EdgeTech moisture is a small manufacturer of humidity and dew point chill mirror hygrometers; we are one of three divisions owned by EdgeOne. Founded and design by NASA and MIT in 1967, chill mirror hygrometers have become known as the NIST transfer standard for all other humidity products. EdgeTech moisture, formerly EG&G, has been making chill mirror hygrometers for over 40 years and offers a wide variety of humidity solutions for most humidity applications.

Our marketing success is measured by profits and sales. We define target markets and design products through customer feedback for those markets and our goal is enter these new markets and gain market share.

Why is GlobalSpec a fit for those marketing objectives and targets?

We are a small manufacturing business operating in a very challenging time where budgets are tight and marketing dollars must produce results. Although unofficial, we consider Global Spec, EdgeTech’ s marketing team and has a proven track record of getting us market exposure and qualified sales leads resulting an increase in sales.

What objectives and goals did you specifically hope to apply to GlobalSpec?

Our objectives and goals in using Global spec is to get our product and name exposure, resulting an increase sales, an increase in market share and more web-site traffic.

How did you and GlobalSpec go about planning for the specifics of your marketing objectives and campaign?

EdgeTech and Global Spec teamed together putting together a 12-month news letter program aiming at target markets. Within this plan, we are able to get most of our product lines exposure to these markets.

Tell us about the experience and outcome of that initiative?

The results of the news letter program has been tremendous, we are receiving qualified sales leads, we getting product line exposure, we are getting names of the decision-makers and most important of all we are getting sales results.

Do you currently or have plans to do more?

We are always reviewing and tweaking our marketing plan as the year progresses and do plan to explore some of the new programs that GlobalSpec offers, one being the new virtual trade show.

The online advertiser — which owns Commission Junction, Smarter.com, CouponMountain.com and PriceRunner — reported $130.2 million in fourth-quarter revenue, missing Wall Street analyst estimates of 133.1 million.

The lead-gen business made up 48% of ValueClick’s revenue, but it’s been on the decline due to weak macroeconomic conditions and a Federal Trade Commission investigation that resulted in an $2.9 million settlement over allegations that it used deceptive marketing practices in violation of the CAN-SPAM and FTC Act. Talk of selling the underperforming lead-gen side have been brewing since the summer.

ValueClick announced that it plans to focus instead on its online marketing services and tech businesses, growing them via organic initiatives and acquisitions.

While it’s easy to understand that marketing based on behaviors provides substantial benefit, relatively few companies are currently utilizing this technology. This is possibly due to some misconceptions that have generated confusion about visitor tracking and marketing automation.

Somehow, somewhere, people got the idea that visitor tracking technology can identify the email addresses, names or phone numbers of otherwise anonymous website visitors.

While this myth is rampant in the minds of some consumers, I am surprised to find it existent among marketing professionals. No legitimate software or service in existence can proactively identify this type of information without some interaction from the website visitor. Visitor tracking software does not equal spyware.

I like to think of visitor tracking as a form of listening, of paying attention to what a given prospect is “telling” you. Did the prospect click through your email and visit your website? That tells you something, and most ESP’s provide that information. Bring visitor tracking into the picture, however, and the whole game changes.

Visitor tracking is telling you:

• What happened after that person clicked through?
• Did they look at one page and “bounce” off your website?
• Or did they stick around?
• What products did they spend time on? How much time? Did they repeat visit your site within the next week?

If you were talking to those prospects, you would listen intently to discover their interests and then tailor your conversation based on what you heard. Visitor tracking allows you to automate this process no matter how many prospects you have on your hands. Your team can start launching marketing campaigns based on what you “hear” to tap the powerful advantages of visitor tracking software.

Cooling Tower Depot (CTD), a Colorado-based company that builds, repairs, and supplies parts for industrial cooling towers, implemented basic website visitor tracking several years ago, but they recently upped the ante by implementing a marketing automation system. The impact on lead generation and sales was instant.

CTD is closing business with approximately 10 additional customers per quarter resulting in a 15% increase in top-line revenues. The Colorado company increased revenue because they “listened” to the actions of potential customers.

Visitor tracking software can proactively identify the names of the companies that visit a website whether they fill out a web form or not. It also reveals their location, which pages were viewed, the visit duration and the search phrase used to find the site (if any).

CTD used this information to contact companies that had searched “high value” phrases or spent a good deal of time on the site. They converted many prospects that would otherwise have gone by the wayside.

Visitor tracking and marketing automation offer a competitive advantage as shown by the short CTD case study. Visitor tracking technology is not spyware.

We’re also not dealing with magic. The technology can only deliver information and act on instruction. No substitute exists for a competent human that knows her market and understands customer motivations.

The bottom line: B2B sales and marketing teams can leverage basic visitor tracking tools right out of the box with almost no additional skills, knowledge or change in existing business processes. Targeting prospects with individually tailored messaging requires additional brainpower but the ROI on the table will make the effort worth your while.

