Author Archive
EEC ’12 Sneak Peek Webinar
Free webinar alert!
This Thursday, February 2nd at 2pm EST, email marketing industry experts will offer a sneak peek at the hot topics and insightful nuggets of knowledge they’ll be sharing at the upcoming annual DMA/eec Email Evolution Conference.
Speakers include:
- Ryan Phelan, BlueHornet
- Seth Berman, BabyCenter.com
- Dennis Dayman, Eloqua
- Loren McDonald, Silverpop
- and our very own Jordan Cohen of Pontiflex
Register now for this free half hour webinar. We hope to see you there!
Celebrating the End of Append
The Magill Report, an industry trade publication for email marketing professionals, reported yesterday on the “bombshell” news that Experian CheetahMail, the world’s largest sender of commercial email, has decided to prohibit email appending by its clients.
Email appending has long been a controversial list growth tactic, in which email addresses are attached (or “appended”) to offline customer records (e.g., name + postal address) in order to send those customers email marketing communications. Appended recipients have never explicitly opted-in to receive email from the organizations conducting the append, their permission to receive email is “assumed” by virtue of having an existing business relationship (“EBR”) with the appending organization.
While perfectly legal under the U.S.’s national anti-spam law, the CAN-SPAM Act, the practice has long run afoul of consumer privacy advocates’ perspectives on ethical email marketing practices, as well as ISPs and end-recipients/consumers privacy expectations themselves. Last year MAAWG, the largest trade group representing ISPs and “anti-abuse desk” professionals, issued a formal declaration stating that email append is “a direct violation of core MAAWG values” and “an abusive practice.”
As Experian CheetahMail’s Privacy Leader Ben Isaacson wrote in a blog post last week, 10 years ago marketers faced the challenge of having minimal online presences and email addresses to mail to, creating greater urgency around, and ESP and marketing organization support for, practices like email append in order to quickly ramp up email marketing database sizes. Even then, the practice was a major trigger of ISP blocking and deliverability problems, and has only grown in deliverability disfavor since then. As Isaacson explains, by now, marketers have achieved “critical mass online and no longer needed this acquisition method to bolster their email programs. Today’s offline marketers collect customer emails at every point of sale, and even through new mobile and social media channels. There is no doubt that if a customer wants to subscribe to a marketers’ email list, they have ample opportunities to do so.“
Ben’s last point is especially noteworthy. He is rightfully saying that, by now, in the year 2012, it is time for the email marketing industry to stop treating customers like children who need email marketing opt-in decisions to be made for them. That by now, we should respect that everyone knows how to opt-in to receive the marketing communications that they actually want to receive by their own volition, and through multiple channels (whereas in the early days, they may have had to shlep to a desktop computer, then find a single web site and then single reg page and opt-in). And this ESPECIALLY applies to brands with whom they know and have an EBR with.
Most of all, this policy shift by Experian CheetahMail reflects forward thinking that embraces the notion that a paradigm shift toward “Craved-For Marketing” has occurred, and the world will never be the same. This shift is impacting the entire world of marketing, not just email’s quirky little part of it: People now fast-forward through TV commercials using their DVR, unless they actually are intrigued enough by the commercial’s content to continue watching it. Gone are the days of being subjected to the tyranny of media and marketers forcing commercials down their throats. And “The DVR-Effect” impacts every marketing channel you can think of.
Craved-For Marketing is no easy challenge. The gauntlet has been laid down, and marketers need to be more imaginative about what they can do with the huge opportunity presented to them by a subscriber’s actual, explicit opt-in. There is a large role for agencies and professional services groups within ESPs to step up to this challenge and I look forward to seeing more email marketers inject creativity and FUN into their email marketing efforts in 2012 and beyond. (See bullet #3 on my last post, “2012 Email Marketing Recommendations“).
I, for one, think that Experian CheetahMail has made the right decision by ending the practice of email append, and applaud them for doing so.
-Jordan Cohen, VP of Business Development
2012 Email Marketing Recommendations
Rather than predicting what will come in 2012, I have 3 recommendations to make. They are:
1) Launch your mobile website if you haven’t already. It just makes sense that the easier you make it for people to shop on their smartphones, the more likely they will be to do it (and to do it again, and again…) Nothing bothers me more than receiving a brilliantly mobile-optimized email template that then links to a non-mobile optimized web site. Seriously, what’s the point? Those who create an end-to-end mobile optimized experience will reap the rewards in 2012 and beyond.
