What Do You Think Of IP Targeting?

February 10, 2012      Admin

Here’s one for you online fundraisers.

The capability exists to target email messages to specific consumers (donor prospects?) using their IP addresses, with that information cross-matched with a variety of demographic markers.

Here’s the background and a pitch from one supplier of such data, Elect Strategies (as reported in ClickZ):

“We can provide physical addresses and phone numbers for the entire country, email addresses for a significant segment of the US population (120 million), in addition to up-to-date IP addresses,” noted Elect Strategies in a recent email sales pitch promoting its data offerings to political advertisers. “For 99.8% of consumers, we can identify Age (Date of Birth), Gender (M/F), Race (5 Groups), Ancestry (189 Countries), Religion, Linguistic Preference, Education Level, and Income Level.”

Could represent a powerful targeting tool. However, there are serious privacy concerns … have consumers on these lists opted-in to the practice?

Here’s how the process works, per ClickZ. Essentially, when a user opens an email from a partner of the data firm like Elect Strategies – such as an opt-in email from a news publisher – a cookie is generated which reports back to Elect Strategies the IP address associated with the user’s computer or device. With an email address and matching IP address in hand, other demographic info can be added. And voila! A targetable emailing list.

What do you think? Scary? Or can’t wait to try it?

Tom

3 responses to “What Do You Think Of IP Targeting?”

  1. Brenna Holmes says:
    February 10, 2012 at 10:12 am

    I don’t think IP address targeting is scary because of what you presented above – the more authentic data we can gather about supporters and donors, the more personalized and special their interactions and relationship with the nonprofit can be. But using IP addresses for targeting does not provide reliable and accurate data about a supporter’s home address or even where they work. More and more often now, you are likely to be mislead by IP address fueled targeting data than not. Whether it’s big city commutes, virtual offices, telecommuting, or shared servers, we often do not live (or even work) where our IP address thinks we are and so this type of targeting is imprecise at it’s best. I would not waste my clients’ money adding in this layer of targeting.

  2. keith says:
    February 10, 2012 at 10:38 am

    Personally I am not thrilled with the idea of others latching onto me this way. As an organization we are definately not there, but I can see the usefulness in being able to target a specific audience.

  3. Chuck English says:
    February 10, 2012 at 1:08 pm

    There doesn’t seem to be that much difference between this and other techniques used to target donors. You can already buy (or rent) email addresses that are segmented by a range of demographic markers. From the user’s point of view, the use of email lists is so ubiquitous that I wonder whether recipients would even notice they are getting an extra email or question its origin. In the end it’s just like another Nigerian prince that has millions of dollars for me.

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