This Executive Vice President discusses with iMedia the work he has done to help his clients build relationships with their consumers.

Josh Perlstein has been with Response Media for 11 years and has been in the direct-response industry for 13 years. As Executive Vice President, he supervises and oversees operations. He also began the agency’s online services area five years ago. At work, Perlstein lives by one golden rule: The Internet’s greatest application is for building relationships with customers and prospects. Perlstein is also a member of the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) List Leaders Council, Email Committee.

Response Media is an integrated direct-marketing firm that has been around for 24 years. The agency’s core competency is targeting prospects and customers offline and online. It is one of the largest mailing list brokers in the country. Some of its larger clients have included P&G, Pizza Hut and Pfizer.

iMedia Connection: Describe some work you have done recently for your clients.

Perlstein: For current clients such as Pfizer and a couple P&G brands, they had goals to build relationships with customers through e-mail, and we assisted with media to successfully grow the size of their e-mail databases enormously over the last year. We were able to get qualified, targeted new members into their online clubs.

Many have simultaneous goals of gaining trial through sampling. We were able to help through finding them permission-based online requestors, to increase the likelihood of actual offline trial.

Each client, without exception, has seen terrific success (and vast improvements in comparison with other media) in trial, branding and product sales through its online relationship-building e-mail and sampling programs.

iMedia Connection: Can your company point to evidence that suggests online advertising and marketing are contributing positively to branding metrics?

Perlstein: What we’ve seen in almost all of the online campaigns we’ve done is when post-campaign research has been done, brand awareness and intent to purchase has risen in every case in a proportionally higher metric than we’ve seen in other media. So we’ve seen it across the board. When I’m working with an offline product, I’ve also seen actual purchases increase. There are cases in which we’ve been able to tie actual purchase data or panel data directly into the campaign. We’ve been able to match that up on the backend, and we’ve seen actual purchases increase. In every case, we’ve seen actual lifts in purchase. When the consumer is actually buying more of a product due to online relationship-building; that speaks volumes.

iMedia Connection: Are third-party Internet traffic-measuring services useful in your opinion?

Perlstein: We do use tracking services in some cases. Part of the Internet’s greatest value to marketers is the fact that you can test and track everything, and that is not always something easy to do in most offline media -- television, radio and print. So we use that to its fullest extent. When we do a campaign, we use third-party tracking services in many cases to track impressions, to clicks, to conversion and it’s extremely helpful.

iMedia Connection: Are most of your clients taking advantage of day-parting or is this perhaps more hype, than hope?

Perlstein: Many are. We’re looking at day-parting not in Web media but in the e-mail world. So we have found significant increases and decreases in responsiveness and actual sales volume in some cases depending on what time of day and what day of the week we’re sending. So yes, we have seen that quite a bit.

iMedia Connection: What remains the industry’s biggest stumbling block?

Perlstein: There are a few. It still is a “new media,” meaning we’re still getting small portions of the budget from most traditional and mass marketers. It hasn’t proven itself yet to most marketing professionals, and I don’t know when we’ll overcome that because the statistics speak for themselves and anybody who is familiar with the statistics knows what online media can do. Another one of the biggest stumbling blocks I see is when you’re working on very specific goals there aren’t enough options out there. In many cases, I run into situations in which a client would like to add half a million people to its database, for example, and is willing to offer a free sample of something to do so. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough Websites that can accommodate that sort of planning on a cost-effective basis.

The other big problem I see coming from the agency world is the way media is priced online. In every other media, including mailing lists, television and print, agency discounts are commonly provided. For the Web, the standard seems to be net pricing. So in many cases when I’m talking with a client, I’ll go in with a Website and I’ll say, ‘I think this is the plan you should do, and it will cost you $5/thousand to do it’. Well, the site can easily walk in and say, ‘It will cost you $4.25/thousand’ and that creates a bit of competition there, and we’re not all helping to sell more media. So that notion of net and gross pricing vs. a standard price you see in television, print, radio and mailing lists where everyone is talking the same language creates a big hurdle for agencies in my mind.

Another major stumbling block is Spam. What we do is we help clients build e-mail databases but build them proactively. It’s all the e-mails that you don’t ask for that really hurt everybody.

iMedia Connection: What knowledge can you share to bridge the gap on how to better serve marketers’ needs in the online world?

Perlstein: The Internet is great for a lot of things but what it’s really best at – what the Internet has done that no other media could ever do – is build personal relationships between a brand and a consumer. It can do it more cost efficiently than ever before. So if more marketers would see the Internet in that way, as a way to communicate with a consumer on a one-to-one basis and really build a relationship, it would be to everybody’s benefit.

iMedia Connection: Have any of your clients successfully utilized any emerging technologies, such as IM, wireless, iTV, etc.?

Perlstein: No. I don’t think they’re prolific enough yet, and I don’t think we’re at a point yet where the cost for utilizing those media has backed into a cost-effective conversion. All of those things are so promising, terrific and fun. The problem with wireless is it costs so much. It hasn’t been cost effective yet, but I imagine for branding there are some success stories out there.