Notes

Claudia Herrera

Resume Notes
-Optimized functionality and processes?
-Develop marketing strategies via subject line testing and ‘creative optimization’ through A/B testing
-Implemented automated reporting
-Analyzed and communicated results regularly
-Troubleshooted with vendors
-Managed creative
-Assisted MM to oversee promo emails production
-Supported promo email planning strategy partnering with teams
-Supported and trained email associates on best practices

Summary
Inclined
+Knows her problem domain and is confident in what she does
+Shows evidence of providing value by suggesting a new weekly dashboard meeting to increase team visibility and promote productive action items
+Considers herself a go-to candidate for mentorship
+Works well cross-team, internally and externally and has a lot of experience doing so
~Gave a somewhat generic neutral answer when asking her how she stands out (communicates well, open mind, mentoring)
~Used “we” a lot instead of “I”, but when I asked her to clarify her role, she took ownership
-Did not have much to say when asked how often she has had to work with new tech or tools (but may not be an usual occurrence for her role?)

Interview Transcript:

Introduction

Q. Tell me a little about yourself
A. Marketing about 5 years. Associate -> Specialist
Coding email through HTML and schedule.
Reporting on emails
Working with different vendors and cross teams
New Strategies

Q.What did your core responsibilities entail?
A. Two primary areas:
*Strategy
—Event-based emails, coming up with idea where we add more to email to speak to multiple audiences.
—Add features, personalization, so there is something the customer can relate to.
—Added product recs, classify people’s affinity, see different things or in different order.
—Dynamic settings, one email dynamically populates different fields by affinity or gender or categories
—Sometimes different emails to set demographics
*High level campaign reporting

Q. How do you use optimize engagement, process, etc?
—Consolidate reporting feeds, pulling reports from data warehouse
—Setting automated and triggered campaigns
—Through testing, optimizing a subject line, checking to see what customers engage with more. Value vs brand. Testing with send times throughout a day or weekend, split audience between test and control.
—Through controls tests, people get same email and work with BI team to see open rates, and also conversion rates.
Q.What’s your methodology for deciding what you’re testing?
—Tests evolves from conversations with different cross-functional parties.
--Check to see what metrics are decreasing and see what needs to change?
—Example? Saw unsubscribe were increasing by 10% Across the board on campaigns, she did some digging, discovered an additional email which out of cadence to the customer and during the time Apple did iOS update that put the unsubscribe button at the top of the email (normally at the bottom). First spike, from additional email (campaign), second spike from iOS update that changed the unsubscribed button location.
Q. How hands-on are you? At a start-up, you may have to do a lot more manual work with limited resources, can you give me some examples?
—Little bit of both in terms of co-op or individual, is confident to do everything her job entails.
—Depending on the level of depth, simple things can do on her own like HTML edits and basic branching. Otherwise work with different data engineers to set-up the customization.

Q. Tell me about a time where you were responsible for something new that you weren’t sure how to approach. How did you get started? What did you do?
A. Recently had a project transitioning our email tracking from core metrics over to google analytics. First thing she did was to understand what parameters already were in place and what steps needed to be taken. Met with internal analytics team and decided what it is from email that we want to be tracking. Came up with updated fields to look into, worked with email vendor (salesforce) that would be implementing that tracking. Worked with internal team. Old parameters included campaign they were sending and segmentation they were sending to. Categories were not split, and needed more subcategories informing the customers. Without email vendors, she seems to understand how to work with emails.

Q. How often do you work with new technologies or tools?
A.Hasn’t happened too often. Initial learning.

Q. Tell me about a time when you’ve gone above and beyond expectations. What motivated you to do more? How was this received?
A.Used to have some reporting but didn’t present it to counterparts, kept internally, when she started working more on the reporting, set-up a weekly dashboard to offer suggestions and insight. Allowed partners to understand how the emails were performing and what needed to be changed. Still on-going thing. Started Weekly Recap meeting, before the metrics was just looking at engagement, open rates and clicks, kept internal unless requested. It’s an email now. The meetings were well received, lots of questions raised. Replacing the meeting with an email was an idea from the director to give people more time. Easier because some conversations needed to be offline anyways, so time is saved, but it’s also hard to explain email metrics to people who don’t understand. Still getting value out of reporting. Doing a lot of new testing, whenever it was finished, look at #’s individually but weren’t able to communicate to different partners who played into that strategy.

Q. How do you measure success and impact?
A. Revenue per email, looking at GMV, subject line -> open rates, content->conversion.

Q. What do you feel you contribute most to your work environment? Do you have a unique strength or quirk that makes you stand out? What sets you apart from other people in your role?
A. Works well with other and learn from others, able to pass that knowledge to teammates. Usually a designated person to train new people.

Q. How did you get into email marketing, what about the job motivates you?
A. Did a lot of marketing in different channels for a software training company, got into HTML. Found that she enjoyed most thinking about the message and how to communicate with customers. How to make things more appealing for each individual customer

Q.How do you measure success in your role, what makes you better than other email marketers?
A. Experience working with different departments, not a closed mind in how marketing has to happen, open to trying new things and testing new things. Listening to how other people see marketing, outside of the role

Q. Have you ever wanted to try a new tool or technology or process, and how did you incorporate it into your normal job?
A. Came out of a missing need, when it came to images, hosted on Amazon server, but had errors sometimes (wrong image or mistake in the image, hard to drop new images). Help after-send, investigated internally what the tech team could create something in-house. Presented an issue, created another in-house server that worked real-time. Presented to management that this is a need we have. Got the green light from management and had the developer. Got a tool where we dropped out assets in there, it’d show up in emails, dynamic update for image.

Q.What caught your interest with Hush?
A.Dina, currently looking, feels like her growth is maxed out.å
Q.What’s next? What do you see yourself learning/doing that’s new and different from your previous role?
A. Setting up programs in a start-up environment. New and exciting and challenging. Setting foundation.

Questions for me?
Goals for marketing as a company
What’s special about Hush
My role at Hush/what I do