Many lead buyers believe that the only answer is “yes, please,” but the reality of the marketplace is that there is not a one size fits all approach that is effective in meeting the needs of all lead buyers. A lead buyer generally wants leads that meet their criteria in quantities that they can process effectively. The issue of course is that it is rare that multiple lead buyers have criteria that match each other’s exactly and different lead buyers are able to process varying quantities of leads effectively.

To figure out the solution it is necessary to evaluate the individual lead buyer’s value chain proposition and its place within the value system of that particular market segment (i.e., finance, travel, health and beauty and so forth). If you are not familiar with the concept of the value chain, here is the quick breakdown.

Michael Porter wrote a book in 1985 called “Competitive Advantage.” In that book, he introduced the concept of a value chain whereby products (leads) pass through multiple activities within an organization and each activity adds value to the product until the final end product (sale) is completed. Each value-added activity has costs and the value added less the cost is the margin or profit that the company makes from their activities.

The concept can be extrapolated into a system whereby multiple organizations have interconnected value chains and each one adds value to the product until the final end product (sale) is complete. The activities that each lead buyer participates in are broken into two categories: primary activities and support activities.

Primary activities are those related to producing the leads and support activities are those related to running the business. Primary activities include inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales and service. Support activities include procurement, human resources, technology development, and infrastructure (finance, accounting and so forth).

The first step in conducting this analysis is to break down each of the key activities of the lead buyer according to the activities in the value chain framework. For our purposes and simplicity, let’s assume that all companies in our value system are run similarly on the support side and evaluate them strictly on primary activities.

Inbound logistics encompass the activities related to lead acquisition and storage within the company. You may ask these questions: How efficiently is a lead is processed? Do leads queue up and get processed on a weekly basis or are they processed in real time? Operations covers any enhancements made to the lead while it is with the company.

For this activity ask if the lead buyer has systems in place to evaluate lead quality and duplication in real time. Does the lead buyer have systems that clean the data from the format that they acquired it to the necessary format? If so, can any of that information be shared to identify potential quality issues sooner?

Outbound logistics are those activities related to lead delivery. This is not as relevant when you are working directly with the end lead buyer. If you are working with a broker, question how quickly the lead will get into the end buyers hands. Question how your leads will be aggregated with other lead providers and how will that information be relayed to the end buyer. Delays in outbound logistics and blending from multiple sources will change the perceived quality of the leads. Marketing and sales are the activities related to either closing leads or marketing the company itself.

When you are working with a lead broker, most of this is in corporate marketing, but when you are working with the end lead buyer the value is in them closing the leads to sales and this activity is crucial. How competent is the sales force of the lead buyer? Are alternate distribution channels set up should the lead ultimately not meet the initial criteria?

Determine if the lead buyer is familiar with their target cost per sale metrics and derive, based on your lead price, the target conversion ratio for your leads. Determine how transparent your lead buyer can be about their sales and if you can monitor those costs per sale closely.

Once you have answered these questions, you need to evaluate the potential for adding value into the existing system. This can be through cost advantage or differentiation, but your value has to match needs of the end lead buyer and the constraints of the system.

For example, if you can generate leads at a lower cost than your competitors, but a broker or an agency turns around and sells your leads to the end buyer at full price, then that value is stripped and the proposition doesn’t fit into the system. If you provide leads at a lower cost to an end buyer who can not add value on the inbound logistics and operations side, each lead may end up being more expensive to them in the long run as they must ramp up those other activities to effectively process your leads.

On the other hand, if you provide those same leads to a lead buyer that is proficient in the inbound logistics, operations, and sales activities, they ultimately will achieve a lower cost per sale and you have added value in the system. If you can differentiate the leads by adding value on the operations or sales side with added data verification and validation for a lead buyer that is not set up to do so then you may have added value to the system.

If, however, you provide these same add-on services to a lead buyer that is already proficient at them, then you will introduce overhead into their value chain as you reduce the value of their like activities. Both lead providers and lead buyers need to be aware of the dynamics of these value systems if they are going to optimize the lead acquisition system.

In summary, the solution to the quality versus quantity debate lies in fit. A lead provider’s product must fit into the end lead buyer’s acquisition process and add value to their system. If the fit is not right, the quality and the quantity of the leads can be assumed irrelevant. If the fit is right, then delivering the correct quantity of an acceptable quality of leads to the right end buyer results in a long-term profitable partnership between lead provider and lead buyer.

According to the shareholders’ lawsuit, ValueClick knowingly concealed from prospective investors “the willful and ongoing violations of federal law governing the conduct of the advertising and promotion business that lie at the heart of ValueClick’s business operation.

The lawsuit alleged that the online advertising company used “such tricks as false and misleading computer trailer and “pop-up” ads, ValueClick promises “free” gifts to induce innocent victims to complete forms disclosing personal information, such as email and home addresses and telephone numbers. However, rather than provide the “free” gifts, consumers are required, in clear violation of federal law, to make purchases of promoted products before they receive any gift.”

