One of the most exciting things about the SaaS business model is how it benefits customers. Because switching costs are low, SaaS-based vendors compete on providing an excellent experience for customers rather than hiding behind technological lock-in and confusing interfaces.

The SaaS business model is great for the vendor too. Because of the model is based on subscriptions, SaaS businesses typically have a high level of predictability in cash flow — a godsend when growing and managing a fast-moving company.

Quite simply — SaaS rocks.

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• SaaS and Email Marketing

Here are two such examples:

• Flash Holiday Card … story of the entrepreneur Snoman turned VC (Blueprint Ventures)
• The Anti-Portfolio … listing of all the investments that didn’t happen (Bessemer Venture Partners)

Let me know if you come across any others.

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After much deliberation, I decided to make the big leap to a new line of jeans — the 559s. I might be jumping the gun here but I think that they are the jeans for me. I thought that I was a 550s guy but now I found something better.

So, what does this have to do with marketing, especially email marketing — everything:

1. Great email marketing is about great marketing.
2. Marketing is about making it easy for the consumer to identify and purchase your product. Breaking your product / newsletter / communications into simple tiers or categories is a great way to do this. It makes the slight differences in your product easily digestable and understandable.
3. Brands matter. I purchase a specific type of Levi’s it provides a consistent experience. Make sure your brand is consistent through your communications and that you are consistent in how you communicate — similar frequencies, similiar from email addresses, …

Truth be told, I also bought a pair of 505s to hedge my bets. Maybe I’m not that predictable after all!

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The article contains excerpts from an address by John Zeglis,
the chairman of AT&T Wireless, given to the Phi Beta Kappa chapter
at George Washington University. It is very inspirational.

Just in case you are curious, my wife is the smart one in the family and the Phi Beta Kappa member — not me. But, as an interesting aside, did you know that Glenn Close, Peyton Manning, and Ben Rogerson are also members– not too shabby!

Enjoy the article!

An Initiation Call for Risk Takers
By John D. Zeglis

As I speak, I have to be careful because it’s just possible that a room like this has my future boss in it, and I don’t want to offend her.

What is the essential message on a day you reach a pinnacle of academic success? The good news starts with the word that sums up the characteristics of all of you: excellence. Excellence is a choice. As John Gardner put it: “Very few people have excellence thrust upon them. They achieve it. They do not achieve it unwittingly by doing what comes naturally, and they don’t stumble into it in the course of amusing themselves. All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.”

You are here because you’ve made a habit of excellence. Occasional brilliance will not get you into Phi Beta Kappa. You are not one subject wonders. You’ve established your intellectual credentials in a wide range of subjects. The excellence that brings you here is not accidental. You have chosen to pursue it and you have earned it. You’ve broken the code of how to get it done. And that stays with you for life.

A word of caution from a worldly wise old guy who was once in your shoes: There is a paradoxical thing about academic excellence. If you want to continue your habit of excellence after graduation, you will have to learn how to take risks—and to fail more often than you’re used to.

If excellence is the word for today, the word for your future is achievement. They are not disconnected. But they’re not self executing either—it’s not automatic that you can go from excellence to high achievement in “the real world.” Many people who are excellent in school don’t have the same success over their lifetimes. Locking in a formula for excellence early in life, as you’ve done in your academic work, often makes people risk averse. They know how to be excellent, and they aren’t about to start taking risks on being less than excellent. But sometimes a little less success and a little more failure is a good thing.

Students who are identified as “the best and the brightest” have wonderful choices coming out of college. There’s the blue-chip law school, and later the blue chip law firm. There’s the silk stocking investment bank. There’s the Fortune 50 icon business enterprise. They are attractive choices. They offer great starting salaries, small risk, and the opportunity to work with smart students from generations past. The reward for your scholarly excellence is that you have the prospect of making a good living without having to take a great risk. But there’s a potential trap here. And I speak from personal experience.

The really smart students continue their habit of excellence in the workplace: through comprehensive research and perfectly written papers, adapted exactly to the employer’s style and methods. You get promoted. You become a partner in the firm or an officer in the business. You get tenure. And then what?

Well, for a lot of people, the prospect of job security, the need to pay the mortgage, and the corner office—they squeeze out a good part of the desire to take the kind of risk that changes things. And soon people who were A+ students have worked their way into a B– career track in middle age, and coast along into retirement. Peter Drucker, the 20th century’s wisest student of business, likes to say: “I would never promote into a top level job a person who is not making mistakes. Otherwise, he is sure to be mediocre.”

