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One of the coolest email marketing jobs around …
We are working with Angie’s List in its search for a Director of Email Marketing based in Indianapolis, IN.
Angie’s List helps consumers have happy transactions with local service professionals in more than 720 categories of service, ranging from home improvement to health care. More than 2 million subscribers across the U.S. share their consumer experiences and use Angie’s List to gain unlimited access to local ratings, exclusive discounts, the Angie’s List magazine, the Angie’s List complaint resolution service and information about how to make the most of their home improvement projects.
Angie’s List seeks a world-class email marketing leader to orchestrate and improve its B2C and B2B email marketing initiatives across the company. Experience leading the optimization of email marketing in a large, matrix organization is required, as is a quantifiable history of improving email program results through the usage of industry best practices. To succeed in this position, you will need to be technology savvy to enable open communications with the product, development and engineering teams.
The ideal candidate is a senior-level email marketing top gun with a proven track record of success in developing, delivering, and executing email marketing strategies and tactics as evidenced by increases in email deliverability, open rates, click rates, and sales.
Ideal candidates will thrive in a fast-paced environment; will love creating strategic email marketing plans that are tailored to deliver an excellent user experience, and will be expert in taking the charge to build email marketing strategies and activities that maximize all relevant metrics and revenue. These efforts will be based on a deep knowledge and thorough understanding of email marketing best practices, particularly in an ecommerce company.
HARRY’S COMMENTS: Sally Hogshead is one of my all-time favorite business authors. Writing mostly on topics related to marketing and career development, Sally always seems to write the books I wish I’d written myself.
For example, Sally’s book “Radical Careering: 100 Truths to Jumpstart Your Job, Your Career, and Your Life” is outstanding and you should own a copy. You can click here to download Cherry Bombs, a supplement to Radical Careering. The supplement’s awesome, too.
My Top 10 favorite “Truths” from Radical Careering are …
- Do what you’d rather be doing.
- Aspire to be the dumbest person in the room.
- Politics happen when people feel insecure about their work.
- Being in a crap job isn’t your fault. Staying in a crap job is.
- Worry less, Do more.
- The most risky decision is not making one.
- You can be comfortable or outstanding – but not both.
- Go for nervous.
- Collect portable equity, which is the only form of job security today.
- Quality of work; Quality-of-life; Quality of compensation: PICK ONE.
Which brings me to today’s search with Angie’s List, …
… a company that was seemingly designed around the concepts in Radical Careering. In fact, the only one of these ten nuggets that doesn’t apply to Angie’s List is #10. Because at Angie’s List, you actually can have it all. The quality of work this phenomenal; The compensation is excellent; and the quality of life is tremendous. In fact, Angie’s List is one of the healthiest companies in America according to the folks at Interactive Health.
Constantly Evolving
Angie’s List was co-founded by William Oesterle and Angie Hicks in 1995. It was inspired by Hicks’ search for a reliable contractor in suburban Columbus on behalf of Oesterle, a venture capitalist and her former supervisor. The service started as a publication for reviews about home and lawn care, and Hicks went door-to-door, signing up members and collecting ratings on local contractors. Talk about moxie!
Today, Angie’s List has been experiencing tremendous growth, with more than 2,000,000 paid members and 2013 revenue of $245 million (which was 57% more than 2012 revenue). To keep growing, the company is redefining its brand message for both consumers and service providers, moving from a membership-only model to a transactional ecommerce model. These interconnected and self reinforcing businesses create great opportunities for personal and professional growth in the area of email marketing.
About the Role
The basic idea behind this position is to bring email marketing best practices to the different departments in different businesses that make up Angie’s List. Think of yourself as an email marketing “knowledge hub” in a spoked wheel of marketing initiatives: Angie’s List is a membership and transactional-based business, and email marketing should be used to engage members because, as Angie’s List VP of Marketing, Dan Smith puts it, “An engaged member is a happy member, and a happy member renews at a higher rate than an unhappy member.”
Opportunities to improve the business abound, including ramping up advanced segmentation initiatives and working with the technology team to slice and dice the company’s huge list of prospects and members. Additionally, Angie’s List is not fully leveraging all of the services and products that it has contracted through its ESP, Exact Target. The relationship with Exact Target is in excellent shape, and the platform is state-of-the-art, yet Angie’s List hasn’t yet taken full advantage of everything this vendor has to offer.
The firm’s conversion rate on mobile lags its conversion rate on the desktop, even though most of the world is probably opening Angie’s List’s email on a smart phone and possibly acting on it later. Any email strategy worth its salt should address that issue. Additionally, the extent to which Angie’s List emails can be improved to promote social sharing would be hugely helpful.
For the most part, this role will involve interfacing with many internal groups across multiple P&L’s. Angie’s List is a matrixed organization and Dan believes that your ability to develop a cogent ecommerce email strategy will be a key to your success.
Dan adds: “At the end of the day, this role is about building customer relationships through email. Many of the standard ecommerce metrics would apply, including conversion rate, average order value, repeat customer rate, cost per lead, and cost per sale. Yes, the role is strategic. But we will know very quickly if those strategies have legs if the emails are converting.”
View Harry Joiner’s profile
What You Will Do:
- Create comprehensive email marketing strategies, to build brand awareness and ensure adoption of our products.
- Increase Angie’s List efficiencies and revenue generated from email marketing, in both B2C and B2B venues.
- Lead the email marketing practice at Angie’s List in a matrixed, “hub-and-spoke” environment.
- Build and manage the relationships with all members of the email practice, including technology, B2B marketing and B2C marketing.
- Communicate regularly on email activities and outcomes.
- Stay updated on industry trends, new business, growth opportunities, new and emerging markets, and ways to leverage search engines to drive growth.
- Additional responsibilities as assigned.
What You Will Have:
- An undergraduate degree in business, marketing, or related degree. (Graduate degree is a plus.)
- 7+ years of email marketing experience in a consumer and/or business facing industry.
- A mind for email marketing strategy.
- Deep knowledge on target markets, competitive industry, strategy and products.
- Proficiency in MS Excel, Word, Outlook and PowerPoint.
- Strong analytical skills regarding ROI and KPIs.
- Ability to maintain self-motivation and operate with an entrepreneurial mindset.
- Skills in complex problem solving, judgment, critical thinking, creative thinking and decision making.
- Experience and ease with external facing communication; both written and verbal.
- Ability to be highly organized, accurate, timely and able to prioritize.
- Ability to tolerate stress and be adaptable, flexible, persistent, and versatile.
- Ability to manage multiple projects under challenging deadlines.
Additional Details:
- This position occasionally works evenings and more than 40 hours per week.
Applications for this position are being coordinated by Kelley Newsome. To apply, CLICK HERE. Candidates, please be sure to email Kelley for a packet of market research and company / competitive intel that will differentiate you in your candidacy. Due to the intensely competitive nature of this search, thorough preparation for these interviews with this proprietary material is strongly recommended.
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