Author Archive: Emily Konouchi
Want to work at Emma? Our community relations team is hiring.
Spring has sprung! And wouldn't you know it, we're growing our customer support team.
Join us at Emma. We're cubicle-free.
Our Nashville community relations team is on the hunt for the perfect candidate to round out our team of customer service superstars. Superb customer service is a cornerstone of the Emma experience, which begins with a consultation with a member of our non-salesy sales team and continues with personal, friendly, helpful interactions with the community relations team.
The day-to-day work in Emma Support is a healthy mix of predictability and, well, less predictability. Sure, it’s a given that you’re going to talk to customers on the phone, in email and in Live Chat (think instant messaging), but the scope of the questions and the personal interactions with Emma customers makes every day different. You might answer a call from a new customer who has a question about his first email campaign. After showing him the ropes in his account, you might follow up with that new customer by sending an email with links to Emma resources and an encouraging note to let him know how to reach you if he has any lingering questions. Then, you might answer an email from a marketing director who needs advice for increasing the number of people who open her email campaigns. Later in the day, you might find yourself chatting with a small business owner who needs a hand adding a signup form to his website so he can gather the email addresses of new subscribers. After offering your technical expertise, you spend a couple more minutes asking that customer about his social media presence and suggest how he can promote that new signup form to his wider online audience.
While the more frequently asked questions will become familiar, the personal approach to service makes each interaction unique and strategic. We’re not just out to answer the question a customer asks; we’re out to answer their *next* question, too, even if they haven’t thought of it yet. (Psychics, feel free to apply). Oh, and we also seek to empower our customers to become email marketing experts by partnering our technical know-how with helpful tips for best practices in the industry.
In addition to answering questions and solving problems for the customers who reach out to us, the community relations team is also focused on customer outreach, which may come in the form of an informal phone poll to help our product team conceptualize a new Emma feature, an email to check in on a customer who hasn’t used her account in a few months or a handwritten thank you note to a customer who mentioned us in his latest blog post. We believe this kind of outreach sets Emma apart, builds loyalty in our customer community, and at the end of the day, makes our work more fulfilling.
The right community relations candidate loves interacting with people and garners every human feeling from empathy to excitement (no robots here) as you partner with customers to achieve email marketing greatness. Top-notch communication skills — written and verbal — are a must, as you’ll be providing instructions and guidance to customers with a varying level of comfort with technology. While we don’t expect you to be an HTML or programming guru, we are looking for someone who has an interest in technology, keen problem-solving skills and is a quick study. The Emma office is a lively, learn-as-you-go environment, but we’ve also got tons of resources for a self-starter to learn the ropes of the Emma application and email marketing.
So whaddya say? Are you a non-robotic psychic with mad customer service skills? Learn more about the position or apply here.
Behind the scenes of our January newsletter
How we created a plan full of emails, link triggers, surveys and rewards to help our customers with their own marketing strategies.
During a brainstorming session for our newsletter content last year, a group of Emma staffers tossed around the idea of incorporating a New Year’s resolution theme into January’s mailing. It’s kind of a no-brainer, right? The new year lends itself to setting goals and checking off to-dos, so we decided to use our January newsletter to get the Emma community thinking about taking their email strategy up a notch. We provided a menu of resolution-worthy goals related to using a more advanced Emma feature or re-imagining their approach to email marketing.
We knew we had an arsenal of helpful content built into our in-account Help Guide, blog and Ask Emma library, so we created a plan to provide a mash-up of that content for our newsletter subscribers. And when we faced the question of *how* to deliver that ever-so-helpful content, we found an answer in the Emma application. Link-based triggers would allow us to send follow-up emails full of advice, each one tailored to the resolution the reader had clicked on. We think email marketing should be fun and rewarding, so we opted to dream up a “cereal box-worthy prize” for folks who clicked on a link and participated in a follow-up survey letting us know how it went.