Adlai Stevenson was once a partner in my law firm. When he first ran for governor, he went to the smartest man he knew for advice, asking “How did you get so smart?” Smartest man: “Being smart is just a matter of having wisdom.” Adlai: “How do you accumulate wisdom?” Smartest man: “Wisdom is just the practice of good judgment.”Adlai: “How do you gain good judgment?” Smartest man: “From experience.” Adlai: “And how do you get experience?” Smartest man: “Bad judgment.”

Folks without risk barely nudge the needle on society’s achievement, growth, and innovation. It’s only your willingness to persist in the face of failure that can take you beyond excellence and into achievement. Bill Gates dropped out of school. Amy Tan never succeeded as a technical writer. Woody Allen flunked filmmaking. Mother Teresa lost more patients than she saved. Lincoln lost more elections than he won.

I admit that I am not the best example for you. I went to a blue chip law school and worked into a cushy job as a partner for a big law firm, and then general counsel for one of America’s great business icons. It was the comfortable life of a competent attorney who could always say it was somebody else’s fault. But then cataclysmic changes rocked my industry and my company. And I began taking the risks that led me to AT&T Wireless. It isn’t exactly a startup, but I now take more risks in a week than I used to take in a decade.

I don’t “win” nearly as often, but I’m having a lot more fun, and I’m engaged in a business that can fundamentally change the way we live. And I love it. I came to this discovery late in life. My most fervent wish for you is that you get a jump on this earlier than I did. Stretch yourselves. Push your limits. Expand your horizons. Dare to fail. If you never fail, you’ll never achieve your full potential.

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"What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."
–From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Shakespeare was obviously not a technology marketer. I would argue that names do matter and that the name sets the tone for a company and its products. Would Apple be Apple if it were named "American Personal Computer Corporation" — No. The company might have been larger (boring company name exhibit A — IBM) or more profitable (boring company name exhibit B — Microsoft) but not have the same spunk and creativity that we have come to enjoy and expect from them

So, thinking of naming a company? Here are some simple rules:

1. Give it a personality.
   The great challenge in marketing technology is putting a personality on what you do. Some how "Distributed Computing of Large Scale Crawling Projects" or DCLSCP wouldn’t be nearly as compelling as the name Google, although the name probably more accurately describes the founders’ original intentions. Bronto Software is named after a distinguishable thing, which helps us immensely in establishing a brand around a set of web services. Red Hat, named after a lacrosse’s cap of one of its founders, followed similar thinking and out branded their competitors with faceless names like Caldera, TurboLinux and Suse.
2. Avoid initials
   Too often I see companies that decide to name themselves after the initials of their founders. This tends to more common in small consulting services. Avoid this temptation. Although self-flattering and cool for about 30 seconds, you’ll be wasting a perfect branding opportunity — refer to rule #1.
3. Include what you do
   Insert the company’s function into the name, especially when you are just launching the business. I know that the rave in the Internet space is to think of something clever like Yahoo or Google but, in general, I prefer company names that spell out the function a little more clearly. Is this contradictory to #1 and #2? Doesn’t have to be. For example, Bronto Software started off BrontoMail. Only later did we switch it to have broader scope. Earlier on, it is easier to land sales and market with a self-descriptor in the name. Plus, if the business takes off, then you can name it whatever you like and not worry about naming suggestions in blogs such as these.

The rules and thoughts about naming may vary but one truth remains — naming matters.

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Email marketing services like Bronto are fairly easy to use and very powerful for communicating with large audiences. However, easy and powerful doesn’t necessarily make it effective — that’s where good ole’ fashion marketing principles come in:

1. Know your audience
2. Personalize and tailor your message
3. Target accurately
4. Test, iterate, and test again
…

These things determine whether email marketing works or not — much more than high delivery rates to AOL or the latest viral marketing widget in the message’s footer. Perhaps not as cool but effective nevertheless.

Bronto provides incredible rocket fuel in the form of great delivery rates, reporting tools and list management. But, at the end of day, if the rocket is pointed the wrong direction, the results are not going to be here. Insightful support and account management teams can help some but, ultimately, they can only do so much when they are not sitting in the driving seat.

What to do? The onus is on email marketing companies to innovate their offerings by deeply interjecting "best practices" and weaving marketing wisdoms into their products. This goes beyond providing comprehensive documentation and tutorials but rather making it very easy for customers to do the right thing and clearly identify when they are veering off track. I haven’t seen any email marketing vendors that do that well. Why? It’s hard. Ask any computer science professor the challenges in coding an artificial intelligence program that comes across somewhat intelligent — not easy to do. More often than not, the computer program mimics a psychopath that jumps from one non sequitor to another.

So, the challenge rests with us and were working on it. Pass on any suggestions that you have on how to do this well — we’re listening! In the meanwhile, get cozy with this article on basic email marketing best practices from Forrester Research. It should tie you over until we innovate something brillant.

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