1. Tell us about your role in OneSignal?
I am responsible for our go-to market functions, marketing, customer success and sales. Ultimately our goal is to empower every company with the best digital messaging tools to build long term healthy relationships with their customers and exceed their goals & dreams.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
I realized notifications were going to be a crucial customer touchpoint two years ago. They are the first B2C communication channel EVER with built in consumer opt out AND they are the first that can be a direct extension and/or part of a product or service. For example think about Uber or Doordash without push notifications. Businesses must raise their quality bar because unlike email or a robocall or physical direct piece of mail, the opt out takes less than two seconds. This is real-time engagement that requires personalized and thoughtful communication.
3. How do you think technology is upgrading marketing Sector?
Technology has ushered in a transformation on how we find & consume information, research and make decisions. Think about buying a car or even something as mundane as selecting where to eat tonight. Both of these activities were previously accomplished by asking somebody, then taking a physical trip to verify. Today, with the wisdom of the crowds, we solicit opinions from hundreds of sources in a matter of a minute. Thus traditional marketing has been upended and now you must be open, honest, and authentic and be thoughtful about every customer interaction, otherwise a single negative experience will find its way to your prospective customers.
4. Can you explain how push notification help marketers achieve better customer engagement?
Push Notifications are an intimate extension of a product or service, enabling near real-time engagement with your most loyal customers. Unlike email or snail mail, notifications have a high bar because users can easily opt out. Users expect them to be relevant & timely, and when they meet that criteria, they drive greater loyalty & engagement. We see product or service notifications are more than ten times effective driving a desired outcome (either direct action or influenced action) than a promotional notification.
The value and utilization varies greatly based on your business but the universal truth is all messages should be timely and relevant.
CNN is a good example, as it utilizes notifications to provide breaking news alerts, to tell an ongoing story (such as the Kavanugh confirmation hearings releasing tidbits so users can follow along) to keep their most engaged and loyal readers connected to the days news. Rothys, a cool sustainable women’s shoe D2C brand sends personalized messages based on users’ preferences that gain far more engagement then generic promotional messages.
5. How does your email composer support email marketing strategy?
OneSignal offers an email service to create customer journeys that sits on top of email service providers. Our mission is to power the world’s messages, enabling customers to have a single editor and user segmentation solution for orchestration across key customer channels. Today our strength is in push notifications & in-app messaging.
6. How do you define your A/B testing solutions?
OneSignal provides a simple to use A/B testing solution that enables users to test controlled groups, optimize engagement, view the analytics and scale to an entire segment of users. We’ve just announced an advanced analytics suite that includes receive receipts and outcomes. This is part of a broad push to empower marketers to drive a result.
7. What tips you would like to give marketers to achieve better customer engagement through mobile marketing?
People want timely and relevant information. If you’re not personalizing based on what you know or a user has told you, you’re missing the mark. Stop taking a traditional reach and frequency approach; instead know that every consumer can and does have endless access to information. If you’re not making every touchpoint feel authentic and personalized, you’re letting a competitor gain ground. The obvious example is Amazon. They’ve spent the better part of the past 25 years slowly building personalized, authentic, efficient consumer touchpoints. They continue to add more and more and more value to their consumer relationship.
8. What advice would you like to give to the technology Start Ups?
Focus on nailing a value proposition, don’t expand beyond a core until you’ve built a scaled business solving one pain point. I see too many “successful” startups raise B or C rounds and go horizontal with their product mix before they are GREAT at the specific vertical they started in. The best companies build a profitable big business on one core competency – in software it’s Adobe with creative, Oracle with databases, more recently Twilio on SMS or Salesforce with self-serve CRM.
9. What is the Digital innovation in sales technology according to you that will mark 2019?
The two areas that intrigue me are lead qualification automation and sales sentiment analysis. These two areas have promise to fundamentally improve how we build and train sales teams across all industries.
10. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
I believe automation enables us to tackle more strategic challenges. This has been going on for centuries. AI will help us with processing messages, sentiment, responses, help automate rudimentary transportation and logistics. OneSignal specifically is focused on leveraging the data points we sit on to automate basic decisioning to improve relevancy of a message. For example, Intelligent Delivery sends the message to the consumer at the point we know they are most likely to be using their device and to engage with your business. Personally, I believe an AI-Centric world is no different than the changes we’ve faced in past centuries with the printing press, the wheel, industrialization. If you’re intellectually curious, there will ALWAYS be pain points and opportunities to tackle.
11. What are the major developments you are planning, in recent time?
The biggest development is helping the 800 thousand businesses send timely and relevant messages to over a billion active users each week. This will be accomplished through automated segmentation and user journey orchestration.
12. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
What I have always loved about technology is the meritocracy, teamwork and collaboration that are required to build anything of substance. What drew me to OneSignal is that essence, which had been fostered by our founders, George Deglin & Long Vo, who are open, transparent and strive for a culture of equality. I don’t think of the team supporting me but rather I am just one part of an interconnected group striving to build the most reliable, efficient messaging software service in the world.
13. What movie inspires you the most?
“Stand By Me” is a movie that had a profound impact on me. It’s a story about the importance of friendship, loyalty and justice.
14. 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?
Of course, here are pictures from a pie eating contest we had outside of our office with fellow neighbors SurveyMonkey, Zoura, OpenText among others.
15. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
I’m an early adopter, so I have a ton of nascent apps on my phone. I use lots of folders. I’ve got a ton of our customer apps (NFL, CNN, HQTrivia, Business Insider) so I stay close to delivery and their specific experiences. Lots of mobile only shopping apps too, I love trying out the newest social experiences.