By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA—The down economy has not hurt email marketer Silverpop’s business. “Our revenue broke records in the fourth quarter,” says Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey.
What’s fueling the company’s growth? “The increasing awareness of the need for online marketing,” says Nussey.
“This economy is a good thing for online marketers in general.
“There are a lot of opportunities for a company like Silverpop,” he says. “The solutions we provide, by every measure, are the most profitable marketing tools available to business today. So, as budgets get crunched, things like email, social networking, online advertising, will get more money or at least won’t get cut.”
Profitable since 2004
Founded in 1999, the 340 employee company raised a $15 million round in April led by new investor D.E. Shaw, with Draper Fisher Jurvetson and other previous investors participating.
Just this month, the company announced that the European Founders Fund bought an undisclosed amount of common stock directly from Silverpop’s shareholders.
Profitable since 2004, the company sustained a 50 percent compound growth rate the last four years.
Nussey says the firm delivers a unique set of integrated, on demand marketing solutions that are much easier for non-technical marketers to use than any others available. It helps companies create and automate multi-channel marketing campaigns with measurable results.
The secret to successful campaigns, Nussey says, “Is to know your customers and focus on them relentlessly. A lot of tech companies come up with a product then say, ‘gosh, who do we sell it to? In my experience, that doesn’t work well. If a product is super hot, it may take care of itself, but more often, you’re in trouble.”
Nussey says the marketing world is moving steadily toward a true multi-channel environment.
“Each channel is unique and best suited to certain messages. I don’t think email will ever go away, but the world where there is a single dominant channel such as email is going away.:
Sells to larger customers
Silverpop, he notes, looks for customers who want an integrated suite of multiple tools. While email is at the center of its suite of products, it also includes social networking, transactional messaging, surveys, and micro-sites for landing pages.
Typically, says Nussey, users who want such an integrated suite and are willing to pay a bit more for it, are larger, more sophisticated marketers. Silverpop generally sells to customers with 1,000 or more employees.
Its clients include Fossil, Siemens, KPN, British Sky Broadcasting, Telegraaf Media Groep, Barclays Global Investors, Shop Direct Group, Plantronics, Pitney Bowes MapInfo, Houghton Mifflin and others.
What’s coming in the future? Advanced reporting and analytics of marketing efforts will be the big thing in online marketing in coming years, Nussey says.
“I’m not one of those people who think traditional marketing is going away. It won’t,” he says.
Multiple channel marketing works
“The reality is that we are in an increasingly diverse marketing channel world.” Whether a marketer is using email, billboards and broadcast ads is not as important as “The ability to weave it all together,” says Nussey.
In fact, he points out that studies show marketing through multiple channels is much more effective.
“Marketers who address their customers though multiple channels get substantially better returns,” he says. “If they see an ad, an email and a billboard, they’ll buy more.”
He says the opportunity for Silverpop on the channel side is to get more deeply into each of the channels.
Analysis the wave of the future
But analytics, which Nussey says “are the toughest nut to crack,” is the wave of the future. “Understanding who your customers are, how they’re engaged, how you can best serve their interests, drives loyalty and growth. But frankly, no one is doing it well today.”
“It’s a huge challenge,” he says. “Many marketers are usually left with licking their thumb and putting it in the air to see which direction the wind is blowing.”
Today, most of the marketing information available is comparable to a book, he says. “But most marketers, even with advances like ours, only look at the covers and the first pages. There is so much rich information inside all the pages.
“If we can really dig into that data and help marketers understand it, that’s the ground-breaking change we’ll see in a few years—getting to all that data and making sense of it.”
In the past, marketers had only a few data points a year to consider, whether or not a person getting a catalog bought frequently or not at all and so forth.
“Now we’re getting hundreds and thousands of data points—emails opened, clicks on Web sites and more.”
The analytics part, the insights from looking at that data, is the “truly important part” of online marketing even now, he says.
“If you just wanted your email delivered, you could go online and get that for 20 bucks. At Silverpop, getting into all that data is one of our largest focuses. The future of our industry is to take it much further.”
On the Web: www.silverpop.com
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