Firm Promises E-mail List-Growth Success

Ask any e-mail marketer what their biggest challenge is and list-growth will surely be somewhere near the top.

Enter Pontiflex, a Brooklyn-based startup whose name takes the word pont, which is Latin for bridge, and merges it with flex to mean flexible bridge.

The company has developed a cost-per-lead, do-it-yourself e-mail-address-acquisition marketplace where advertisers can search for publications that meet their criteria, build their own creative using multiple templates, and send the campaign to the outlets they’ve selected.

“Essentially what we do is help e-mail data get from publishers to advertisers,” said Zephrin Lasker, CEO and co-founder of Pontiflex. “We’ve got advertisers running with 20 different sources [whereas] in the past they could only run with two because it would take their tech group weeks just to set up the data handshake.”

Lasker likens his system to PayPal where advertisers can buy space from publishers “without it being a tech project every time you do a deal. It’s an easy way for e-mail marketers to build their lists.”

Under Pontiflex’s business model, the advertiser logs in, selects a category such as “retail” and type of offer, such as “newsletter,” and based on the historical performance of those types of campaigns on the various sites within its portfolio, the system returns a list of publications where the advertiser will likely be successful.

The list also includes the amounts the marketer is likely to pay for leads on each publication. Advertisers can also limit the amount they want to pay for each lead, eliminating publications they believe are too expensive.

Then the advertiser builds the creative using various templates supplied by Pontiflex.

“They can basically build anything they need to build within the system,” said Lasker. Currently, the system does not support rich media, but may do so in the future.

Once the campaign is sent, advertisers are only required to pay for names that are new to their files, said Lasker.

Pontiflex has relationships with about 200 publishers, about 130 of which are live, he said.

“That’s thousands of sub-sites because some of them are networks” said Lasker.

Pontiflex requires its advertisers to collect e-mail addresses only on an opt-in basis, said Lasker. What is more, the company does not allow its customers who are engaging in co-registration programs—where new registrants to a site are offered e-mail subscriptions and offers from other marketers—to pre-check the permission boxes, he said.

“It has to be opt in,”:he said. “We saw one customer doing opt-out, they said it was a mistake, we kicked them off our system.”

Meanwhile, from the it’s-a-small-world department comes news that among Pontiflex’s executives is Evan Adlman, vice president of strategic development.

Previously, Adlman headed up business operations for deliverability firm Return Path’s Postmaster Network, the e-mail list-management unit Return Path acquired from Italian firm Seat Pagine Gialle 2004.

Entrepreneur Rosalind Resnick founded the list-management concern as NetCreations in 1995. She sold it to Seat Pagine Gialle for $111 million in 2000 just before the dot-com implosion and walked away a rich woman.

Currently, Resnick is a limited partner at Greenhill SAVP, an investment group with a stake in Pontiflex.

“She’s one of our mentors because she kind of created this space,” said Lasker. Indeed, Resnick pioneered and preached opt-in e-mail marketing when it was an extremely unpopular concept with traditional direct marketers. She also coined “double opt-in,” a term that has since lost all meaning as a result of being co-opted by too many dishonest marketers

According to Adlman, one of the more important services Pontiflex offers is an instant welcome e-mail.

“We have clients who request that we send them data on a weekly basis but by then, some of those leads are seven days old and that’s too late,” he said. As a result, Pontiflex has built auto-responder technology that greets new registrants on behalf of clients customized by publisher regardless of the data-delivery frequency the advertiser has requested from Pontiflex.

“We send e-mail to the user instantly upon opting into their offer,” said Adlman.

Currently, Pontiflex has no business-to-business offering, according to Lasker. “There’s been a ton of demand for it, but that market is so fragmented and we haven’t been around all that long so it hasn’t been a priority.”