E-mail professionals help get the word out

SAN FRANCISCO -- Janine Popick wants to make sure you get even more daily e-mails in your inbox.

Don't hate her. It's her business.

Her company, VerticalResponse, helps 40,000 small businesses send e-mail marketing campaigns to their customers.

The merchants — primarily restaurants, retailers and dot-coms — could do it themselves. But with VerticalResponse or competitors Constant Contact or iContact doing the heavy lifting, they get professional-looking e-mails with color, images and tracking tools to see who actually reads a message.

"We let them know who opened it and who unsubscribed," says Popick, 41, the company's founder and CEO. "We comply with all the anti-spam laws, and let them focus on running their business."

Rates start at $10 a month to send up to 500 e-mails; most customers spend about $60 a month. The fourth quarter is traditionally the company's strongest period, when sales were up 40% over the prior holiday quarter, Popick says.

Business was a "little bit" down in January, and Popick says she's being less aggressive than usual in sales projections because of the uncertain economy. "It's too early to tell what's going to happen."

A career in direct marketing

Popick grew up on Long Island and began her career in direct marketing working at firms Claris (then owned by Apple) and NBC's then direct sales unit XOOM, which is now a money transfer service.

After she left NBC in 1999, she and husband John Hingley came up with the idea for VerticalResponse while on vacation in France.

"We saw a big gap in the market," she says. "A simple tool for the small-business market to communicate with their customers didn't exist."