Complaint Review: Etarget Media - Coconut Creek Florida

We rented an email list from Etargetmedia. We were told it was 500,000 bowhunters and rifle hunters in selected states. The email campaign was marketing a crossbow giveaway which we had sent to our own database of email addresses. The results we received from our own list was substantial. We had an open rate of 40% and a click through rate of 25%. The landing page was a form that the person filled out for a chance to win a crossbow. Knowing this, I knew we would get some heavy traffic to our website through Etargetmedia's list.

Etargetmedia was a bit confused on how they wanted to send out the email to the 500,000 list. On the day it was supposed to launch we did not see any traffic. I emailed and they said to give it some time and that they were in the process of "disseminating all of the data for your campaign." I started to see some activity via our Google Analytics roughly a day later. The "Live" view on Analytics showed itrack-report as the top referral, which was etargetmedia email blast. I was overjoyed to be seeing some relatively moderate traffic from the email campaign. When I looked at where the traffic was going on our website it was hitting every page except the page to win a free crossbow. This bothered me so I sent an email to etarget asking why I was seeing traffic going to pages not even linked from my email. They responded with this, "As a valued client, we would like to offer a make good deployment. Please let us know what day you would like to schedule this make good campaign to go live." This got me to start searching the web for producing fake traffic and I saw a slew of companies that provide the ability to produce fake traffic to a website. The live traffic I was seeing was very automated in the sense that there were at least 2 visits per page from the itrack-report and each visit was 8 min in length for time on page. Some of the top viewed pages "people" were visiting were not even directly linked in our navigation and found in a very obscure part of our website. I had a total of 50 sign ups for the crossbow giveaway through Etargetmedia during the first email campaign of 530,000 email addresses. My guess is they used a traffic generator for a majority of the hits I was seeing and sent out the email to a "real" list of email addresses they had on file. At 5:05 pm on the dot on the last day the email was "sent", the itrack-report referrals stopped... Seem odd? I thought so...

Results for 1st campaign: 
500,000 Emails
34,099 Opens
6.8% Open Rate
2,337 "Clicks" 
0.5% CTR

For their "make good" campaign the results were the same, however they sent to a "new" list of 250,000 subscribers. I asked again why no one was going to the giveaway page as it was the most prominent link in the email to which they responded, "It is impossible for us to control where the individual subscribers navigate to on your site." 

Results for 2nd campaign:
250,000 Emails
31,678 Opens
12.7%  Open Rate
2,567 "Clicks"
1.0% CTR

We spent a good amount of money for the list and did not see the results we had hoped for. It is tough to prove if Etarget was actually using a traffic generator, but all the data pointed to the traffic being generated from traffic generating software.

If we even had a legitimate campaign, these numbers are horrible compared to industry standards. I've since then sent this same email through 2 other reliable rented lists and have had an amazing results at a 20% CTR.

We will not be using Etargetmedia in the future.