David Wachs is senior VP of mobile at digital marketing firm ePrize.

How many texts would you say you send each day? Hmm … a lot.

Today, texting is everywhere and everything to consumers According to the CTIA, 2.27 trillion text messages are sent every year, in the US alone, which is 6.3 billion per day or about 20 text messages per person every day.

But despite these huge numbers, when it comes to brands reaching their consumers, email marketing is still the more commonly used tactic. Even though text message marketing — which includes coupons, special offers, and participation in loyalty programs — is redeemed 8 or more times frequently than email, email marketing continues to prevail.

Why are marketers so unsure about SMS as an effective marketing channel? Would marketers be more open to implementing SMS practices if it felt like less of a mystery and they learned how to use SMS in tandem with email-based campaigns?

Of course, email marketing does have its benefits and each channel should be used appropriately to communicate with customers.

In fact, when used in tandem with SMS, marketers can effectively reach their target audience, engaging with a robust, multi-channel communication stream. We’re all familiar with the pros of email, but when you take a step back and look at what SMS based programs can offer, you’ll see the huge opportunity that your brand is missing by not embracing SMS.

Don’t believe me? Here are five reasons that might change your mind.

1. Put simply, SMS marketing is more effective

The numbers don’t lie.

The open rate of text promotions/offers is a whopping 98%! Compare that to the 22% open rate of emails. While an email might sit in a customer’s inbox all day, a text is read within minutes, making it a great channel for flash sales and same-day promotions.

2. Reach a highly engaged audience

Consumers opt in to mobile programs and make a careful decision on which text campaigns they choose. This differs from email campaigns, where consumers subscribe more generally for brands they may only be temporarily interested in.

Because users limit themselves to brands they truly care about when opting into SMS promotions, brands are able to market more directly to a captive, and loyal, target audience.

3. Build your brand conversation

While email communication is a one-way street, people can actually reply to an SMS promotion and engage with the brand through two-way SMS dialog.

By opening the doors of conversation between brand and consumer, and creating customer engagement, marketers ultimately create a stronger relationship and build brand trust.

4. Sell more and drive awareness

Unlike email, which tends to drive online sales, text promotions drive engagement to bring consumers in-store.

Once in-store, the consumer is more likely to buy other attractive products, and a consumer’s basket size is on average three times larger than if you drove their purchase online. SMS gets your consumer in the store and opens their eyes to additional offerings they might not otherwise have been interested in.

5. Measure your ad value

With so many customer acquisition points with SMS programs, brands can easily track where users are texting in to join (via in-store advertising, print advertising, etc.) and measure the relative effectiveness of that advertisement. This allows marketers to measure advertising in a way like never before, and is a valuable tool for marketers.

Marketers know that in order to stay relevant, they have to be where their consumers are. And consumers are mobile! Since we know texting is one of the most popular mobile activities today, brands are missing out on a major opportunity by not leveraging SMS based marketing.

SMS practices are not just an efficient way to reach today’s consumer but also the most relevant way to engage with them, build brand trust, and even track the effectiveness of advertising. If you’re not already engaging with customers via SMS based campaigns, it’s time to go mobile.

photo credit: Sifter via photopin cc

These technologies add email applications to your inbox; instead of a boring HTML message, you’ll be able to engage directly with multimedia content. For instance, you may receive a notification from Kickstarter about a cool project. Without clicking away from your inbox, you’ll be able to watch the video and “like” the page.

In the wake of the merger, the new company (which will go by “PowerInbox”) has pulled in $10 million in funding from Atlas Ventures, Longworth Partners, Battery Ventures, Genesis, GIMV, and Correlation Ventures.

The new company will have offices in Cambridge, MA: New York City; and Tel Aviv. The CEO will be ActivePath chief executive Jeff Kupietzky. PowerInbox founders Matt Thazhmon, Dileep Thazhmon, and Lance Jackson will focus on product development.

