Posterous launches small business email marketing tool

Microblogging site Posterous launched a tool March 28 that allows users to send posts as email newsletters. The company developed the tool for small businesses, which account for more than 20% of its membership, as a complement to the site's social media management capabilities, said Rich Pearson, VP of marketing and business development at Posterous.

After a consumer opts-in to subscribe to a Posterous feed, they will receive an email every time an author submits a post to the platform. The marketer will appear as the sender, and the post's title will appear as the subject line. Any multimedia content included in the post will run inline in the newsletter.

Posterous is working with email delivery provider SendGrid to ensure the messages are not routed into subscribers' spam folders.

“Small businesses don't have the time to create content in multiple places. So if you have a newsletter service and you have a blogging service, you have to copy and paste and reformat, and it's a big hassle,” he said. “This makes it so that with one email, you can share with all your social networks and you can share with your customers.”

Pearson added that Posterous developed the tool after its small business users “wanted us to extend more into reaching their customers.”

Subscribers will be able to reply to each newsletter, and the author will be able to determine whether to feature those replies as comments on their Posterous page.

The company is planning to roll out additional email marketing tools by June that will let users control who receives newsletters, as well as format them to resemble their site, including the addition of company logos, said Pearson.