Balsam Brands seeks an Email Marketing Manager (Redwood City, CA 94063)

• Inc. 5000: America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies (2012, 2013)
• Internet Retailer: Top 500 Retail Websites (2011, 2012, 2013)
• San Francisco Business Times: Fast 100 – Fastest Growing Bay Area Companies (2012, 2013)
• Silicon Valley Business Journal: 75 Fastest Growing Private Companies (2012, 2013)

Balsam Brands is a fast-growing innovator in ecommerce strategy and marketing. Its current array of brands and businesses have benefited from its deep understanding of organic and paid search in addition to online customer experience. In addition to its competence in SEO / SEM, Balsam Brands’ strengths include a rigorously analytical culture coupled with an ability to secure exclusive products.

The company seeks a talented email marketer with a passion for taking initiative, learning, testing, analyzing – and driving results. Balsam Brands prides itself on being staffed with folks who are down to earth as they are smart. (This is the first time I’ve worked with an HR executive with a Stanford MBA!) The role is an excellent opportunity for a sharp, business oriented email marketer to have a significant impact on my client’s business.

As the key email lead for Balsam’s brands, this individual will have broad, end-to-end responsibilities for the firm’s email campaigns from strategy development through the analysis of the financial impact of each email program. The Email Marketing Manager will be involved in email campaigns across all of the company’s brands, targeting a wide variety of consumer segments.

There will be a variety in the Email Manager’s activities, too, with an opportunity to improve the email program’s copy, merchandise selection, promotional calendar, triggering and sequencing, and more. This position combines planning with action and implementation, which should appeal to a candidate who is both a leader and a doer who gets energized by both setting direction and making things happen in the trenches.

This is a great role for someone who wants to have full ownership of an email program at a company with really smart, driven, interesting people. Balsam Brands is placing big bets on the email channel, and this is a nice chance to align yourself with people who are insatiably curious about how to improve their business both incrementally and with broad strokes. The company will look to you to determine things like …

• What’s the value of a desktop email versus a mobile click?
• Can the company use responsive design tools like Ink to close the gap?
• In the next 12 months, how will email grow versus search and social? What are the ways to combine these channels so that, when used together, they generate more business than they would as standalones?
• How will Google’s new look for the Gmail iPad app impact response rates on the iPad? What’s the best process for creating simple, honest, actionable, compelling, and personalized subject lines? Seriously: PROCESS. Great email marketing isn’t just about the technology. It’s about making your customers look forward to hearing from you – and they’ll only do that if you are consistently great. (And consistent anything requires a process.)
• Are there ways to improve the efficiency of Balsam Brands’ content marketing efforts – like say, turning blog content into email newsletter content? (As it turns out, yes.) As Balsam Brands’ email guru, what other ways can you reuse and recycle the firm’s content from season-to-season?
• Video in email: What’s the plan?

Balsam Brands is growing like a weed, which means the NUMBER and COMPLEXITY of its marketing problems are increasing. (This is normal, btw.) Email isn’t going anywhere. If anything, its efficacy is growing. Therefore, Balsam Brands will be relying on YOU as this channel’s steward to improve the emotional resonance of its family of brands while – what else? – selling more stuff to more people, more often, for more money. If these kinds of issues keep you up at night, then we’d love to hear from you.