Live from DMA07: Vendors Glad to be Out of “E-mail Ghetto”

E-mail companies exhibiting at the DMA07 fall conference in Chicago this week are much happier than they were at last year’s show in San Francisco.

Why? As they see it, they’ve been let out of the “e-mail ghetto.”

At the DMA06 conference, e-mail vendors were in a room off the main exhibit hall that required going though an underpass to reach.

“Oh, you mean that room where they had to whip out Google Maps to find us? Yeah, I remember that,” said Tricia Robinson-Pridemore, vice president of market and product strategy for e-mail technology provider Strongmail.

While the main exhibit hall played host to crowds of eager buyers and tire kickers, the e-mail services providers in the other room had plenty of time to get to know one another better.

“It was like we were exhibiting in the United States of Zebra,” said Barry Abel, vice president of field operations for Message Systems.

According to Jordan Ayan, president of e-mail service provider Subscriber Mail, the upside of last year’s placement was that the people who did venture over to what the vendors quickly dubbed the e-mail ghetto tended to be highly qualified leads.

“The people who came over had to hunt to find us so they really wanted to be there,” he said.

The downside, though, was that the vendors stuck in that room were unable to meet marketers who maybe weren’t immediately in the market for their services, but might be soon.

“What we missed were opportunities to form those serendipitous relationships with people who weren’t necessarily hot on e-mail yet,” said Ayan.

He said he believes the interactive pavilion’s placement smack in the middle of the tradeshow floor this year is evidence that the DMA made a conscious decision to respond to e-mail company executives’ complaints over last year’s fiasco.

“This year, we’re not direct marketing’s ugly stepchild,” he said.

Message Systems’ Abel agreed. “We’re getting more traffic this year. Plus it’s a better mix of people. This is an emerging market and sooner or later these people [attendees] will make the turn into e-mail because it’s so cost efficient. That’s what was missing last year.”

David Atlas, senior vice president, worldwide sales and marketing for e-mail certification firm Goodmail Systems, said his company’s booth is clearly more a part of the general flow of the tradeshow than it was last year.

As a result, he said: “We’re proportionately a smaller fish in a big ocean, but it’s much better than that polluted little pool we were in last year.”