VerticalResponse Signs More Than 20,000 New Businesses To The iBuilder Email Marketing Service In Less Than One Year

Staggering Growth Validates Importance of Fast, Effective and Affordable Email Marketing Solutions

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - June 17, 2002 - VerticalResponse, a leading provider of permission-based email marketing applications, today announced that more than 20,000 new businesses are leveraging the iBuilder service to quickly and easily develop and deliver email marketing campaigns to prospects and customers. Businesses of all sizes have signed up to use iBuilder including Equifax Direct Marketing Solutions, Shop at Home Network, and Razor & Tie Direct.

"As one of the leading direct-response TV marketers in America, we require an email marketing program that gives us an efficient, direct link to our customer base," said Edith Bellinghausen, Vice President of New Media for Razor & Tie Direct. "VerticalReponse gives us all the functionality of the most expensive email marketing software in an affordable, scalable service. With VerticalResponse, we have an easy to use, online service that lets us build customized campaigns in minutes with the flexibility to send as many or as few emails as we need."

"Business of all sizes are frustrated by overly expensive software suites that are difficult to deploy," said Kent Allen, Research Director at Aberdeen Group. "Companies, and separate business units (SBUs) within larger companies, are looking for suppliers that provide hosted, scalable email delivery and online marketing applications that make email campaign creation simple and intuitive. VerticalResponse has shown tremendous momentum in this market space in a short amount of time and the partnership with salesforce.com -- one of the leading, if not the leading, e-CRM technology supplier -- validates their growing momentum ."

iBuilder provides businesses with solutions to the two most painful problems in email campaign delivery: campaign creation and campaign delivery. In minutes, businesses can create customer email campaigns using iBuilder's template-based system or by copy and pasting HTML code directly into the system. With VerticalResponse's email delivery engine, businesses can deliver campaigns ranging from 5 to 5 million and beyond. Email bounces, unsubscriptions, and reporting information, such as click-throughs, are automatically updated, gathered, and presented with real-time reporting capabilities.

"When we launched iBuilder a year ago, we set out to create an affordable, hassle free service that would allow businesses of all sizes to deliver email campaigns in minutes," said Janine Popick, CEO of VerticalResponse. "We are proud of the quality and consistency of the email marketing solutions and support that we provide our customers."

VerticalResponse powers email marketing programs for over 20,000 users including Equifax Direct Marketing Solutions, Brookstone, The Breast Cancer Fund, Yaga and Gardeners Eden. Because of its open architecture and easy to use self-service capabilities, iBuilder, can be easily integrated into online services to add email marketing capabilities for end users. iBuilder is also used by leading professional service agencies to deploy email marketing campaigns as a service to their customers.

About VerticalResponse

VerticalResponse, Inc. is the leading provider of email marketing applications as online services. VerticalReponse's self-service campaign creation and deployment application, iBuilder, allows businesses of any size to quickly create and affordably deliver email marketing campaigns regardless of technical expertise. Today, 20,000 businesses including Brookstone, ACT!, The Breast Cancer Fund, Gardeners Eden and PetCareRx have registered to use iBuilder to power their email marketing programs.

VerticalResponse was founded in 2001 by a team of direct marketing and email technology experts that designed and managed one of the first email marketing engines ever built. VerticalResponse is headquartered in San Francisco and can be reached via their Web site at http://www.verticalresponse.com or by phone at 1-866-683-7842.