Presenter: Josh Aberant, CMO, SparkPost Josh Aberant serves as the CMO at SparkPost. Prior to joining SparkPost, he served as Postmaster at Twitter for four years. Josh was the Co-Founder and CEO of RestEngine before the company was acquired by Twitter. At RestEngine he led the launch of its industry-leading social data outbound marketing automation platform. With over 15 years of growth & marketing best practices experience, Josh has led teams at MarTech platform companies including Marketo, Lyris, EmailLabs. Additionally, with over 20 years of experience at tech startups, Josh has been involved in the success of many early stage startups including Collab.Net & Intershop. Josh holds a Bachelor’s in Physics from San Francisco State University and was awarded the Faculty Prize in Physics from Bishop’s University.

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The Role of Email in Customer Engagement
Stitching a Product Renaissance
Josh Aberant, EIS Barcelona 2018

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Bio - Josh Aberant
CMO
Postmaster
Founder
Director or Privacy

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• Customer engagement: A historical case study
• Lessons for products & services today
• Role of email in nurturing customer engagement with
today’s products
• What product emails require
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Overview

4. A Customer Engagement Machine

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• World’s first mass-produced,
mass-marketed complex
consumer technology product.
• Achieved bigger global reach
than any other product of its
time.
• Singer Manufacturing Co.
dominated its market. 1914 U.S.
market share: 60%. Rest of the
world: 90%.
• Singer was the 7th largest firm in
the world in 1912.
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Singer’s Remarkable Sewing Machine

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Singer had lots of competition
• Elias Howe is credited with
inventing the sewing machine
• Singer invented some
improvements
• Grover and Baker Sewing
Machine Company did also
• As did Wheeler and Wilson
Manufacturers
• These companies all sued each
other until they resolve it by
creating the first patent pool
• With their patents pooled all their
innovations were shared
Elias Howe

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Singer had competition, but only
Singer thrived and dominated. Why?

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Singer’s business innovation was in
answering:
How do you help customers adopt a
new & sophisticated product?

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It’s not enough to build a better
mousetrap.

12. “Most people think that if you build
a better mousetrap, the world will
beat a path to your door,” Peter
Liebhold, who curated an exhibition
on Singer at the Smithsonian. “In
fact, that’s not true. If you build a
better mousetrap, it could sit and rot
in the corner of your garage.”

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Changing customer behavior requires
activation and engagement.

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• Before the Internet :-)
• Before most households had a telephone
• Singer provides a fundamental lesson for today’s
businesses, product and customer experience teams
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Singer’s Remarkable Engagement Program

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• A focused customer activation and
engagement team
• Today we’d call them a growth
marketing team
• Customer engagement = door-to-door
visits!
• First company to introduce a newsletter to
educate customers
• Foced on thee ouch points critical to
adoption: education, onboarding, and
training
• 2x marketing staff than manufacturing
operations
• Global reach and localization
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What Made Singer Different?

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Singer Worldwide Unit Sales, 1853–1913

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18. Customer Engagement Today

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• Shift to focus on the customer experience
• It is imperative to Activate and Retain customers
• Getting users onboarded, activated, and using product is
key to retention and upsell
Just like it was a 100 yesra ago,, user engagement is central
to conversion + growth
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Today’s “Product Renaissance”

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Email is today’s customer
engagement channel.

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How Email Drives Products User Lifecycle Today
• Email drives activation, engagement and retention
• Generally We call these types of emails “transactional”,
“triggered” or “app-generated”

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Emails are essential
to SaaS providers, e-commerce, financial
services, travel…
...and most every other product
experience.

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SparkPost is for your triggered, transactional
or app-generated emails

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App-Generated Email Requirements
• Demanding, real-time performance
• Very low latency. Batching and queuing aren’t acceptable
• High reliability. Email downtime directly affects app users
• High value messages deserver high deliverability
• Deliverability is crucial. Lost messages = unhappy users
• Data really matters
• Product teams need visibility. Their apps need data
• Real security implications
• Phishing and other concerns are risks with high impact

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Sampling of SparkPost Customers
CRM and
Marketing
Automation
Enterprise
Publishing
and Media
Telco
Email Service
Providers
Internet

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“We looked at
stability, deliverability,
and how the API
actually performed in
the real world. It was
just what we’d
hoped—and
SparkPost’s analytics
were a slam-dunk.” -
Financial Times

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Learn More
• SparkPost’s mission is simple: help teams building great
apps and sites engage their customers with email that’s
delivered on-time and to the inbox.
• Resources for product and tech leaders:
• SparkPost Academy for product teams:
sparkpost.com/academy
• Downloadable ebooks, etc.: sparkpost.com/resources
• Blog: sparkpost.com/blog

31. Thank You
Josh Aberant
@jaberant
t.co/Josh
jaberant@sparkpost.com