Email as a revenue stream

Site Impact wholesales email marketing

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Chances are, many SNPA newspapers already know about Site Impact, the email marketing company that goes through 145 million addresses to find just the consumers who may be interested in a client's ad.

While CEO Brandon Rosen keeps the papers' names confidential so as not to give away competitive strategies, he says there are a lot of them. "The reason to work with us for the newspapers is, we're the source. We're a wholesale email marketing company. There are a lot of brokers out there. We don't broker anything."

Rosen will say that six of the 10 largest newspaper companies in the country are clients of Site Impact and two more are in negotiations. Smaller groups of papers use it as well, as do other media companies, advertising agencies, list brokers, radio and TV stations.

Site Impact, www.siteimpact.com, which has recently applied to membership in SNPA, prides itself on speed and the reliability of its database. If one newspaper has its own database of 10,000 emails, Site Impact probably has 20,000 in the same area, Rosen said.

The eight-year-old company has offices in Orlando and Coconut Creek, Fla. Of about 80 employees, only eight are in sales. The rest are in customer service, technology and execution.

"The best part about us is everything we do is same-day turnaround time. Everything we do is last minute," he said.

Here's how it works. Suppose a new sushi restaurant opens in town. In addition to selling a quarter-page ad, a newspaper contracts with Site Impact to do an email blast to people in a specified area who have indicated in a survey that they like to eat out. The ad goes out in the email, the advertiser pays the newspaper and the newspaper pays Site Impact.

Now, say it's 4 p.m. on a weekday and the sushi restaurant doesn't have many reservations. Site Impact can put out a new e-blast in time to generate some evening business.

The company can also target people based on income, gender and hobbies, among other demographics. And it provides an analytics platform to measure the impact.

Site Impact gathers emails by giving consumers coupons and savings offers through the internet in return for providing their emails and answering survey questions, Rosen said. It also works with third-party data groups, but usually does not incorporate a newspaper's own database.

Site Impact is especially careful to comply with regulations against spam, he said.

The result is a turnkey digital product that offers another revenue stream for publishers. Clients may send out 5,000 emails or 1 million.

"We do thousands of campaigns on a monthly basis to tens of millions of consumers," Rosen said.  "It works. We don't lose clients. Clients are happy. It's a good product. There's a good margin in it. The newspapers love it."

And Site Impact is always trying to develop new technology to improve the product.

"We're always working to get better quality data, better quality delivery. We're working on real-time targeting technology, which gives us analytics in real time so we know when people are ready to shop or ready to buy or just made that purchase."

For more information contact Brandon Rosen at Brandon@siteimpact.com.


Jane Nicholes

Jane Nicholes is a veteran journalist based in coastal Alabama and is a regular contributor to SNPA. Reach her at jbnicholes@att.net.

Suggestions for future stories and comments on this piece are welcomed.

Site Impact, email, marketing
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