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Stuart Garfield
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It’s hard to find a self-appointed electronic marketing guru talking about e-mail these days. Social media, text messages, and mobile video platforms are more popular buzzwords.
On Tuesday, Nielsen Online — the new-media branch of Nielsen Media Research Inc. — reported survey results showing use of online social media networks has surpassed e-mail use. At the same time, e-mail remains a primary point of customer contact for many companies, creating an opportunity for a cluster of area tech companies.
“It’s a great, cost-effective medium to reach out to people. But it has its problems in terms of spam, in terms of image blocking, in terms of getting blacklisted — and that’s sort of where a lot of (companies) play ignorant,” said Altaif Shaikh, founder of ListEngage Inc. The bootstrapped e-mail tech company provides software-supported services designed to develop targeted e-mail campaigns, preview e-mails in various browsers, and clear company IP addresses off spam blacklists.
“You can absolutely take any piece of content and hit the send button,” Shaikh said. “That is not good e-mail marketing. That is carpet bombing — batch and blast.”
Instead, ListEngage provides a system to enable a targeted e-mail based on an action such as downloading a particular white paper. Other e-mail messages may be targeted based on survey responses, Shaikh said, and the first few follow-up contacts can be automated.
Founded in 2004, ListEngage employs four full-time staff at its Framingham headquarters, and a team of 18 designers and developers in India. The company is “highly profitable,” said Shaikh.
Shaikh’s venture is part of a cluster of Boston-area e-mail marketing software firms. Perhaps the best-known among them, Constant Contact Inc. (Nasdaq: CTCT), provides automated e-mail marketing for small and midsize businesses. Constant Contact, which went public in October of 2007 with a $108 million IPO, recently added an autoresponder to draw in new contacts by qualifying their interests and stating the company’s plans for communicating with them.
In a report last August, Forrester Research analyst Julie Katz noted users’ growing reliance on text messages and social networks for communication, and their impatience with untargeted e-mails. To stay relevant, e-mail marketers should tie marketing messages to event-triggered e-mails such as order confirmations — and a growing number are doing so, Katz reported.
But however informative and targeted their e-mails, marketers have a problem when customers switch addresses, said Austin Bliss, founder and president of FreshAddress Inc. The Newton-based company, founded in 1999, scans its network of customers to track down changes of address based on activity using the new address.
Companies like Constant Contact aim for the non-savvy small-business customer, but Bliss said plenty of large enterprises have a lot to learn about better e-mail marketing. “Some of these larger institutions, there’s a lot of things they need to rethink,” Bliss said. “But they are getting quite nimble.”
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