Conference Overload

Our little email/online marketing industry is overrun with conferences.  It’s completely out of control.  I’m surprised no one else has started complaining or blogging about it, so let me be the first.  Here’s an incomplete inventory of but a few months of what our team is attending:

February — DKIM Implentation Summit, MAAWG, DMA Financial Services Conference, RSA

March — DMA Leaders Forum, ARF Annual

April — ESPC Deliverability Boot Camp, Email Authentication Summit, Marketing Sherpa, DMA Direct Marketing to Business Conference, MRA 20th Anniversary Show

May — Catalog Conference, Mediapost’s Email Insider Summit, ISPCON, INBOX

June — DoubleClick/Epsilon Email Conference, DM Days, MAAWG, Ad:Tech, MRA Annual, AMA ART, CASRO

Plus a few other smaller local events and customer conferences.  All I can say is Whew!

I realize that some of the problem here is that our business is diverse enough that we get invited to a wider range of conferences, and we certainly never complain about speaking opportunities — but this is starting to get expensive and dilutive.  And it’s hard to say no to a conference when the conference organizers make sure your competitors are going to be there.

5 Ways to Spot Trends That Will Make You (and Your Business) More Successful

I’ve recently started writing a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. Ken has been covering email for a long time and is one of the smartest journalists I know in this space. My column, which I share with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey, covers how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Below is a re-post of this week’s version, which I think my OnlyOnce readers will enjoy.

Last week I published my annual “Unpredictions” for 2011. This tradition grew out of the fact that I hate doing predictions and my marketing team loves them. So we compromise by predicting what won’t happen.

But the truth is that the annual prediction ritual – while trite – is really just trend-spotting. And trend-spotting is an important skill for entrepreneurs. Fortunately it’s a skill that can be acquired, at least it can with enough deliberate practice (another skill I talk about here).

Here are five habits you should consider cultivating if being a better trend spotter is in your career roadmap.

Read voraciously. I read about 50 books every year.  About half of them are business books, and I also mix in a bit of fiction, humor, American history, architecture and urban planning, and evolutionary biology.  I keep up with more than 50 blogs and I read all the trade publications that cover email.  I also read the Wall Street Journal and The Economist regularly.  What you read is a little less important than just reading a lot, and diversely.

Use social media (wisely). Julia Child once said that the key to success in life was having great parents. My advice to you is quite a bit simpler:  make friends with smart people. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others have given us a window into the world unlike any other. Status updates, tweets, and – maybe most important of all – links shared by your network of friends and colleagues gives you a sense of what people are talking about, thinking about and working on. And you can’t just lurk.  You actually have to be “in” to get something “out.”

Follow the money. Pay attention to where money gets invested and spent. This includes keeping an eye on venture capital, private equity, and the public markets, as well as where clients (mostly IT and marketing departments) are spending their dollars and what kinds of people they are hiring. Money flows toward ideas that people think will succeed. A pattern of investments in particular areas will give you clues to what might be the big ideas over the next five to 10 years.

Get out of the office: I think it’s hugely important for anyone in business, and especially entrepreneurs, to spend time in the world to get fresh perspectives. I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but our head of product management, Mike Mills, frequently refers to the NIHITO principle – Nothing Interesting Happens in the Office.  Now that’s not entirely true – running a company means needing to spend a huge amount of time with people and on people issues, but last year I traveled nearly 160,000 miles around the world meeting with prospect, clients, partners and industry luminaries. You don’t have to be a road warrior to get this one right – you can attend events in your local area, develop a local network of people you can meet with regularly – but you do have to get out there.

Take a break. While you need information to understand trends, you can quickly get overloaded with too much data.  Trend spotting is, in many ways, about pattern recognition. And that is often easier to do when your mind is relaxed.  Ever notice that you have moments of true epiphany in the shower or while running? Give yourself time every week to unplug and let your mind recharge. As Steven Covey says, “sharpen that saw”!

Business Week just ran an interesting article entitled “I’m a Bad Boss? Blame My Dad,” which unfortunately I can’t link to because Business Week online is for subscribers only. The premise of the article is that our past is always with us…that the patterns of behavior established in our home environments as children inexorably follow us to the workplace.

You may or may not agree with the premise — certainly, there is at least a little truth in it — but the article had another interesting statement:

CEOs often get hired for their skills, and fired for their personalities.

I’ve always felt that Boards and CEOs need to view “personality,” that is to say, the softer skills, as equally important to the classic skills: strategy, analytics, finance, sales, and hard-nosed execution. People who can do all of those things well but who can’t inspire others, show empathy, balance self-confidence with humility, communicate properly and clearly, and operate with a high degree of integrity, will fail as a CEO in the long term. I’m not sure how Boards and hiring committees can adequately screen for those characteristics in advance, but they certainly should!

