Former Premiere Global Services executive and e-mail marketing pioneer Tricia Robinson-Pridemore has joined StrongMail Systems as vice president of market and product strategy.
Robinson-Pridemore brings nearly 10 years of e-mail marketing experience to her new position, having been one of the founding principals of AccuCast before it was acquired by Premiere Global last year.
Robinson-Pridemore, whose role will be to help define the product and market strategies for the next generation of StrongMail’s digital messaging solutions for marketers, said she was attracted to StrongMail because of both its management team and its direction.
“I feel they have a position in the market that provides a unique alternative to an ASP (Application Service Provider),” she added. “They can provide marketers with a host of opportunities in terms of integration with other internal systems, control of how they send campaigns and when they send campaigns, along with other features that advanced e-mail marketers are increasingly looking for.”
Robinson-Pridemore has seen first-hand the expanded role e-mail now plays within marketing organizations, including getting a much larger share of the internal enterprise budget.
“That’s in part because the size of the databases has grown but also because the effectiveness of the channel has grown,” she noted. “We’re realizing higher open rates, higher click-through rates, higher purchase rates and the ability to open up this one-to-one dialog with customers. It’s moving away from a push medium and into a truly interactive one.”
Along with that growth has come the desire of many marketers to bring many of their e-mail marketing solutions in-house, especially now that they don’t have to custom-build that software themselves.
“What StrongMail is doing is building that solution for you, so instead of companies having to do custom build work on their product, you can leverage the StrongMail solution and really operate as your own ASP,” she added.
