Robyn Woods-Child is interviewed for the Rust Report September 2012
Can you provide and overview of the company?
“Rocketseed are global leaders in email branding and signatures. We released our software to market in 2002. Our head office is based in UK and we have sales and marketing branches in Johannesburg, New York and of course Sydney which our presence here has been since 2007”.
What sets you apart from the competition?
“Rocketseed enables our clients to put their sales and marketing collateral in front of their customers in every outbound email their employees send, which is significantly different from any other form of marketing. An average employee sends up to 15,000 emails per annum so if you multiply that by the number of employees in your company and then the number of years your company has been going, that’s a significant marketing opportunity that you have either missed or potentially you can take advantage of in the future”.
How would you describe your target market?
From my perspective as a marketer, every company could benefit from Rocketseed. We have a very strong hold into the enterprise level because of the sophistication of the software, enabling the marketing department of a company to segment, rotate and time the banners that arrived to the recipients inbox via the employees outbound emails. The scalability can go from as I was saying from a small business right up to our large clients, our large global clients.
What is top of the agenda for your customers?
There’s four main things that I run across all the time, one of them is how to keep their brand in the forefront of their client’s minds. They’ve got these customers, how do they retain them and maintain them and stamp their brand the impression at every opportunity. Second one is that they are looking for IT that’s got a light touch, cost effective IT with a light touch on their current infrastructure that they have in place. One of the biggest is trying to get a return on investment from their Website and their social media initiatives. How do I drive traffic there? We see many funny examples of a company that’s advertising on TV to drive customers to their web. Rocketseed is a natural flow via the employee outbound email to drive this traffic and converted it. The other topics are confused a little bit in the market place, sometimes I see as a skatter shot gun approach. Here’s the latest initiative rather than sitting quite concisely and thinking that through. They are being bombarded with a load of information.
What are the greatest challenges for the company currently?
The greatest challenge here in Australia is that unlike my, the global branches we’re a relatively unknown brand here. The other challenge I have is actually getting the marketers to see that this is a channel, which is highly effective. We garner quite significant, staggering results through some of our clients and we have some really big global brands like Dell in the US for example, British Red Cross, Virgin Mobile in South Africa. Getting that message to Australian marketers is the most difficult challenge I have here.
How does email marketing compare to direct email and online advertising?
Vastly different. When you’ve got from both of those of sectors, you’re were sending into an inbox or you’re putting up on a computer when somebody is searching something and these things come up. When you are embedding a header in a natural email conversation you’re having with your clients, you already have their attention. That already interacting with you, you are having that conversation and there is their sales and marketing collateral there, to drive to the company’s Website, social media or etc.
What is the core messages you want to communicate to the market?
Email is our world. We can build your business leverage and grow your revenue in every email you send out. It’s that simple and it’s that powerful.