And for the record, if I’m a bad boss, I blame myself. If I’m a good boss, I am happy to give my parents credit.

No Recession at Return Path

I know, I know.  I shouldn’t jinx us.  But we’re growing like mad at the moment, so much so that we have well almost 50 open positions now across all divisions of the company.  If you want to come join one of the fastest growing, most innovative, and just plain coolest places to work in the industry, we’d love to talk to you.

What’s driving the growth? 

• All our operating units have open positions.  Sender Score (deliverability/whitelisting) has the most openings and is growing explosively.  But Authentic Response (market research) and Postmaster (lead generation) both have openings as well
• Geographic expansion.  We have a bunch of openings in Europe as well as in the U.S.  Other parts of the world…stay tuned for later in the year (or let us know now that you are interested once we get to your corner of the globe)
• The power of email.  Parts of the economy may be a bit choppy now, but online marketing, and email in particular, are going strong.  Clients are finding the e-channels to be more and more effective and efficient ways of driving sales and customer loyalty

Visit the careers page at our web site to have a look — all the new jobs probably aren’t posted yet, but many are, and the rest are on the way shortly.  This is a fun and exciting and rewarding place to work.  Trust me.  I’m completely unbiased.  No, really.  Come join the team, or refer others!

SUGGing and FRUGGing: Practices as Ugly as They Sound

(Below is the beginning of my December column for DM News.)

We love surveys. Though many people in direct marketing don’t know it, we have a large business unit, Authentic Response, that provides a global online sample aimed at helping market researchers connect with qualified panelists via our MyView portal. And, like most companies, we use surveys to get a read on what our customers want from us and how we can improve their experience with us.
Market research is an industry that prides itself on accuracy and purity of data, which is why I want to use this column to let direct marketers know how painful it is when companies poison the market research well by engaging in SUGGing and FRUGGing.  For the uninitiated, SUGGing is the acronym for…(Read the rest at DMNews here.)

The Very Unfriendly Skies of United

The 6 a.m. flight from LaGuardia to Denver is unpleasant to begin with, but the idiots who set customer-facing policies at United seem to have found a new way of making it even less pleasant.

I’ve long-hated United’s “Economy Plus” seating, which gives the first 5-10 rows of coach a huge amount of leg room at the expense of all the other rows in coach.  American, by contrast, has more leg room in all rows of coach, so I can actually work in any seat on an American plane, laptop and all.  On United, the seats in the majority of coach are almost unworkable.

United used to just automatically put you in Economy Plus if you were a frequent flier with status.  But now United is taking Economy Plus to a new level — they’re automatically NOT putting you in Economy Plus and then charging more for it on the spot.  You can move yourself into Economy Plus for free online ahead of time, assuming there are open seats in it.  So really, the new policy is just designed to hold a gun to customers’ heads at the airport.

This morning’s flight is a prime example of how not to treat your customers.  It’s 6 a.m., and coach is maybe — maybe — half full.  And the announcement comes on that United’s new policy is that you are forbidden to move seats into Economy Plus after takeoff, even if there are open seats (which there are).  You can only do that if you pay $44, and a United representative would be happy to take that money at any time.

My colleague Angela had the best line on this situation — it’s as if United has put up an invisible electric fence in the middle of coach.  Whether or not there’s a ringing and a shock, it certainly feels like United is treating its customers like dogs.  They now join my customer service Hall of Shame along with Verizon (the anchor tenant) and Fedex/Kinko’s.

A Thankful Moment

While there are certainly some aspects of being a CEO that are full of those proverbial thankless tasks…there are some moments that are just the opposite.  And boy are those rewarding.

I had one this morning.  While I frequently get nice emails or handwritten cards from employees after they interview or start or get a promotion or raise — and those are all great — this is one I can easily blog about because it’s online.

Yesterday was the first official day of work for Neil Schwartzman, who actually joined us many months ago as a consultant running compliance for our Sender Score Certified whitelist but just finally became a full-time employee as we set up a Canadian entity and International entity and whatever our lawyers and accountants told us we had to do in order to be legit about hiring out of the country.

Neil’s thank you post is very entertaining (I promise, our objective isn’t to have employees drinking and slacking off!), but more than that, rewarding in that he says we do a good job at Return Path of walking the walk around ethics, reputation, and high standards in what we do for the email ecosystem.  Now that’s rewarding.