2) Adopt an email first mentality. Email marketers are feeling a ton of pressure to weave “social integration” and even, gasp — “Social CRM” — into their 2012 planning, when many aren’t even using their own email clickstream data yet to improve email messaging segmentation and relevancy. Tell your CEO/CMO/Power-That-Be to chill and explain how much more you stand to gain by being given the resources you need to get the foundation of your email house in order.
3) Be CREATIVE. Regardless of where you stand on Groupon, those guys are email marketing royalty, with 150MM+ subscribers, a daily send schedule, and virtually zero problems when it comes to deliverability. That’s right — Groupon is a company that knows how to get into the inbox every time. The secret to their success? Check out the video or read the transcript of their feature on 60 Minutes last Sunday.
Stahl: What you did was you took a spam business, a junk mail business, and somehow made it entertaining and cool.
Mason: We do realize that we’re sending people an email every single day, and that could get annoying. So there’s gotta be something else there that keeps you engaged and keeps you from un-subscribing.
That something is the absurdist humor in the daily deal write-ups. Four hundred writers and editors – more than most newsrooms – come up with hundreds of these pitches a day, with twists of phrases and logic. Here’s one for a dentist: “Humans developed smiles as a way to deflect predators in the wild and former bosses in the grocery store.”
The loopy write-ups give Groupon its personality, which seems to seep down from the very top….
Aspire to make your emails craved by recipients in 2012. Invest in great creative and witty writing, and the world will be your oyster.
Good luck!
Jordan Cohen, VP of Business Development
ExactTarget Connections 2011
Pontiflex was proud to sponsor our ESP partner ExactTarget‘s annual Connections user conference in Indianapolis last week. About 3,000 email marketers were in attendance, making it one of the largest marketing conferences in the world. Everything about the event was world-class, and the experience began as soon as you stepped off the plane with a huge banner in the airport welcoming attendees to Indy and the show.
David Daniels from The Relevancy Group wrote a nice post covering many of the event’s highlights, including information about ExactTarget’s incredible year-over-year revenue growth and exciting new platform enhancements. Click here to check it out.
The highlight of the show for me was Aron Ralston‘s day 1 keynote speech. If that name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, Aron is the adventurer who got stuck between a rock and a hard place — literally — while hiking alone in the desolate canyons of Utah ~8 years ago (ultimately having to amputate his own arm to free himself from the giant boulder that was holding him hostage). Fitting with the overarching theme of “Connections,” Aron explained how the deep love of his family and friends sustained him for those desperate and lonely 127 hours; and how the urge to see them again was what eventually got him home. It was an honor to hear him speak, and to get to meet him afterwards. Here’s a picture of the 2 of us below! (Thanks to my colleague Jason Penta, VP of Client Services for snapping the photo).
left: Aron Ralston; right: Jordan Cohen, VP Business Development, Pontiflex
Meet Our New ESP Partner: StrongMail
We are proud to announce our newest ESP partner today, Redwood City, California-based StrongMail.
As noted in today’s press release, “the partnership [with Pontiflex] will enable StrongMail’s customers to effectively increase opt-in subscribers for their email, Facebook, Twitter and mobile app lists,” and at the same time, “StrongMail’s email marketing, social media and lifecycle marketing solutions make it easy for marketers to then engage these newly acquired customers with targeted messages…”
You can check out the full press release here.
Also, register for the free webinar we’re doing with them on Wednesday – there are still a few spots left.
Acquire, Engage, Influence…
Want to learn how to acquire new customers using Facebook, Twitter and Signup Ads?
We hope you’ll register for our ESP partner StrongMail‘s webinar next week, “New Strategies & Tools for Multi-channel Acquisition Marketing.” Learn how Fortune 500 brands are using word-of-mouth on Facebook and Twitter, and in-app signup advertising to find and acquire new customers.
Details:
Time: 11:00am PT / 2:00pm ETFeatured Speakers:
Tal Nathan, VP of Client Services, StrongMail
Jordan Cohen, VP of Business Development, Pontiflex
As consumers shift their media consumption habits, marketers must evolve their new customer acquisition strategies to encompass proven and emerging channels including email, social and mobile. Traditional acquisition methods are also evolving to embrace these new channels and transcend the limitations of first generation tactics.
