Make the most of Google+

A new way to segment your audience and send targeted messages

Google+ (Google Plus) may be brand new, but with the large early adoption rate and great features, it’s only a matter of time before this social sharing platform is adopted by brands and businesses. As a brand builder and marketer, the Circles feature in Google+ suddenly becomes very attractive. With Circles it’s not only super easy to categorize your followers (or audience), you now have a great way to target specific segments of your audience with custom messages.

Just like your custom email groups in Emma, Google Circles lets you apply the same logic to your followers.

For example, if you’re an online retailer and you have some data on who is following you, consider breaking up your followers by location, customer type, size or “age” (that is, when they became a customer).

Now, if sales are lagging in the Southeast, hit that Circle up with a coupon that’s only visible to them. Want to keep your largest customers happy? Send their Circle a quick note of thanks. Maybe you have a Circle of customers that only purchase a specific type of widget. You can send them industry news that the rest of your followers may not care much about.

The advantages here are pretty clear. There’s less worry about bombarding your entire list of followers with information that may only be applicable to 10% of them. Your messages will be more relevant because you know exactly who your target audience is.

While Google admits that they still have some work to do for businesses to have a presence on Google+, what we’ve seen so far is promising. Word on the internet says other services like Google Analytics will be hooked up soon, as well.

The future is bright for audience segmentation and relevancy. Sign up for Google+ if you haven’t already, and explore what it has to offer. And let us know the unique ways you’re using it.

Emma’s design team is hiring, part deux

Attention, customer service gurus with a love for design and branding: Work with us!

We’re looking for a design consultant in Nashville to round out our team of advisors who help our clients discover and articulate what they want from their custom designs.

As a design consultant, you will often be the first and most enduring face of the design team for many of our customers. Because of that, it’s essential that you possess the perfect blend of solid design knowledge, project management chops and customer service skills. The person we’re looking for could confidently explain why layered files make for easier revisions, translate those revisions into design-speak for the designer and then coordinate the completion of the project itself — all with the warmth and genuine enthusiasm that our clients deserve.

Experience in marketing coordination, ad trafficking or similar fields would definitely be a plus, as these jobs often require the same basic strengths and skills as the design consultant position. Our team turns out high volume on a quick turnaround with style, and we also enjoy a good afternoon snack to celebrate our efforts. (Especially if said snack involves Taylor’s tandy cake. Yum.) Other things we like include Razor scooters, nicknames, office visits from co-workers’ puppies and making new Pandora stations.

So what do you say, dear reader? Would you like to advise our fabulous clients on email form and function? For more information or to apply, please click here.

If you’re a graphic designer, we’re looking for that as well! Check out that position over here.

Our new Studio Design form is here

Announcing an easier-to-use, more flexible Studio Design form

Last summer, we introduced a design option called Studio Design, an entirely different approach to custom stationery design. With Studio Design, customers choose from a gallery of themes, graphics and motifs, and an Emma designer hand-crafts your design from there. Because of the systemized process, our designers get a streamlined work flow, and you benefit from a shorter turnaround time and minimized design cost. As Kat shared in her 5 things to know about Studio Design post in July, you’re a good candidate for Studio Design if any of these situations apply:

 

• You want stylish, professionally designed stationery, and you want to be directly involved in the design-making process.
• Your stationery needs to reflect your brand identity, but you don’t have a lot of your own supporting graphics to use.
• You want a simple header that contains your logo or name, and possibly (but not necessarily) a slogan, background color or texture and/or a couple embellishments to make it look extra special.
• You have good, solid ideas about how your stationery should look, but you could use some help articulating what you want.
• You don’t know exactly what you want, but you know what you don’t want — so choosing from a gallery of original graphics would help you figure it out as you go.

Some wonderfully original stationery designs have come out of Studio Design. (A few are included in the slideshow on the left, and you can also check out an album of examples on Facebook.) But we received customer feedback about the form’s limitations. Namely, it was impossible to change your mind mid-process without the necessity to start all over. Also, once you selected a theme, only certain textures and elements fell under that theme, with no option to mix-and-match.

We’ve just released an improved Studio Design form. Our new form allows you to go back and check — or change — your selections, without losing any work. And you’re free to mix-and-match textures and elements at will. We’re giving you license to wow us with your imaginativeness, and we can’t wait to see what combinations you dream up. You’d like peacock feathers and polka dots on your stationery? Sure, if you say so. Collage letters plus tulips? Go for it. We hope you’ll enjoy the ease of the new Studio Design form, and be sure to check out our Help Guide for step-by-step instructions for filling it out. And if you have any questions about our design process, let us know.

Our 100th employee interviews our CEO

The Emma team has been growing, especially in the tech-related departments. I was among several of the new hires this past year that have, apparently, led folks to wonder exactly how many employees we have. After hours of intensive research (probably just someone skimming the employee directory) we found we’d recently crossed the 100-employee mark. Nice! And who was that 100th employee, you ask? (Cue another quick skim of the directory.) Hey, it’s me! Double nice!

I began to wonder: What privileges might I, the first Emma hire with a three-digit employee number, be given? Extra vacation time? A key to the executive washroom? Final say on what music is played on the first floor? No, friends. The honor bestowed upon me is the chance to ask Clint Smith, co-founder and CEO of Emma, any questions I like. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it really is. See, Clint usually doesn’t let us ask questions; mostly we just get him sandwiches when he’s hungry, as you’ll see.

Read on to find out how this cool work environment came to be, where we’re headed, whether any of it involves using mind control and how you could be the prestigious Emma employee #104. (Trust me, 104 is just as prestigious as 100.)

