Launching Email Marketing

My First Blog Post

Hey Folks – We’re publicly announcing Optify’s new Email Marketing solution today, so I thought I would seize the day and write my first post as Optify’s CEO. Needless to say, I have been briefing a lot of writers, analysts and partners about this launch, so it’s a nice change of pace to put some thoughts in writing. Although this is my inaugural post, you won’t find me being a stranger to our blog in the coming months, and no one will be ghost-writing my posts.

Why Email Marketing

For background, there was a non-trivial internal decision made last fall to help our customers follow their leads from our top-of-the-funnel inbound marketing solution down into the mid-funnel with email marketing. I am certain that decision was a good one. As our B2B marketing suite continues to expand, we will stay on pace to consolidate marketing functions in one place compared to the litany of point solutions that seem to pervade so many marketing departments. Importantly, we are in parallel enabling our customers to gather trend reporting and analytics from an increasing number of digital marketing channels in one place, and we now bring the email marketing channel into the analytics fold.

Like everything we do, Optify Email Marketing is designed first and foremost around ease-of-use. I was talking recently to a local vice president of marketing over coffee who was asking about our new product. He related to me how he really thought his Marketo system would start producing once he hired a “Marketo expert”. I told him dead-pan that the day I heard a VP of marketing tell me she needed to hire an “Optify expert” would be the day we had flat-out failed the ease-of-use litmus test so critical to SaaS (to say nothing of quadrupling the total cost of ownership). From our email templates, content editor, work flows, contact manager, and analytics that bring it all together, Optify Email Marketing is simple and accessible to the “I wear a lot of hats” marketer we work with so often.

As our customers have come to expect from Optify, we did it right. We built Optify Email Marketing on top of ExactTarget, the gold standard of email solutions. We knew that our professional B2B marketer customers had high expectations, and we aim to please. Not only do our customers get the world-class open rates and spam filter avoidance of Exact Target, but we also incorporated Exact Target’s best practices into our simple email workflows. We are very proud to be an official ExactTarget Embedded Partner. Be sure to ask your current email vendor how they stack up!

To enable email, we also created a contact manager that is enabled across our editions, whether or not a customer is also using email. We know that B2B marketers already have leads in Optify, but they also manipulate all sorts of lists – purchased lists, lists from other point systems, etc. Marketing lists tend to be much larger volume than sales lists, but they also contain less information – often just a name, email, and an industry or geography. We optimized our contact manager to be quick and easy to use for the B2B marketer who has a lot of lists but requires a lot lighter weight workflows and field capture than a heavy duty CRM system.

Closing the Loop

Finally and very uniquely to Optify, we are now “closing the loop” between inbound marketing and email marketing. To use a basic example, we participated in the SMX trade show here in Seattle last week. We loaded up the couple hundred business cards collected at the booth and sent them an email followup. Once they opened our email, any of those prospects who had previously been an anonymous visitor on our site in the weeks or months prior to the show show up as the specific person we emailed with all of their previous history on our site. Now we have a much better idea which trade show leads to prioritize, which leads are further along in their buying research, etc.

Big shout out to the Optify product development team to get this huge release to market and seamlessly integrated with our inbound marketing suite. I grabbed a quick iPhone snapshot of part of the team as I was writing this post, just to provide a mental picture to all of you of where the magic happens. I’m no photographer, so it may not completely show in the image, but suffice it to say the pedal is down!

 

Expect to see a lot more great and simple products from us. And I hope you take a look at Optify Email Marketing soon.

Rob - @RobertEleveld