By Peter Vanderlee
Do you roll over and die for the lack of funding, or do you make something great happen in your company by doing things differently?
Last fall TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington passed on sage advice to VC-backed companies from Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley. Gurley predicted “across-the-board reductions” in valuations, and a tough market for raising money – “Basically, the cost of capital is going way up.” This year, GigaOM’s Kevin Kelleher points out that several new growth companies, including DigitalGlobe, Changeyou.com, BridgePoint Education and Rosetta Stone listed on public markets during April and May, but that the IPOs are being enjoyed by companies that are already cash-rich and don’t really need the money.
If you’re a growing young company with a cool product that’s market ready, but cash constrained, what are you going to do to survive, much less grow?
Look for a venture-marketing partner – a company that has the tools, resources and expertise to help identify your best prospects and market to them on a shared-risk, pay-for-performance basis. Then you can SELL your way to success.
AmazingMail.com Inc. is a keen proponent of venture marketing.
We work with angel investing and venture capital groups to identify and screen companies that have fully commercialized products that have been sold to a small base of customers (500 minimum), but can’t scale their marketing efforts because anticipated new sources of additional capital have dried up or stalled in their execution.
Instead of providing capital, we will invest our marketing resources and infrastructure, developing and executing direct marketing campaigns that generate sales. As that revenue begins to flow, we’ll first recover our campaign costs, and then a pre-negotiated ongoing percentage of sales as reward for our risk.
We’re confident of the venture marketing business model because we’re using a new, automated multi-channel marketing platform called AmazingCampaigns that delivers text-to-print, text-to-mobile, digital direct mail, email and personalized Web page (PURLs) campaigns. AmazingCampaigns can be delivered in quantities of one to more than a million in 24 hours or less.
Designed to support customer acquisition, cross-sell, up-sell, retention and loyalty programs, AmazingCampaigns features include the ability to produce statistically modeled, ranked, and scored lists that respond up to eight times better than a standard list. If customers don’t respond to a marketing offer, AmazingCampaigns can send a series of automated (drip) messages to digital channels, through direct mail, or both. Sophisticated analytics then report back on campaign progress across all digital and print channels.
Multi-channel integration offers a bright future for AmazingMail and our customers. According to Winterberry Group LLC, most marketers have found that online channels demonstrate greater value as a complement to direct mail applications. Estimated benefits range from a 7 to 10 percent lift, to several times expected results.
We’ve got AmazingCampaigns working with several pilot clients now and we will be sharing those results and demonstrating AmazingCampaigns at DMA09 in San Diego, October 17-22, 2009.
There is always a greater appetite for innovation during an economic downturn, and we’ve responded with venture marketing, using our automated, intelligent, integrated and multi-channel marketing platform that delivers amazing results – and can be delivered in ways that innovative businesses need to thrive. So, if you’re a business – or you know of one – that could use a venture-marketing partner, drop me a line at pvanderlee@amazingmail.com
(Peter Vanderlee is VP Marketing with AmazingMail.com Inc., located in Phoenix AZ. AmazingMail’s automated, multi-channel direct marketing platform, AmazingCampaigns, delivers text-to-print, text-to-mobile, digital direct mail, email and personalized Web page (PURLs) campaigns.)
