1. Tell us about your role in BounceX?
As AVP of Marketing, I oversee brand, content, and digital demand gen. My role, in essence, is to help define BounceX’s story, determine the best ways to package it up and broadcast that story to our audience to cut through the rest of the noise in SaaS.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
Before getting into MarTech I was actually on the retail side of the table, most recently working on the global marketing team at well-known international footwear brand. My focus was initially on experiential marketing and customer engagement, but over time, I transitioned more into the performance marketing world – primarily around conversion rate optimization. That, along with the desire to join what was at the time an early stage startup, led me to BounceX.
3. How do you think technology is upgrading marketing Sector?
At the highest level, as technology has improved it’s made it easier and faster for consumers to find and purchase the things that they want or need. Time is the most valuable and scarce resource that people have, and as technology improves, friction in the shopping experience decreases. This means that consumers spend less time getting their hands on the things they need and more time enjoying them.
4. How has digitalization contributed in the growth of marketing organizations?
“Marketing” encompasses so much more today than it did even 10 years ago, which has made marketing organizations much more diverse, in terms of personnel and skillsets. I think when the average person tries to picture a marketer, they instantly go to a character out of Mad Men, but the person managing performance media is much closer to a statistician than that traditional archetype.
5. How do you define your Behavioral Marketing Platform?
Our product is a performance marketing engine powered by unique device identification technology. We allow online businesses to better recognize the traffic on their site in real-time and scale their personalization efforts to visitors who appear anonymous, but shouldn’t be.
6. Can you explain how does your behavioral automation software and analytics help in better customer engagement?
Let’s use abandonment emails as a tangible example. Since the send and content are both influenced by user behavior, they’re significantly more relevant than the generic batch-and-blast marketing email. Because of this, they drive much higher customer engagement, with 2x higher open-rates and click-rates, and 4x higher conversion rates.
However, most retailers today only send these emails to logged in traffic, but miss the significant percentage of website visitors who are opted-in to email, but otherwise anonymous. That means very few shoppers actually receive these more engaging emails. By connecting more visitors to contacts in their database, we’re able to drive 7x more conversions from that channel for our clients.
7. We recently covered the news about the partnership of BounceX with Emarsys, how will this partnership benefit your customers?
With this partnership, our customers benefit from even better identification rates than they did prior to the integration, which means even better performance for their email channel. It also allows BounceX campaign data to flow seamlessly into Emarsys, so clients get better visibility and control over an increasingly complex customer journey.
8. What advice would you like to give to the technology Start Ups?
The early days are a grind, and it’s easy to get tempted into raising a big round of funding too soon. In some ways it’s easier to raise a lot of money than it is a little bit of money. But with big rounds come big growth targets, which often incentivizes investing heavily into sales and marketing at the expense of product and customer success. This is where a lot of startups fail.
My advice would be to be aggressive, but smart. Find the things that work well and scale those until you can’t any more. Also,
Invest as much time and energy into the things that drive undeniable value for your clients.
9. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
Check your ego at the door. I think it’s, understandably, hard for a lot of people to come to terms with the fact that a machine can outsmart years of marketing expertise and best practices. The fact is, we’ve “manually” optimized to the point of diminishing returns in a lot of areas. I think we still have a lot of noise to work through in the short term, but this is where AI can step in and spot trends that we never would to take things to the next level. Early adopters can sometimes get burned, but those who straight up dismiss AI will be passed by those who are taking the time to understand how they can best apply it down the line.
10. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
I’d be nothing without my team. I have a very collaborative leadership style. I don’t have all the answers, so I don’t pretend to. Instead, I do my best to surround myself with people who are experts that I can trust in their specific areas. When it comes time to make a decision, I’ll turn to them to ensure I have all the information available so we choose the right path forward. Sometimes that means we might go a different direction than we originally thought, sometimes it doesn’t. Your team is there to ensure you make the decision that’s best for the company, not for yourself.
11. What movie inspires you the most?
I’ve watched the movie Titanic dozens of times, for some reason. I even listened to a podcast where each episode analyzed a minute of the movie. No, I don’t know how this happened, and no, I don’t think it’s normal.
12. We have heard that you have a very joyful work culture, so can you share with us some of the fun pictures of your workplace?
We just updated our page on The Muse with a bunch of great photos from our new office
13. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
For productivity, Evernote and Wunderlist are my go-to’s. I’m a daily New York Times crossword player during my commute. I’m also one of maybe five people on the planet who still uses Foursquare.