One of the interesting developments in Martech has been the emergence of the ESP-centric marketing stack. Companies start off as email service providers then – because they have PII – start to say things like “wouldn’t it be great if we got customers to put ALL of their touchpoint efforts under one roof…let’s start gobbling up companies!” Companies then spend a lot of effort developing PowerPoints and videos that show a multi-touch, multi-channel customer marketing effort with customers so happy that it’s a no-brainer to buy into the vision.
NeverBounce is a Cleveland, OH based Email Verification company that began life as a digital marketing agency.
MessageGears is an Atlanta-based ESP that works with large B2C Enterprise brands such as Expedia, Chick-fil-a, and Ebates. They have what they term a Hybrid system (that we will get into in a bit) which provides their main differentiation and selling point. They see the three main requirements for any ESP working with these types of clients to be:
This week, we are looking under the hood of Fresh Relevance, who provides real-time personalization and automation across email and web to optimize revenue for e-commerce companies. Based in the UK with US offices in Boston, they enable marketers to track all behavior in real-time and use this data to personalize the shoppers journey on all channels and devices. They boast about 550 websites using their technology.
If your business collects personal data from people residing in the European Union, regardless of where in the world your business is based, then it’s most likely in progress with an implementation plan to comply with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that comes into effect on May 25, 2018. If your business falls into the first bucket but hasn’t started yet, then it’s as late as being a 50-mile drive away from its best friend’s wedding that starts in 4 minutes.
Personalization has been a common term in the email industry for years. The theory is that if you customize and personalize an email message, the recipient is much more likely to engage with the content, more likely to open, and more likely to click through. The problem is that different people have different ideas what personalization means.
In today’s Unboxing article we look at Ongage, a seven year old profitable email marketing technology company based in Israel with corporate offices in New York City. Ongage has carved out a very unique niche for themselves in the email technology universe as an independent front end for ESP’s and SMTP’s with their sweet spot being the SMTP/MTA world which often lacks a front end of their own. It also allows you to integrate multiple SMTP’s into a single common interface. Let’s open it up and look under the hood, starting with the list of recommended vendors that Ongage has integrated with:
For our first Unboxing article of 2018, we are going to examine dynamically generated content creation in email developed by Movable Ink. Look for a new Unboxing article each month.
This year I asked the members of Only Influencers to brag about their accomplishments for 2017. The response was outstanding and we will be making this an annual event. So, here is what the members of email marketing community accomplished this year:
To respond or not to respond is always the question. Some marketing automation platforms have taken the position that they will not respond to RFPs during the sales process because it is not the best use of their time. However, I believe that RFPs can be highly informative and useful during the procurement process as long as they are written with intention. As RFP season begins to wrap up, I took stock in the different RFPs that crossed my desk. I reviewed countless RFPs this quarter, some good, some bad, some 125 pages long and I realized that many brands have no idea how to write an RFP for a marketing automation platform, so a generic procurement RFP template is wordsmithed to reflect marketing automation language. Below are some surefire tips to make sure that a salesperson does not fall asleep reading your RFP.
It never fails that a few months before a brand marketer is due to renew their marketing automation contract, they reach out to tell me that they are secretly looking to switch to a new platform and want my opinion. After we have spent a little time talking about their current state, what they want out of their future state and the business goals they are looking to accomplish, we usually determine that their current platform meets their needs. However, one thing always stands out, they typically need what I refer to as a “Marketing Automation Tune-Up,” which, simply put, is just recalibration and adjustment to what they are currently doing.
A few weeks ago I launched my latest Community, OnlyFounders.com. They say entrepreneurs want to change the world. That is a debatable statement. But one thing is clear, in my 20 years of being an entrepreneur the things that I have done that have literally changed the world all involved the communities I was involved with. Facilitating communication is one of the most powerful things you can do in your career as a digital marketer. So in honor of my 4th (most likely my last) community building effort, I thought I’d share what Ive learned over the last 20 years of the importance of community, the impact it can have, what makes a good community, and how to build one that engages and inspires people around the world. And perhaps even more importantly, how it changes you as not only a digital marketer, but as a human being.
As the tech industry takes a step forward in actively recruiting more female talent, it often takes two steps back when we hear about Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins or Susan Fowler’s blog post about her very strange year at UBER. While they sympathize and often empathize with these all too common tech stories, women in email marketing often find themselves caught in the middle of this discussion because they straddle the line between marketing and IT. They need to be both technical and creative to effectively do their jobs, and that becomes even more daunting if they have executive management who have little knowledge about their role or who aren’t as supportive as they could be.