Revenue Enhancement Group- Beware

If you are in the lead generation/data monetization business you need to read this so you can avoid the suffer and financial losses I experienced as a result of working with the Revenue Enhancement group company.

I'll try to make the story short and to the point as possible.

Starting July I was shopping for a data monetization company for backend monetization of leads I generated on a coreg path in the freebies vertical.

I was contacted via linkedin by a rep of Revenue Enhancement Group called Martyn (I will not reveal his last name for now as I was told he is not working there anymore and it does seem to be the case looking at his Linkedin profile). We agreed to start working together. I signed their list management contract and started sending real time data to their API. (We agreed to start on 500/day )
Started sending data July 18th and here are the results:

Leads: 3655 (with about 65%-70% of them with full contact info- Name, email, full address, phone number, gender). I had some traffic issues at the time so I sent a bit less than 500 day.
Gross Revenue: $107.92
My share: $53.96

Ok so we are looking at $0.03 gross revenue. Very low in my opinion and I think many of you will agree with me. However I was patient as Martin explained to me that Revenue Enhancement Group take the first month to learn the data and optimize their operation which was acceptable by me.
So let's look at the results for August, should be better tight?

Leads: 18,245 (with about 65%-70% of them with full contact info)
Gross revenue: $108.16
My share: $54.08

This is not a mistake, and I think the numbers speak for themselves. For 3655 leads in July I earned $53.96 and for 18245 leads in August I earned $54.08, a "nice" increase of $0.12 for 5 times the data,and gross revenue of $0.005 a lead.

Obviously at this point I was very upset and sent an email to my account manager to see what is going on?

I got a phone call from David Shteif the CEO of Revenue Enhancement Group, where he apologized for the results and explained that my account should have never been accepted as part of their network in the first place (he tells me that after 2 months of sending traffic to them) he also tells me that Martyn (who recruited me) is no longer with the company as he misrepresented their company. I told him I appreciate the phone call and the apology but I think a financial compensation is in order as I lost money.

David agreed to consider a financial compensation. I made a request which he declined as being too high. And in an email he sent me he wrote:
"The data was not good, it had several hard bounces. Not too many offers were sent and the data was underutilized for that reason. Martyn campaigned to get us to accept the feed as it was rejected on a number of occasions until we broke down and agreed to test. I would just chalk it up as a learning experience and move on. The information you got about how much a list should generate is bogus. There are several points that your not taking into consideration when coming up with the unrealistic revenue expectations such as how you generated the data, and what vertical the data is in and most important percentage of Yahoo considering Yahoo shut out over 80% of the mailers. "

I was shocked to discover that he referred to Martyn as a separate entity from Revenue Enhancement group as Martyn emails were sent from revenuegrp.com domain and presented himself as representative of that company. I was also shocked to discover that they accepted my data because they "broke down". So does that mean that a good salesman can sell them bad data because they will eventually break down? Not very professional in my opinion.
I also did not appreciate his suggestion to "chalk it up" (my financial loss and bad experience ).

When I told David that I am going to advertise this story so other companies can get a chance to avoid this kind of experience, I got an email from their legal counsel warning me that any negative statements about Revenue Enhancement Group posted by me online might result in a legal action against me.
Finally I sent David an email 3 days ago asking for performance report for September as I sent about 8000 leads in September and still didn't hear back so I don't know if I even see any revenue at all for September.

So this is my experience with Revenue Enhancement group and I thought it was important to share it. Everything that I wrote here can be backed up by emails I have except of course the phone call with David.
If you have any question s comment I will be happy to reply.


Ori Ben Shalom