This webinar will feature case studies from leading companies and outline the strategies, tools and technologies needed to acquire new customers, nurture them via social CRM and then mobilize that base of advocates to continuously feed your customer acquisition funnel.
Breaking Email Out of the DM Ghetto
I had the honor of speaking at two big annual email marketing events in the past 2 weeks: First, at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas, and then again earlier this week at the DMA’s annual Email Evolution Conference in Miami, Florida. Both of the panels I sat on focused on digital marketing integration best practices, with the former squarely focused on email-social media integration.
One concept that I was happy to get the chance to touch on was the need for email marketers to break out of the “direct response ghetto.” I argued that practitioners’ “buy now, buy now” mentality hampers the entire industry’s ability to capture the imagination of the C-suite.
CEOs love spending billions of dollars on Superbowl ads because they are fun, creative, and downright sexy. On the other hand, a never-ending series of “20% off if you buy now” coupons jammed into peoples’ inboxes is far from inspiring.
Like I told attendees at both events–social media is the salvation of email marketing. Here’s why:
- The people on the hook for social media marketing success are often the same people responsible for email marketing success (as was the case at Sherpa with my co-panelists from Threadless and Freshpair);
- Marketers get props for growing their social media presence regardless of whether they can quantify any hard sales from the channel. With social media, the C-suite gets that there is intrinsic value in having a large audience of identifiable individuals to communicate with;
- We can easily make the case to transfer that currency to email lists… We can and should rightfully argue that having a large list of email subscribers has just as much intrinsic value in and of itself, regardless of whether people buy in direct response to email marketing messages or engage with marketers’ brands in other ways (e.g., advocate brands to their friends and families)… And finally;
- Social media is “humanizing” email marketers… it is teaching marketers how to incorporate personas into their brands, and infuse all their messaging–email included–with personality and charisma. The email marketing leaders of tomorrow are using email to drive engagement with, and conversations about, their brands–not just immediate sales–and the only way to do that is to get creative, to be inspiring, and to give recipients something fun to do…
Once we capture the imaginations of the masses through email, capturing the C-suite’s will quickly follow. So forget everything you thought you knew… Leave the calculator at home… And for crying out loud stop analyzing everything to death… Tear down the walls that are holding you back and inject Superbowl-level thinking into your email marketing program.
Jordan Cohen
VP, Business Development
Pontiflex
Silicon Valley, Meet Silicon Alley
It isn’t always easy pulling us Pontiflexers away from our comfortable surroundings in DUMBO, Brooklyn, but every now and then there is something going on far, far away that we simply can’t miss. San Bruno, California-based Responsys‘s annual client summit, Interact 2011, certainly fits the bill.
Taking place at San Francisco’s Marriott Marquis Feb 15 – 17, Responsys has organized a truly world class event, with a speaker line-up that includes Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, Bonin Bough, global director of digital and social media for PepsiCo, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit.com and Shar Van Boskirk, Forrester Research’s veteran interactive marketing analyst. If that’s not impressive enough, Responsys also will be hosting a private concert featuring the one and only Cyndi Lauper!
Our partnership with Responsys demonstrates how great things happen when the best minds in Silicon Valley and New York’s re-energized Silicon Alley tech start-up scenes join forces. By integrating Pontiflex’s industry leading user acquisition platform with Responsys’s best-in-class email email marketing technology, marketers are able to maximize the effectiveness of both.
We hope you’ll visit our exhibit at next month’s event to learn more. Responsys has graciously extended a special $200 discount on conference registration for clients and friends of Pontiflex. Email Jordan – at – Pontiflex.com to request your private registration code. See you in San Francisco!
Communicating to your Subscribers, Fans, and Followers
We were delighted to host an event last night with our partner ExactTarget here in NYC in conjunction with ad:Tech NY. Held at the exclusive Blue Fin restaurant in Times Square, about 100 marketers, agencies and industry influencers mingled over top shelf cocktails, sushi, heavy apps, and, of course “fresh M&Ms”.
There was also a brief panel discussion that took place around the theme of “Communicating to your Subscribers, Fans, and Followers.” As always, we came prepared. I’m not sure how far I strayed from my original notes, but, for what it’s worth, here they are…
Part 1: Introducing the Topic: Communicating to your Subscribers, Fans, and Followers
- The topic of today’s panel really encapsulates a major theme that we’ve been talking about here at Pontiflex, which is that in today’s age of extreme media fragmentation and corresponding digital ADD, marketers need to adopt a ubiquity strategy and be where their customers are – relevantly.