United, these companies are a powerful force. More than 50 email applications will serve 500,000 users, who will collectively receive 5 million emails per year.

As is to be expected with M&A, Dileep Thazhmon, the COO of the new entity, told VentureBeat that there will be a few routine layoffs on ActivePath’s team. The combined team will include just 17 people.

“Rather than using our resources to compete with each other, we are going to work together,” said Thazhmon in a phone interview with VentureBeat.

The team will be squarely focused on building out the product and pitching its technology to Fortune 500 companies. Thazhmon said the company will push its product to email marketing service providers such as Constant Contact and MailChimp.

“We see email as ripe for innovation and believe both companies are bringing complementary experience to exploit this huge opportunity. Putting the teams together just makes sense and is a great way to establish the industry standard for interactive mail,” said Scott Tobin, partner at Battery Ventures and a PowerInbox board member, in a statement on the news.

Interactive email image // Urfin, Shutterstock 

LocBox wants to be the alternative to Groupon, Living Social and the host of flash sales sites, and has raised over $5 million in its quest to win over small businesses.

The San Francisco-based startup helps businesses run marketing campaigns. The idea is that Groupon and the like can pull customers into a store to pick up a one-off promotion, but they can’t drive long-term loyalty.

Founder Saumil Mehta said he would inspired to create a product that his parents, both small business-owners, would actually use.

“I called hundreds local businesses early last year and discovered that they really needed help with sustainable revenue and foot traffic from loyal and new customers,” Mehta told me. He explained that traditional methods and channels (Yellow Pages, for instance) are no longer reliable but the channels were either overwhelming, unsustainable, or had tenuous return on investment (ROI).

Prior to founding the company, Mehta was the director of product at Kosmix, a social media technology that was later acquired by Wal-Mart.

“I decided to help them [small businesses] by building a product,’ Mehta continued. Using LocBox, businesses can better organize their efforts if Twitter, Facebook and email content is pulled into a single dashboard. In its beta phase, the technology is currently used by several hundred customers (primarily health spas and small medical practices) who have run thousands of campaigns.

The market is flooded with email and social media marketing tools that cater to small businesses, including MailChimp and Constant Contact. Many of these tools offer sophisticated analytics on the front-end so customers can tell if their campaigns are actually working. Mehta claims to have “better targeting algorithms” than the competition.

Sign up to the site, and a potential customer will receive an overview of their current online and social media presence, and a recommendation for a marketing and social media campaign. If they decide to run it, LocBox offers a flexible price that is based on previous, similar campaigns.

It’s a crowded space, but investors see a gap in the market for this kind of consolidated dashboard. Investors in the round include InterWest Partners, Google Ventures and 500Startups, with additional investments from angel investors including Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan of WalmartLabs, and Deep Nishar, senior VP of products and user experience at LinkedIn.

Image via Shutterstock

Epsilon

Epsilon said that only 2 percent of its users had their name and email stolen. But that could add up to a very large number of users — surely in the millions — as Epsilon handles email marketing services for more than 2,500 companies. The problem is that cyber criminals can now use those email lists to send phishing attacks — with personalized messages from brands that consumers do business with — that could be much more effective than random email spam. The company says a full investigation is underway.

I received two emails — yeah, can you beat that number? — from some of those brands saying that my data had been leaked and that I should beware of suspicious emails. If you have signed up for or opted into email or other digital marketing campaigns from the affected brands, there’s a chance the thieves have your name and email. Epsilon sends billions of emails a year on behalf of its clients. That is jarring for consumers, since they’re getting emails today from brands who say they turned over their email address and the name that goes with it to an outsourcing company, Epsilon, that nobody ever heard about. The advice for now is, don’t respond to any new messages coming from these brands, and certainly don’t click on anything in your warning email.

