Email Marketer VerticalResponse Keeps Growing Despite Down Economy

Are you tired of gloom and doom headlines? I know I am. That’s why I decided that as a public service I would post articles about companies that are growing — and even hiring! 

If your B2B company is growing, drop me a line. I’d love to hear about it. Maybe together we can generate some positive mojo to help turn our economy around!

VerticalResponse Founder and CEO Janine Popick started her email marketing company during  the last recession in 2001 — and boot-strapped her way to success. In fact, the company grew over 50% in 2008 and is on track for a “good” growth rate this year.

What follows is an interview I had with Janine recently about her company and her insight as to why email marketing is still a great tool for small business.

DH: Why is VerticalResponse growing despite the recession?

JP: What we’re seeing is that small businesses are really looking at what they have. They look at the business cards they’ve collected and the names of people they’ve met and they’re wondering how to communicate with them.

No one is cutting back on customer retention — what they’re cutting back on is their Google AdWord spend or print advertising.  So email marketing fits right in with small business owners’ mindsets.

DH: Have you increased VerticalResponse’s marketing spend for 2009, and which marketing tactics are you using?

JP: My entire team is very conscious about how they spend money. We constantly track what is working and what isn’t. We have our cost per customer pegged and we’ll pull things on the fly if we have too.

We’ve made some changes. Instead of doing a large national conference, we’re doing regional conferences because the costs are lower.

We also have a VerticalResponse community — and we’re monitoring how our customers use social media tools such as Twitter. For example, instead of writing separate newsletter content and blog posts, we now write the newsletter, provide an online version of it, and then let people Tweet about it.

DH: What do you think small businesses are looking for with regard to email marketing?

JP: In a nutshell, they are looking for return on investment — and email marketing gives them that immediate ROI they’re looking for.

We have lots of customers who are doing e-newsletters and / or selling product through email — and many still have huge open rates. One of our customers is making $14K a month selling facial products online. When she remembers to do an email campaign, that goes up to $18K month.

DH: That’s interesting, because for awhile, you heard that email marketing wasn’t working anymore and that blogs/RSS would take the place of e-newsletters. But now I’m reading about how e-newsletters are still a great way to market to customers (which is something I’ve been doing since 1999 — and won’t give up anytime soon).

JP: RSS is awesome — if you’re a tech head. But the rest of the world hasn’t adopted it. Email is still a great marketing tool because not everyone reads blogs.

DH: Ok, last question. What has been your greatest success — one that you’re particularly proud of?

JP: The day we turned profitable — which happened in 2005. I knew then that going forward I wouldn’t have to go back to my family and friends asking for money. Instead, I could give them back their money!

Thanks, Janine! VerticalResponse allows you to cost-effectively send email newsletters, campaigns, and surveys, and it integrates with SalesForce.com — making it easy to send email to your customer / prospect list without having to maintain two separate lists. Very cool, Janine!

(Thank you to Samantha Rubenstein of Atomic PR for arranging this interview.)