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SmallBizSavings Ends "One Size Fits All" Advertising with E-mail Delivery
of Product and Service News Catering to Small Businesses

Telemarketing and traditional direct mail continues to give way to direct e-mail as the fastest growing form of business-to-business marketing. According to Forrester Research more than 3 billion pieces of (opt-in) commercial e-mail messages were sent in 1997. The Direct Marketing Association predicts that businesses will likely spend $3.5 billion on Internet direct marketing activities, like direct e-mail, by the year 2002. The costs of direct mail ($0.50 - $1.00 per piece) and telemarketing ($1 - $3 per call) are so much higher than opt-in direct e-mail ($.15 -$.20 per message) that most industry organizations expect e-mail marketing to become more prevalent.

SmallBizSavings ( http://www.smallbizsavings.com ), a new business-to-business e-mail marketing company launched in May, hopes to fill the void not served by traditional direct marketers of small business products and services.

The company is offering a free opt-in e-mail filtering service tailored to meet the information and purchasing needs of businesses with between one to fifty employees. Small business owners and managers can opt to receive product information about services from any one of 50 different purchasing categories including: long distance, health insurance, trademark search services, business banking in addition to many industry specific categories.

"I receive phone calls all day long from companies trying to sell me products in bulk. I don't need 500 cases of toner cartridge or computer training for dozens of employees. I don't have a huge staff, and I use e-mail more than the phone," says Steve Levy an independent software developer. "Send me an e-mail message about something I need, like an accounting product that will help me run my business more efficiently and I'll take a look."

"Business owners recognize the importance of staying informed about products and services that may be of benefit to them," says Victor Cheng, founder and President of SmallBizSavings.

His research shows that many small business leaders feel overwhelmed by the deluge of 'off-topic' information that they encounter while on the Internet. SmallBizSavings, and other filtering services like it, address this problem by monitoring, categorizing, and selectively forwarding information from vendors to subscribers.

"We save our subscribers a tremendous amount of time by only forwarding information in the categories that interest them. The customer is in control of the marketing relationship. They get to decide what kind of companies are allowed to market to them and when they are allowed to do it. It's a quiet revolution."

Fueling the revolution are low cost providers of products and services like Dell for computers and Travelocity for travel services. These and other Internet-oriented companies rely heavily on Internet advertising and promotion. For small businesses that are looking for these quality low-cost vendors, using targeted Internet-based advertising, like direct e-mail, also makes sense.

Cheng founded SmallBizSavings after finishing graduate school at Stanford University and doing a three-year consulting stint with McKinsey & Company, the world's leading strategic management consulting firm. At McKinsey, Cheng helped develop marketing and growth strategies on behalf of Fortune 500 companies that wanted to target small businesses.

He says mass advertising approaches, like print advertising, were not always effective in selling the more complicated products and services that small businesses demand. Even establishing a local sales force for the small business market, while more effective, was not efficient for many industries.

"It was the challenge of finding a smarter way to market to small businesses which became the initial impetus for SmallBizSavings," says Cheng. "I've known for a long time that 'One Size Fits All' advertising doesn't work."

"As e-mail use increases, fewer and fewer people will turn to printed materials to look for suppliers and make buying decisions. I can visualize a time when sources like the Yellow Pages don't exist in the physical world, especially when SmallBizSavings is tossing information right in your lap, opened precisely to the page you need."

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