Since design is such an important part of who we are, our brainstorming meeting also included a fun discussion about the look and feel of the newsletter and its accompanying emails. Creative director Allison Davis and designer Elizabeth Williams put their heads together and decided to not only create a bold, fresh design fitting for a new year, but also to stage an Amy Sedaris-esque photo shoot featuring our own delivery specialist and newsletter model (it’s a working title), Claire Burns. What resulted was a stand-out design that was reminiscent of our Getting Started Guide. As Elizabeth says, “I wanted the design to be comfortably familiar but delightfully fresh — with a heavy-handed dash of ‘It’s the new year people, let’s get empowered!’”
Click to see the whole January series.
About those link triggers
Because Emma’s link-based trigger feature allows you to send a follow-up campaign automatically when someone clicks on a link, we knew the tips related to the resolution would arrive when the recipient was most interested to read it. We created six emails total, the January newsletter plus five more detailed campaigns to cover each resolution:
- Survey tips and tricks
- Advice for segmenting your audience & getting new subscribers
- Expertise for creating stylish, stand-out campaigns
- Ideas for personalizing campaigns and send-times
- Suggestions for incorporating triggers into an email marketing strategy
Just click on the slide show to the right to see all of the campaigns (and all of Claire’s poses). Once we completed and tested each campaign, it was time to set up the triggers. We followed these steps and sat back to watch the opens and clicks on the response page.
About the survey, landing page & rewards
A week or so after the January newsletter send-off, we started working on the follow-up campaign inviting those who clicked a resolution to give us a little update on how they were faring. Since Emma’s response page gave us all the details on who clicked which link, we took the time to personalize the message in each follow-up email. We sent one version to folks who clicked to embrace the power of surveys, another for those who wanted to finally master the steps to creating a trigger email and so on. Of course, we wanted to create a special follow-up message for the ambitious folks who clicked more than one resolution — that ended up being the largest group of recipients for our segmented follow-up.
We also created the survey embedded in each follow-up email in Emma. It was a simple, three-question form asking folks if they’d accomplished the goal and how it changed their marketing plan. As promised, we offered a reward: After submitting their survey response, the survey-taker landed on a page chock-full of downloadable buttons — and we also created that landing page entirely inside our Emma account, following the steps in this article.
Our team of designers had fun creating the buttons, and our hope is that the buttons will encourage our customers to follow the tips we outlined in our follow-up emails and become email marketing superstars.
Our results so far
With so many mailings and a corresponding survey to boot, we had gobs of response details to look through and analyze. But we were most eager to see which resolution got the most clicks (it was the one about style, if you’re curious), how many link-clickers wanted to receive more than just one of our follow-up emails full of advice and tips (that was a whopping 43% of the link-clickers, believe it or not), and what folks were saying in their survey responses.
While we were pleased that 85% of the survey-takers had already taken a more strategic approach to their email marketing with Emma’s help, we were even more pleased with the long-answer comments they left. We expected to hear more details on how these strategies were applied, but instead we received a healthy mix of success stories and requests for more help. This is our audience talking back to us, telling us what they need. Thanks to that unexpected result, we now have a natural next step: connect our support team with these customers for dedicated help and training.
More resources
Want to get in on the resolutionary fun? Sign up for our January newsletter so you can click on the links and get helpful follow-up emails. We won’t make you take a survey in order to get the prize, either — we just uploaded the buttons on our Facebook page. And best of luck to you in your own resolutionary efforts!
Details on a recent security breach at Emma
We’re very sorry to report a recent security breach in Emma’s system that has resulted in some Emma account information being compromised. Though a relatively small number of accounts are known to have been affected by the breach, many more accounts were exposed to potential threat, and we’ve taken a number of precautions (more on that below) as a result.
This morning, we emailed each Emma customer account with details on how their specific accounts were affected, but we also want to create a resource here on the blog with more information and details where we can easily keep everyone up to date.
What happened?
