Epsilon Interactive Announces Q3 Benchmark Results Highlighting Continued Strong Deliverability Across All Vertical Sectors
Relevant Promotional Messaging Drives Retail and Travel Sectors; Service Messaging is Leveraged Increasingly for Cross-sell and Up-sell in Financial Services

NEW YORK - December 20, 2005 - Epsilon Interactive, a leading provider of strategic, ROI-focused email communications solutions and marketing automation technologies, today announced the release of its quarterly vertical benchmark analysis for email campaigns launched and delivered in Q3 2005. Continuing with the momentum reported last quarter, clients across all vertical markets continued to see strong results and deliverability from their strategic email initiatives.

The retail segment experienced exceptional results for their promotional efforts launched during the quarter, which garnered a 95.7% delivery rate and 4.1% click-through rate as retailers continued to leverage email around key shopping events like summer holidays and back-to-school. In addition, overall click-through performance improved, even with a 59% increase in the number of messages sent when compared to the same period last year. These results highlight the increased use and effectiveness of dynamic offers and behavioral triggers.

"Relevance, defined as matching the right offer to the right customer at the right time is the number one issue today," said Al DiGuido, president and CEO of Epsilon Interactive. "These results demonstrate the importance of relevance in building customer relationships and results and are particularly encouraging for retailers as we close in on the final shopping days of the holiday season."

Consumer demand for online account management messaging in the financial services industry continues to grow and experienced a strong delivery rate of 95.6% - a slight increase from the previous quarter. Given this demand, a portion of service messaging is increasingly being leveraged to present relevant products, services and customer benefits. As a result, the average unique open rates and click-through rates out-performed the same period last quarter reaching an impressive 42.6% (an increase of 6.7%) and 20.6% (an increase of 1.6%) respectively.

In the travel sector, overall delivery rates continued to increase reaching 95.9% for the quarter, up 3%. Promotional messaging remained steady with summer promotions, including last minute Fourth of July and Labor Day promotional travel offers.

The overall delivery rate in the media sector remained consistent at 95.1%. Service messaging experienced a 5.4% increase in the unique open rate to 24.8% over the previous quarter as a result of job seekers continually leveraging email and the Web to find new employment opportunities.

Methodology, Transparency Remains Key in Reporting
Epsilon Interactive's transparent delivery reporting includes total emails attempted minus all failures (hard and soft). Findings from the Q3 2005 trend analysis were aggregated from Epsilon Interactive's automated email technology platform, DREAMSM (Direct Response Email Application Manager), and were based on all retention-based mailings from July 1, 2005 through September 30, 2005. Individual campaign results can dramatically vary based on audience, creative, subject line/offer and more.

To guide business-to-business marketers on how to optimize their deliverability, Epsilon Interactive released the latest in its series of white papers, entitled "Enterprise Deliverability & The Rise of Reputation Solutions." This white paper updates marketers on the latest developments in the corporate anti-spam industry, with a particular focus on the introduction of the earliest reputation-based solutions.

For further information on the Q3 2005 benchmark data or for an executive summary of Epsilon Interactive's white paper, "Enterprise Deliverability & The Rise of Reputation Solutions," please contact Mary Beth Keelty at mkeelty@epsiloninteractive.com.

About Epsilon
Epsilon is a leading provider of multi-channel marketing services, technologies and database solutions. Through its combination of client-centric marketing solutions, Epsilon helps leading companies understand, measure, manage and optimize their customer relationships. The organization's end-to-end suite of integrated services includes marketing strategy, creative, data, technology, analytics and distribution services to produce multi-channel marketing programs that generate measurable results throughout the customer lifecycle.

In September 2005 Epsilon acquired Bigfoot Interactive (now Epsilon Interactive), the leading provider of strategic, ROI-focused email communications solutions and marketing automation technologies. Epsilon Interactive now serves as Epsilon's key offering in the interactive marketing and communications space. Founded in 1969 Epsilon is an Alliance Data company.

For more information see www.epsilon.com.

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