- Email, Facebook and Twitter – not to mention mobile apps, SMS, BBM, IM, eReaders, tablet computers, television, radio, good old fashioned newspapers, etc etc are turning us into what industry analyst David Daniels calls a “Short Burst Society” – Marketers need to cut through the clutter and Burst through the noise in order to be relevant.
Part 2: How do you attain your subscribers, fans and followers?
- Marketers can’t afford to be complacent–they need to put signing up for their email lists FRONT AND CENTER, where their customers are, when they are there, and when they are in a moment of engagement. Here are a few examples:
- Scott’s lawn care puts “text to opt in” instructions on billboards at baseball games.
- Southwest Airlines does the same thing – on their in-flight cocktail napkins! (Check out this interesting post from DJ Waldow at Blue Sky Factory on how they do it).
- Tommy Hilfiger uses Pontiflex to run sign up ads on relevant publisher web sites and mobile apps to get people to opt in to hear about new fashion lines and events
- The ASPCA runs display banners that allow consumers to sign up directly inside the banner without ever leaving the site
- Marketers must always prioritize privacy when communicating with customers — both new and old.
- You wouldn’t want someone reading your name badge at a conference networking event without knowing and then using it to start emailing you. You’d rather that they came up to you and asked your permission to keep in touch. Ask me, don’t just start following me!
Part 3: How do you build the relationship and retain your subscribers, fans and followers?
- Just like first impressions in the real world, your welcome email and emails (plural) are key. If the first few meetings don’t go well, the relationship probably isn’t going to go very far. If they do go well, then you’re in business – at least in the short term, and – if you play your cards right – for a lifetime.
- Develop a thoughtful on-boarding strategy. Don’t just say “thanks for joining our list” and commence sending regular offers.
- Special introductory discounts and offers will make new customers feel valued.
- Start building social communities from the very first email.
- ASPCA includes links to “participate in the cause” on Twitter and Facebook and grew its presence on these sites 20-fold in one year, with email playing a large role.
- HUGGIES offered expecting mom’s a due-date widget
- Heinz put a link to a community site for its SmartOnes diet brand where people can share their weight loss stories
- The most important thing is to BE RELEVANT – if you have no interest and football and a person starts talking to you every morning about football, you’re going to tune that person out. Marketers need to continue moving away from broadcasting and to relevant, personal messaging – constantly listen to your customer and respond!
Special thanks to the ExactTarget team for organizing such a great event and including Pontiflex as a co-host. In particular, we’d like to give a shout out to Andy Clark, Kristen Neal, Lindsay Niemiec and panel moderator Rob Wiley — you guys rock!
AppLeads – Bursting Through the “Short Burst Society”
David Daniels, founder and CEO of The Relevancy Group has been called “one of the most influential experts in e-mail marketing, if not the most influential.” Needless to say, with creds like David’s, we are extremely proud to have received such a positive review of our new AppLeads technology on his blog yesterday.
Some especially nice tidbits from the post, titled “New Approaches to Subscriber Acquisition, Achievements That We Can’t Do Without”:
- “The smallscreen “smart” app based device will quickly become the fuel of our “Short Burst Society.”
- “Given my love of that notion that this “Short Burst Society” will guide what we as consumers deem as relevant, I am thrilled to see Pontiflex deliver a publisher and advertiser APP based email subscription network that lives within the application registration process.”
- “[Pontiflex's AppLeads] API/SDK allows their code to be infused in pane or landscape mode (think of apps that don’t work in landscape mode and your frustration when they don’t), so they are keen on the user experience. I dig that.”
David has been talking a lot lately about the “Short Burst Society.” “We’re now living in what I refer to as the ‘Short Burst Society’ in which consumers are time-starved with a shrinking attention span,” he said. “Even when pushing relevant messages, marketers still have a shorter opportunity to capture the consumer’s attention and drive corporate value.”
He’s right. And we’re thrilled that David agrees that AppLeads is a solution that bursts through the noise in today’s competitive and cluttered landscape.
Arun Krishnan
Jason Penta
zlasker
Roshan Bangera
Jordan Cohen
eadlman
Geoff Grauer
Jerrie Gullick
Jon Beardsley
Nick Herman
Stacy Huggins
Tiffany Sumner
Avantika Banerjee
Daniel Egan
Lisa Khan
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