Best Buy, one of the chains that was hit, told customers that it will never ask anyone to provide information such as credit card numbers unless they are on its secure e-commerce site http://www.bestbuy.com. If you receive an email asking for the personal information, you should delete it because “it did not come from Best Buy.” Citibank told customers it would send emails using your first and last name, the last four digits of a Citi credit account number, and the “member since” date to show that it’s a legitimate email.

The list includes the following companies. Please leave comments below about how many times your email was stolen and whether there are more companies than the ones below that are affected:

Target
Best Buy
Walgreen’s
Capital One
TiVo
JP Morgan Chase & Co.
Kroger
US Bank
Citi
McKinsey & Company
Ritz-Carlton Rewards
Marriott Rewards
New York & Company
Brookstone
The College Board
Home Shopping Network (HSN)
LL Bean
Disney Destinations
Barclays Bank of Delaware

[image credit: malwareresearchgroup]

The company targets small businesses looking to do more with their email lists. Once launched, customers upload their email lists, either manually or by importing them from mail services like Google’s Gmail. The service matches social profiles on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to the email addresses. The list also shows the person’s location and ranking on Klout, a tool that determines a person’s influence among users of the Twitter microblogging service.

Once the social data is available, the customer can create marketing campaigns. Similar to sending a basic email, the campaign includes a subject title and body of text. The only difference is that the customer chooses a social channel on which to send the message, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr and StumbleUpon. For example, a customer could create a specific message, such as “I found you on Twitter,” to go to the people who have Twitter profiles within their email list.

The company says its service integrates with other businesses tools, such as MailChimp, iContact, CampaignMonitor, BatchBook, and Wufoo. Interestingly, MailChimp appears to have its own social aggregation tool for email lists.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2009, claims to be working with more than 15,000 businesses. Investors include Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Software; Mark Goines, a former Mint.com board member; Dave McClure of 500 Startups; Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures; Saar Gur at Charles River Ventures; and Travis Kalanick, Auren Hoffman, Brian Norgard, and Dan Gould.

Sailthru offers several email tools that can be used by companies to optimize outbound email marketing campaigns as well as manage service providers. The first tool, Triggermail, monitors emails sent to customers and what happens once it reaches their inboxes. The second tool, Horizon, tracks customers browsing habits on their websites and helps to format and send customized newsletters based on the information collected. Lastly, GetConnect aggregates email services so that users can send email from one tool, rather than sending via a bunch of different tools separately.

The company claims it doesn’t have any direct competition, though there are others that do enable and track outbound email marketing such as Constant Contact and Exact Target. But Sailthru appears to be the only one optimizing company newsletters based on browsing habits.

The New York City-based company, founded in 2008, is working with a variety of companies, including Business Insider, Tumblr, Bit.ly, OMGPOP, WeGame.com and MusicNation.com.

Funding was led by DFJ Gotham and included Metamorphic, RRE, Pilot Group, Thrive and Lerer Media.

Email marketing can be a great way for small businesses to target a specific group of potential customers. Looking to bring advanced email marketing features to the main stage, Infusionsoft today announced the launch of its Email Marketing 2.0 services with several advanced features.

Infusionsoft’s Email Marketing 2.0 services targets small businesses with 2 to 25 employees who are looking to bring their email campaigns to the next level using special software. The service automatically responds and adapts to customer feedback, helping to optimize campaigns and making the possibility for increased sales and customer service more of a reality. Infusionsoft gives small businesses a one-stop shop for email services, including customer databases and the ability to send multiple forms of messages like postcards or voice messages. A new authoring tool will allow users to customize emails based on any uploaded image or company logo, creating HTML emails without messing with code.

A whole host of marketing companies exist that can help you to optimize your email campaigns and keep tabs on a evolving customer base, including Constant Contact and CRMSugar.

The Gilbert, Arizona-based company, founded in 2001, has had two rounds of funding for a total of $17 million. Here’s a video interview by Dean Takahashi with Infusionsoft co-founder Scott Martineau.