It was clear to me right away how much effort Emma puts into giving both employees and customers a memorable, fun experience. Was it a goal from the start to have a workplace culture like that? How did it come about?

Really, it was the very simple notion of creating the kind of place *we’d* like to hang out every day. Nothing more. I guess if we’d wanted to hang out in a place that was stale and corporate and believed inspiration could be found in a handful of framed “Successories” posters (sorry, whale soaring through the air), things could have turned out very differently. Will and I also came to Emma with a lot of inspiration in hand – we’d worked in very open, creative, collegial environments at companies like Citysearch.com and Smallbusiness.com. So we didn’t have to invent a workplace culture — we simply had to take some of the great things we’d already experienced and adapt them to our own style. And we felt the same way about the customer experience. Shouldn’t it be the kind of experience we’d want as customers? (The answer was yes, by the way.)

I feel like that culture puts a lot of emphasis on a democratic way of doing things rather than a small handful of people dictating direction and goals. How do you “guide the ship,” so to speak, while giving us so much freedom? Is mind control involved?

The fact that you’re feeling a sudden urge to walk over to the kitchen and grab me a sandwich (roast beef and provolone, Josh, roast beef and provolone) should in no way concern you that mind control might be at work here (also, chips, Josh, chips – and not those stale baked ones you brought me last time, thank you). First off, there are too many smart people here for any handful of us to feel like we can figure this all out alone. Our job is to try and set a clear and compelling direction that gets everyone nodding and smiling and possibly jumping up and down, and to empower folks to help fill in the blanks, and even uncover new and interesting directions, along the way. Last year, for example, we pulled our values, vision and strategy off the wall and revisited the entire thing, and in the course of the roughly six-week project, we involved *every single staffer* at Emma. That’s how much we believe in an open, collaborative approach. That, and the powerful combination of roast beef and cheese. This Q&A really is making me hungry, Josh.

Sorry. So talking about free lunches and beer we get probably isn’t a good idea right now? Moving on then…

Okay, so you hired a few web developers recently, myself included, and there’s talk of hiring more. What’s in the works that we need to expand our team so much?

There’s a ton of work ahead as we enhance and expand our core email product — new features to add, more data and insights to provide, new ways to integrate with other services and so on. And there are opportunities to expand beyond that core product, all within the umbrella category informally known as Helping Companies Engage Their Audiences in Cool, Stylish, Effective Ways. Emma is ultimately a digital communications and engagement service, which means the doors to things like Surveys, Social, Mobile, Analytics and more are wide open for us. And that means people, particularly people who are really talented at product design and development. If they’re also talented at juggling or knife throwing, that’s cool, too. We’ll be looking for those talented designers, developers and jugglers in Nashville and in Portland, and potentially in our other satellites cities – Austin, Denver and New York – and beyond. So, Josh, if you happen to be throwing a party for say, 20 of your closest, most talented technology pals this weekend, we’ll supply the fruit punch and disco ball. It’s just one of the many awesome recruiting ideas we have.

And we all know that free fruit punch is the best fruit punch.

When we have all these new developers and designers, what is life at Emma going to look like for us? Other than the knife throwing, that is.

Marc, Kevin, Alex and the rest of our senior technology leaders have big plans not just for the kind of work we’ll be doing, but how we’ll go about doing it. We love the idea of moving forward in really nimble, collaborative, creative ways, using the latest platforms and approaches, all with a bit of Emma flair thrown in for good measure. We love the idea of small teams moving quickly on interesting projects and challenges. And we love the idea of folks being able to raise their hands with a good idea worth exploring, and to then be set free to do said exploring. Not like mountaintop exploring, Josh, but more like awesomely-cool-new-product-concept exploring. It requires less outdoor gear. So the idea is that, as a designer or developer at Emma, you get the chance to work with a variety of great people on a variety of really interesting projects, all aimed at expanding Emma’s horizons in ways we probably can’t even imagine.

Speaking of great people making great things, a huge part of what got me excited about working at Emma was all the awesome folks I met during my interview process. How does the hiring process work and why is it done that way?

We know that so much of a company’s culture and, well, success, starts at the hiring table. (The table is made of mahogany, by the way.) So we put a big emphasis on making sure we’re finding people who aren’t just extremely talented, but who also *really* want to be a part of this thing called Emma. We’re looking for that unique combination of capability and commitment. So we make it a bit of an elaborate process, from an initial set of 10 questions you might be asked to answer, to coffee chats with a couple of senior staffers, and a series of visits to the office eventually ending in what we call an “All Hands” interview, in which folks from a variety of teams come together for a candidate’s final conversation. We know that every single person who joins the Emma cause will help shape the company and the culture in his or her unique way, so we’re picky, and we’re intentional, and we don’t make this an easy job to get. In fact, Josh, you might be interested to know that people who inquired about work at Emma last year had just a 2% chance of actually landing a job. So you’re in select company, my friend.

Select company indeed. Between that and being Emma’s 100th employee, it feels pretty good.

Got any other food-related analogies or anecdotes about employees juggling on mountaintops for the big finish?

Given the amount of food that makes its way into and out of the Emma offices on a daily basis (there are, by my count, roughly *12* groups and clubs devoted to baked goods alone), I’m sure I could regale you with a week’s worth of food-related analogies. But I’ll just end by saying that I’m thrilled you’re #100, Josh, and I hope you get some sort of plaque, or cheesecake, for cracking the three-digit ranks for us. Onward and upward, Mr. Mock. Also, there’s Nutella cake on the second floor. It sounds even better than roast beef.

Read more
Emma’s job openings
Emma’s new tech blog

Photo credit: David Weintraub/Dreamland Pictures