Keep in mind that your impression of ad coverage is skewed greatly by retargeting after you visit a vendor website. As you know you can’t just measure the placements you see personally and assume that everyone else sees them too.

I enjoyed your comment about our Enterprise service level, can’t say I disagree with you… even though I named it years ago. Haha.

When you think about SMB email companies sponsoring big conferences you have to realize that we may not be there trying to appeal to our core SMB customer. I’ll give you a hint… the differences you noticed in conference sponsorship have a lot more to do with the stage of the companies in question than a customer acquisition strategy.

When is Bronto going to join everyone on the radio?

====

Hey Aaron,

Sure. My #2 and #3 categories (don’t know who’s which rank) are based on my wildly unscientific impression on broad market share based on revenue that are competing for the smallest of SMB customers. I also am biased toward ESPs that allocate a heavy portion of their budgets on banner and paid search advertising. Other folks like Benchmark, aWeber, Emma, and MailChimp seem to take different approaches. Probably the best ranking would be absolute $s — but obviously I don’t have those numbers.

I agree with your logic about sponsorships but I do question the consistency of its implementation. For example, iContact sponsored a Shop.org conference last Spring — big market retailers. I went to another one (maybe EEC), which is part of the DMA, that iContact also sponsored. It really doesn’t make sense. iContact’s product and service is not geared and can’t handle the needs for the vast majority of the folks at these type of conferences — high-end email marketers that are often using Responsys of Cheetahmail. Is it possible that some potential customers could be there — yes but the conversion, which is not very trackable, would be low. I really do think that its wasted marketing spend, although I’m sure that the conference promoters love are happy to take the money. Now sponsoring other shows with more prospects getting into email marketing makes a lot of sense. I’m just not sure that the full tradeshow / sponsorship schedule reconciles with that.

Other mass market marketing methods can make sense too, like radio. It wouldn’t have a high enough conversion for us given our focus but I definitely understand why you and Constant Contact try it out. So sadly, you won’t be hearing my radio voice overs anytime soon … another dashed dream…

My 2 cents.
Joe

Now if there was a third ad in the game that painted a positive picture of ROI, then I’d think we have the makings of a great horse race.

===

Hey Dean,

I do think that iContact’s ad playing up the Jupiter Research stat of $45 to $1 ROI for email marketing, which tries to play on positive picture. That is a powerful number that plays well for all the providers in our space.

Joe

I am seeing ads come up on some of the weirdest sites, which tells me that both companies are trying to cast a HUGE net.

I have even heard a few radio spots here in Chicago.

Andrew

====

Yes … they are really competing in the micro-SMB space, which is basically like consumer space. I have noticed Constant Contact and iContact on the radio. I’m not sure if Vertical Response has tried that approach. Perhaps I’ll start hearing some GroupOn radio spots soon. If so, I would be happy to help you with the voice overs

Cheers,
Joe