But in some ways, it’s even more meaningful coming from Neil.  Just as he says he took a risk in coming to work with us, we took a risk in bringing him on board.  As a leading voice in the anti-spam community, Neil is exactly the kind of person that spooks out some of our clients who think of anti-spammers as the enemy.  Our view is, as you can imagine, more nuanced.  Anti-spammers who do their job well are a legitimate marketer’s best friend because they are keeping the inbox clean of actual spam.  As we tell our clients, we are a big tent here — the only way we will solve our clients’ deliverability problems is by working WITH the receivers of the world on common language, rules, standards, and metrics — not working AGAINST them.  And that’s where Neil has done such a great job for us so far — bringing his unique perspective on the spam problem and working alongside many others on our deliverability team like Tom Bartel, Tom Sather, Leslie Price, Melinda Plemel to help keep the world safe for email.

So thanks, Neil…and right back at you!

Book Short:  Blogging Alone?

I usually only blog about business books, but since I read Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam, because of its connection to the topic of Internet community and social media, I’ll record some thoughts about and from it here.

It’s an interesting read, although a little long.  Putnam’s basic thesis is that America’s social capital — the things that have brought us physically and emotionally together as a country throughout much of the 20th century such as church, voting, and participation in civic organizations like the PTA or the Elks Club — are all severely on the decline.  The reasons in Putnam’s view are television (you knew all those re-runs of The Brady Bunch would eventually catch up to you), suburban sprawl, two-career families, and “generational values,” which is Putnam’s way of saying things like people in their 60s all read newspapers more than people in their 50s, who all read newspapers more than people in their 40s, etc.  He believes the decline is leading to things like worse schools, less safe neighborhoods, and poorer health.

The book does a good job laying out the decline in social capital with some really interesting and somewhat stunning numbers, but the book’s biggest shortcoming is that Putnam doesn’t do the work to determine causation.  I buy that there’s a correlation between less voting and less safe neighborhoods, for example, but the book doesn’t convince me that A caused B as opposed to B causing A, or C causing both A and B.  What I really wanted at the end of the book was for Putnam to go mano-a-mano with the Freakonomics guy for a couple hours.  Preferably in those big fake sumo suits.

The book was published in 2000, so probably written from 1997-1999, and therefore its treatment of the Internet was a little dated — so I found myself wanting more on that topic since so much of the social media revolution on the Internet is post-2004.  His basic view of the Internet is that it is in fact a bright spot in the decline of community, but that it’s changing the nature of communities.  Now instead of chatting with whoever is bowling in the next lane over at the Tuesday night bowling league on Main Street, we are in an online discussion group with other people who own 1973 BMW 2002 series cars, preferably the turbo-charged ones.  So the micro-communities of the Internet circa 2000 are more egalitarian (“on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog”), but more narrow as well around interests and values.

What has social media done to Putnam’s theories in the last seven or eight years?  How have things like blogging, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Photobucket changed our concept of community in America or in the world at large?  I welcome your comments on this and will write more about it in the future.

Unleashing the True Power of Email

A recent Behavioral Insider column had a truly tantalizing quote from iPost’s Steve Webster:

"There is the presumption that when someone receives an email message they then click on the email go to the Web site and either make a purchase or not and then they are done interacting with your email. This turned out to be wrong. We discovered very quickly that the power of an email impression lasts for weeks after the customer has actually received the message. The particular interaction they will have with you later really depends more on their personal preferences than on your putting a new email in front of them."

The highlighted portion is a point we’ve been making here at Return Path for years now.  Emails are not perceived by recipients as distinct, one-off promotions.  But many marketers continue to view them that way and make both strategic and tactical errors because of that.  Here are a five things you need to start doing – right now – if you want to capitalize on the true power of email:

1. Stop analyzing each email in a vacuum.  The whole is worth more than the sum of the parts.  The deeper you can dive into your data and analyze the whole program and how recipients interact (or don’t) the better decisions you can make.  Be sure to read the entire Behavioral Insider column – some of the tests they describe around segmentation reveal how email does or doesn’t influence purchasing and how it can be used more effectively.

2. Sending ever more email isn’t the answer.  To the point above, more email seldom makes buyers buy more.  Marketers don’t quite believe this because every email blast they deploy results in revenue.  But the point this column makes is that you have to look at what is happening at the individual level.  It soon becomes clear that sending targeted, segmented email – less email per person – is more effective.

3. Look past the click. As a corollary to #1, many marketers believe if a subscriber doesn’t click, they haven’t interacted.  This clearly isn’t the case.  The smartest marketers segment their non-clickers into buckets.  For example, a retailer might look at non-clickers who are openers, online purchasers, site browsers or in-store purchasers.  If you have an email recipient who browses your website every other week and then purchases in store once per quarter, it is nutty to assume that the email isn’t influencing that just because they don’t click through.

