Jennifer Cannon, the former Senior Editor of MarTech Today, Marketing Land and the creator of the Periodic Table of Email + Deliverability, is joining the emailexpert team as the Director of Commercial Sponsorships. During the course of her fifteen-year career, Jen has worked for email service providers, brands and digital agencies — always with a focus on improving email marketing for the senders and their recipients.
How did you get started in email marketing?
Believe it or not, when I first became involved with email marketing, I fought against it. I was part of a small marketing team for an NHL club and we were primarily focused on social media growth and website engagement at that time. Our email campaigns were futile; there was no strategy behind our initial efforts.
When did you start to realize there was value in email?
I joined Salesforce Marketing Cloud shortly after as a Customer Success Manager (CSM) in 2014. My primary focus in this role was educating my customers on how how to use the platform(s), but also prioritized helping email marketers manage the complexities of their customer data, extract learnings from that data and create new use cases based on these learnings. This experience taught me how important building relationships is with customers, but also that — when done properly — email ROI was the key to everyone’s success.
What was one of the biggest issues you helped resolve for either your customers’ or your own organizations’s email service provider?
In 2016, I joined the Boston Bruins Hockey Club and TD Garden. I stepped into the role of digital marketing director in the middle of an ESP migration. I was able to help remediate the many issues stopping the team from “flipping the switch” to the new ESP, retire the old services and transition everything into the new ESP successfully.
Most recently, you weren’t practicing email — you were writing about it. Why the change, and what did you learn?
As an email marketer, I leveraged several different email websites for resources but I also noticed a major information gap for marketers looking for generalized information. As the senior editor at MarketingLand and MarTech Today — two vendor agnostic and marketing-focused publications. I heavily focused on writing about email marketing, which led to the creation of the first Periodic Table of Email + Deliverability. The table was well-received by email marketers and has been helping email marketers identify problems and new solutions for their email campaigns since its launch.