On the evening of September 7th, our regular security monitoring alerted us to suspicious activity and, ultimately, a breach in one of our databases. Immediately, our team began work to identify — and address — the source of the breach and investigate its scope. As our investigation has continued, we’ve learned that this was a sophisticated, deliberate attack with the apparent objective of targeting the email lists of customers in a particular geographic region of the world. (Since the investigation continues, we’re not yet disclosing all of those details.)
In a small number of accounts (about 1% of Emma customers), the hacker was able to export email lists or access usernames and decode passwords to log into accounts and send spam. These customers have already heard from us directly, with details about the breach and an offer to help in any way possible.
In other cases, customer information — including usernames and passwords — was accessible to the hacker. For these accounts, we’ve expunged all previously stored passwords that may have been compromised and assigned each username a temporary, highly secure password. This step means that any login information the hacker has is unusable. Those customers will be asked to create their own new passwords the next time they log in. We’ve put in place new password standards to ensure those new passwords are strong and secure, and we’ll be rolling those changes out to the entire Emma community soon. See our tips for creating strong passwords.
Some accounts were not affected at all, and at no point was *any* customers’ credit card information accessible. That’s all stored separately by a third party and is heavily encrypted.
Is it fixed?
We’ve thoroughly secured what we believe to be the source of the breach, enlisting the help, advice and scrutiny of outside database and security experts. In addition to the regular security scans already performed by an outside monitoring firm, we had an additional audit performed Wednesday night. That audit came back clear. We’ve set up additional sophisticated, around-the-clock monitoring to protect against and shut down any further abuse. And as we mentioned earlier, we’ve shut off further account access by this hacker by replacing compromised passwords with secure temporary passwords.
Each and every person who works at Emma knows that a breach in the safety and security of data acutely impacts the brand and business our customers have entrusted us with. And we’re deeply sorry not to have met that trust. Going forward, we’re committed to doing whatever it takes to make Emma’s systems impenetrable and are working tirelessly to make sure things like this don’t happen again.
If you have follow-up questions or if there’s anything we can clarify, please don’t hesitate to let us know. We’re here to answer your questions and help in any way we can.
Thanks,
The Emma team
Meet Cheekwood
How a museum used email and surveys together to make the most of a stunning Dale Chihuly exhibit.
This summer and fall, Nashville’s Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art is the temporary home to spectacular glass sculptures by internationally acclaimed artist Dale Chihuly, and the museum extended its normal hours to allow visitors to experience the exhibit in the evenings. Chihuly’s work is a sight to be seen any time of day, but artistic nighttime lighting transforms Cheekwood’s grounds into a wonderland and transports you — at least mentally — away from the thick, humid Nashville air to an otherworldly place.
While the folks at Cheekwood had planned on offering extended hours on Thursdays and Fridays, overwhelming support for the exhibit made them consider adding another night of Chihuly goodness to the calendar. Rather than just assuming it would be well received, they empowered their email subscribers to make the call.
With Emma’s survey feature, Cheekwood sent a short, stylish campaign (using their stunning Chihuly-themed custom stationery) inviting members, subscribers and volunteers to weigh in on the possibility of making Wednesday evening yet another time to drop by and take in the exhibit. They linked to an equally stylish survey, in which they posed the question, “Do you think Cheekwood should add Wednesday evening to Chihuly Nights?” and then gave survey-takers a chance to include comments to support their answer.
The response was fantastic. The campaign containing the link to the survey was emailed to more than 13,000 audience members, and more than 31% of them opened the email. Nearly 2,000 recipients clicked on the link to take the survey, which overwhelmingly favored adding Wednesday as a new Chihuly Night.
It doesn’t end there, though. The Cheekwood staff created a follow-up campaign to announce the new night and to thank their subscribers for taking the time to give their input. They even shared the survey results (a whopping 94% were in favor of adding Wednesday nights) along with some of the great comments survey-takers offered up in their responses.
This was Cheekwood’s first survey using Emma, and we love the way they kept it simple. They focused their approach on learning the opinions of those closest to the organization, and they thoughtfully followed up with the outcome, letting those email subscribers and Chihuly-enthusiasts be the first to hear the good news.
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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