 |
Tim KoppChief Marketing OfficerExactTarget |
On Monday, May 17, the Chief Marketing Officer Institute will reveal the winners of its "CMO of the Year" award for leadership excellence. The following interview, conducted by the CMO Journal and CMO.com, is one of 10 with each of the finalists. Click here for our conversations with the other nine finalists.
>> Category
Small to Midsize Organization
>> Company Description
ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and one-to-one marketing solutions. The company's software-as-a-service technology provides organizations a single platform to connect with customers via triggered and transactional email, integrated text messaging, voice messaging, landing pages and social media. In 2009, ExactTarget raised $145 million in venture funding to accelerate global expansion, and it has recently posted its 37th consecutive quarter of growth.
>> Highlights
A pioneer in interactive marketing, Tim Kopp leveraged his experience with some of the U.S.’s largest household brands (Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola) to lead ExactTarget’s efforts to push the company into channels beyond the email inbox. Thanks in large part to his leadership, ExactTarget is consistently identified as a top company by investors and analysts.
>> The Conversation
Q: We are intrigued that you spent a large part of your career at two large consumer companies, P&G and Coca-Cola, and now lead marketing at a fast-growing B2B software company. How did your experiences at P&G and Coca-Cola shape your work at ExactTarget?
A: As Vice President, Global Interactive Marketing, at the Coca-Cola Company and head of interactive marketing for the $17 billion Beauty Care Division at P&G, I developed a passion for consumer-focused marketing. P&G’s mantra is that the consumer is boss, and I couldn’t agree more—regardless of whether you’re talking B2C or B2B. That really forced me to constantly work with that end in mind and focus on longer term strategic planning to create compelling marketing that truly resonates with consumers.
I think many technology B2B marketers forget that we aren’t in the business of selling software—we’re in the business of solving business problems. So, much like I did at P&G and Coke, I continue here to push our team to put the customer’s needs at the center of all of our marketing efforts.
Q: ExactTarget sells its software to other marketers. How has your own experience in selling to marketers shaped your work on ExactTarget’s product development?
A: As a marketer developing products for marketers, empathy is key. While at P&G and Coke, I watched the number of marketing channels we had to manage explode thanks to the Internet and mobile, while budgets and staffing remained tight. The same holds true for nearly every marketer I talk with today. They are overwhelmed with options and looking for technology partners who can empathize and simplify rather than pontificate and embellish.
We’ve completely rebuilt our Product Marketing team around customer segments for this very reason. Like most companies, ExactTarget’s Product Marketing was more akin to Brand Management with a focus on positioning and branding. Both efforts are important, but, to succeed, we as marketers needed to help shape the product and create unique, competitive solutions for customers in all of our segments. As a result, we stopped thinking about our offerings as individual products and instead focused our efforts on understanding customers in each market segment and creating compelling solutions to help them achieve their objectives through web, email, mobile, and social channels.
Thanks to this, we’re now much better positioned as a marketing team to serve the needs of our most sophisticated clients—companies like Expedia, Best Buy and Microsoft—as well as those smaller clients who share the common goal of growing their top line revenues while increasing operational efficiencies.
Q: Describe how ExactTarget clients are combining social media and email marketing? Do you think these two digital channels will eventually converge, or will each retain its unique purpose and function going forward?
A: Email and social are different sides of the same coin. Both are consumer-driven, consumer-owned channels. We can no more force our way into the inbox and expect a positive result than we can flood Facebook or Twitter with marketing messages and not expect a backlash.
In many ways, thanks to the rise of the iPhone and the social inbox, email and social have already merged. Today’s consumer is a multi-modal communicator who makes the determination of whether to call, text, email, IM, update or tweet based on the nature of the message and whether they want that message amplified by their network. Our view, therefore, is that we must empower marketers with tools that allow their subscribers, fans, and followers to consume and share content where, when, and how they desire.
What is clear is that it is not an either/or proposition—either email or social. In a survey of 1,500 consumers last fall, we found that consumers prefer email more than three to one for marketing; however, only 15 percent wanted all marketing delivered via email. The results are a clear indication that each of the interactive channels offers a unique opportunity to connect with customers and prospects to drive conversion.
The challenge, of course, is that marketers today are being asked to manage more channels with the same or fewer resources as they had a year ago. Across our customer base, we’re seeing email marketers becoming more holistic interactive marketers, responsible for managing email alongside mobile and social media. That’s why we’re incredibly passionate about bringing all the interactive channels together on a single platform that aggregates all customer interaction data in one place in order to make it actionable across all interactive channels. We have several customers today, such as Papa John’s and Groupon, that are doing an amazing job at connecting with customers using combinations of email, mobile and social across a common platform.