According to the lawsuit, victims were enticed to provide this information to enter contests offering fantastic prizes, such as cars, trucks and college scholarships, where no prizes are ever awarded. Instead, after the victims’ personal information is extracted, the entries are thrown out without any prizes being awarded. “The trusting victims assume that someone else won the contests while ValueClick, which does not even bother to purchase these highly touted prizes because they are never awarded, uses their personal information and laughs all the way to the bank.”

In addition, the lawsuit says ValueClick concealed this critical information from the investing public, despite the fact
that it knew that the government was viewing its industry with increasing concern and had commenced an investigation of such practices.

This was connected to last year’s $2.9 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it used deceptive marketing practices in violation of the CAN-SPAM and FTC Act. In addition, ValueClick and its subsidiaries settled a lawsuit with publishers and advertisers that worked with it. That lawsuit alleged that ValueClick had allowed adware creators to hijack commissions from other advertisers.

*Corrected from an earlier version. A judge has yet to rule on the settlement agreement.

According to Marketing Sherpa, the latter case “a nurturing process” also addresses the second most significant challenge shown in the chart below: marketing to a lengthening sales cycle. A strategic nurturing process not only identifies when a lead is sales-ready, but can pinpoint at what stage the prospect is in the lengthy buying cycle for forecasting timely opportunities.

When the quality of a lead is dependent on its original state, this usually means that all but the most obviously disqualified leads are simply handed off to the sales force as they are generated. This practice is still very common in B2B marketing, according to Marketing Sherpa.

But is that the right way to capture revenue? Below is a chart by Marketing Sherpa that shows how, while most marketing targets lean toward volume, it should be about converting leads rather than just finding them. A better approach is optimizing not only web pages for SEO but, in the case of paid search, carefully aligning the context of PPC keywords with ad listings and landing pages.

Less time spent on low quality leads would seem to be the answer.

LeadFocus makes it easy for publishers to offer lead generation programs to advertisers and helps advertisers more easily target the publisher audiences. The advertising and lead generation and delivery platform provides a full service suite of tools, including ad serving via contextual and behavioral targeting, inventory management, reporting, analytics and lead delivery and management for publishers and advertisers.

The technology employs complex algorithms to place the right advertiser in front of the right buyer in real-time. Publishers can focus on selling their own performance programs without having to qualify, manage or deliver leads.

In a 12-month ramp up to launch Madison Logic has already licensed its platform to dozens of media companies including: PC Magazine, iMediaConnection, ClickZ, Sourceforge, DMNews and Security Focus.

“We have approached the emerging market need for lead generation advertising with a technology that optimizes every opportunity to generate a quality lead within publisher’s web content,” said Matlick, who serves as the company’s CEO. “We are using best practices from contextual and behavioral advertising and blending it with traditional ad serving principles. Now publishers are able to offer lead generation advertising without the headache of managing it.”

Matlick was co-founder of IndustryBrains a site specific pay per click ad network and MediaBrains, a buyer’s guide platform for business publishers,

Madison Logic was founded in 2006 and has 20 employees. It has raised less than $1 million in angel funding. Among the outside early-stage investors are William J. Benedict, Jr., founder and CEO of Alpine Meridian; SoftBank Capital’s Mike Perlis; Geoff Judge, an investor in early stage companies and an active member of The NY Angels; Mark Walsh, the Chief Technology Advisor for the Democratic National Committee and former Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of VerticalNet, Inc.; Internet Capital Group’s Ivan Inerfeld and Elke Wong, who serves as the company’s COO and was co-founder of Industrybrains.

Pontiflex said existing investors New Atlantic Ventures and Greenhill SAVP also participated in the round. The new capital will be used to strengthen the ‘cost-per-lead market’ company’s flagship Pontiflex AdLeads product that makes online lead generation simple, effective and transparent.

Pontiflex has signed up advertisers such as Kimberly-Clark, Gold’s Gym, eFax and ad agencies such as Universal McCann, Carat, Leapfrog Interactive and RUF are leveraging Pontiflex to generate guaranteed returns on their branding and direct campaigns. Pontiflex’s growth is consistent with the emergence of performance advertising as the fastest growing segment of online advertising. According to the recently-released 2008 IAB PWC Internet advertising report, performance-based advertising accounted for 57% of the total online advertising spend of $23.4 billion, up from 51% in 2007.

With Pontiflex AdLeads, advertisers can connect to the entire lead generation market through a single point of connection. They can select premium publishers for their campaigns and run display and direct response creative on a CPL pricing model. Both brand and direct response advertisers use these leads to build customer acquisition programs, community sites, e-newsletter lists, social networking groups and loyalty programs.

The company raised $2.5 million in its first round a year ago.