Our ‘Profile: A Day in the Life of’ feature takes a look at some of the global professionals working across performance marketing. It aims to shed light on the varying roles and companies across the flourishing industry.
In this edition we head to London, to speak with the founder and chief operations officer of dotmailer, Tink Taylor.
Name:
Tink Taylor
Job title and company:
Founder and COO of dotmailer.
In one sentence, how would you describe what the company does?
dotmailer is the best mid-marketing email marketing automation provider globally, offering a unique email and marketing automation solution that enables marketing teams to transform the way they work.
What are the company’s unique selling points?
dotmailer’s intuitive, accessible platform enables marketers of all levels to create highly personalised marketing automation campaigns, based on a huge number of rules, variations and triggers, in the easiest way possible. We describe the platform as offering “NASA technology with Fisher Price interface” and it is our mission to make the things that marketers find difficult much easier.
Within the last six months/year, what stands out as the company’s major milestones?
On July 15, dotmailer celebrated its fifteenth birthday – a fantastic milestone for the business but also the culmination of a number of really exciting new developments. The dotmailer platform has just been re-designed and re-launched, we have revealed a new brand positioning, tone of voice and website, and colleagues in the sales, account management and marketing teams are settling into their new home in our new office at No. 1 London Bridge.
At the same time, our global business continues to grow and our overall business strategy has shifted to focus primarily on the large end of the SME sector through to global corporate and enterprise clients, particularly Magento e-commerce customers in the UK and especially in the US. In support of this, we have welcomed a number of new starters to the senior team, including Peter Duffy, Senior Business Development Manager, Chris Boddice, Marketing Director, Carol Norney, and Revenue Marketing Manager.
Duration in current role:
15 years – since I co-founded the business back in 1999.
Where are you based?
I spend my time split between dotmailer’s UK head office and our New York office. I will soon be looking beyond this as well as we continue with our global expansion plans.
Previous performance marketing-related companies you have worked at:
Having founded dotmailer early on in my career, it accounts for the majority of my performance marketing experience. However, my earlier roles had a communications and technology bias and they are where I developed my passion for email marketing. Before dotmailer I worked at Sequent Computer Systems later acquired by IBM on the roll-out of a global corporate CMS based intranets. Prior to that, I was in a communications role with a focus on improving internal communications through technology. I have also designed and built websites myself in the past, alongside teaching people to windsurf – it is where it all started believe it or not, that is a long story though!
What are your main job responsibilities?
On a broad level, it is my responsibility to ensure that we have a cohesive mission throughout the business – so that everyone knows what we are trying to do and why, and is able to implement that in his or her own role. Day-to-day, my focus is very much on expanding our global sales opportunities, ensuring that our product and services are delivered globally.
Take us through what you get up to on a typical working Monday:
For me, Monday is all about sales, and that extends from reviewing our own sales performance to upskilling the team through training and education. So a typical Monday starts off with the UK overall sales meeting, followed by the senior management sales team meeting, and then, in line with different time zones, I do the same with teams located throughout North America.
A typical training session might cover specific sales techniques, or we all look more broadly at the marketing industry and best practice. On a practical level, we share client case studies so everyone has good visibility of the accounts, what we are doing for them and how they are performing.
What top three websites can you be found browsing during your lunch hour?
It is not often I get a lunch hour! I do take a few minutes each day to keep on top of industry news and developments. Deliverability.com and the Econsultancy Blog are both up there on the list. My main source of email marketing news and comment specifically is Onlyinfluencers.com. It is an open website now, but started off as an invite-only online discussion group and I was one of the first members invited to join in its early days. It remains a fantastic space for open debate and networking, and is often where you’ll hear any news first.
What are your top three tips for someone looking to get their hands on a job like yours?
In the 15 years since we first founded dotmailer and my role has of course evolved over time – I have gone from being immersed in the day-to-day business to working on the business, in a much more strategic capacity. My top three tips for anyone who wants to start and build their own successful business in the same way would be:
- Do not be afraid of giving up control.
- Build a successful team around you that you can trust and that is recognised.
- Always have the next goal or project for the business in mind – it is what will drive you to follow the first two tips and be able to move on to the next, exciting thing.
Career-wise, where do you see yourself in three years’ time?
My focus over the next three years is on our overall strategic goal to increase the number of dotmailer offices globally through overseas development. By that time, I hope to have developed several more global teams which, by that time, are reaching the maturity of our New York office set-up, with the same level of operations and partnerships in place. It was always our ambition when we founded the company to build a technology that was used and known globally.
Tell us one thing people at work do not know about you?
We are lucky, and I think pretty unique too, at dotmailer in that we have developed an incredibly strong team that works and plays hard together, we call this our ‘dotfamily’; so there is really not much my colleagues do not know about me. If I had to think of one thing that a new colleague on his or her first day might not already know, it is the fact that I used to be a windsurfing instructor, and that is how it all started. So I have designed and built lots of travel websites in the past, starting with one of the largest windsurfing schools in the world I was working at then in Vasiliki, Greece – Clubvass.com. And I am proud to say it was one of the most sophisticated online holiday booking systems of its day!