4. Reliance on CPA is going to bite you.  Yesterday my colleague Craig Swerdloff wrote about CPA versus CPM in list rental on the Return Path corporate blog.  Marketers believe that CPA is the best deal for them because they only pay for performance.  The problem is that CPA often requires a very high degree of volume to achieve success for both publisher and marketer.  All those extra emails don’t just self-destruct and wipe the memory of the recipient who doesn’t take your "action."  They’ve still made an impression – positive or negative.  Both CPA and CPM can be effective, but you need to work with an expert who understands that email is about more than clicks.

5. Permission + value = ROI. Steve Webster’s quote goes on to point out that "We thought the quality of the … creative made all the difference. It turns out that it does – but not nearly as much as the fact that [the email] made an impression on a customer who actually was interested in receiving an email from you."  Sending email without permission, as defined by the customer not by you, is a non-starter.  The first step is getting that person to proactively sign up, and then making sure they recognize your emails as desired.  Then the value piece kicks in.  Do you send what you promised?  Do your emails exceed their expectations?  Do you delight them?  The more yeses you rack up there, the more revenue your email will generate.

New Media’s Influence on the Traditional

Last week, DMNews unveiled its new look and feel and format (of the print publication) at the DMA’s annual convention in Chicago.  Hats off to Publisher Julia Hood and Editor-in-Chief Elly Trickett for diving in and coming up with some great improvements to the publication so quickly after taking the reigns.

What I find particularly interesting about the new format is that its design and even content structure seem to borrow heavily from the world of online media,  such as:

• A top-of-page “navigation bar” that tells you at a glance what articles are on the page (email, circulation, multichannel, legislation, lists, etc.) so you can flip pages and figure out quickly where to stop based on your interests
• MUCH shorter news briefs
• More “fixed” topic sections that are (I think) meant to be recurring in every issue…”Gloves off,” “Duly noted,” “Nailed it”
• “Key points” call-outs of an article etc. instead of all the long form of the prior generation of the publication
• A section called “data bank” that is almost like an analytics widget

I had been ignoring the print edition for several months, assuming I’d catch any critical articles to me via the web site, keyword feeds, and the email newsletter.  But this new format will definitely have me back to at least flipping through the print edition looking for relevant articles.

Help Me, Help You, Part II

Thanks to the nearly 100 readers who responded to my reader survey this past week.  While I’m not sure it’s a truly statistically significant base of OnlyOnce’s audience (I’ll have to ask my friends over at Authentic Response), I’ll treat it like it is.  Here’s what I learned.  First, the general results:

• Satisfaction levels are good – 46% are regular readers and love it, 48% read occasionally and think it’s ok, and only 6% gave it an “eh – wouldn’t miss it if it went away”
• Entrepreneurship is the most popular topic, with 86% interest, and Leadership/Management is a close second at 82%.  Online/Email Marketing came in at 61% and Book Reviews at 43%.  Current Affairs and Travel (which I almost never use) were 31% and 25%, respectively
• 72% of people feel frequency at 1-2 posts a week is on target.  Only 4.5% want fewer posts, and 24% (those kind souls) want it more often
• Most people other than Return Path staff found the site through a link on another blog rather than search

Next, the open-ended comments were interesting.  A summary snapshot:

• Positive comments were generally about tone and candid approach, succinct posts, and topics.  One nice person noted his/her favorite thing was “the author” (thank you Mom/Dad/Grandma/Mariquita/Michael)
• Constructive comments varied.  Some good ones are noted below:
• “assumes a level of knowledge not everyone has”
• “too heralding of the VC view of the world”
• “too much focus on email/marketing,” “too local/American” (that’s who I am, though)
• “ I would like to see more about what it takes to be a CEO in day to day operations. what skills do you find you need, what obstacles do you come across, issues with driving a company.”
• “A little too much PRish in regards to Return Path”
• “It seems like everything you write about is too positive. Or at least a negative story with a happy ending. Nothing about what sucks to run a company. I run one and a lot of it does suck.”
• “Not enough personal stuff — who is the author?” (see the About Me link on the blog)
  
• “The word vigilante is bandied around way too much by the author”
• And of course someone noted as constructive feedback that I haven’t yet mentioned my mother’s name (sorry, Mom/Joyce!).  And one person suggested I shave.  Thanks, really.

Finally, the demographics of my audience:

• 3 % are under 24, 45% are 25-34, 41% are 35-49, 11% are over 49
• 80% male and 20% female (surprising)
• Company data wasn’t so interesting, or I phrased the question poorly – but one takeaway is that about 1/2 of readers seem to be “in the industry” generally speaking, with lots of Return Path staff subscribing as well as lots of other entrepreneurs and a handful of VCs
• Level/title was more interesting – nearly half the audience is SVP-level or above at their company

Thanks again, everyone, and I’ll take note of this feedback for future postings!