Luis Rivera was recently named interim CEO of J.L. Halsey, replacing David Burt. Previously, Mr. Rivera was chief operating officer at J.L. Halsey. DM News’ associate editor Dianna Dilworth spoke with Mr. Rivera about his vision for the future of the brands.
DD: What is your vision as interim CEO of J.L. Halsey?
LR: The long-term vision of J.L Halsey is simple: to provide a fully integrated, multichannel marketing solution for marketers in midsize companies that combines best-of-breed solutions all in a single application. While we build out this integrated platform, we will continue to innovate each of our point solutions like e-mail marketing, Web content management and Web analytics, and begin some initial integrations between the brands.
With regard to our e-mail brands – Lyris, Sparklist, EmailLabs and EmailAdvisor -we will continue to invest in new technologies and features to ensure we are providing our clients state-of-the-art applications.
What changes will you make and what will you keep consistent?
The vision for the company will remain the same. To get there, I’ll be implementing the transition from what was essentially a holding company for the acquired technologies to a centralized organization with a more traditional corporate structure. The changes will reflect improvements in company processes, alignments in product innovation and more centralized decision-making for brands and products.
What are key market developments and how are you addressing these issues?
Marketers are more sophisticated today but have less time to spend with their disparate marketing tools. As such, our major foci continue to be on usability, incorporating smart features into our applications, integrating features across our own products and making it easy to integrate with SFA and CRM applications.
Marketers also want to convert their Web site traffic into some form of customer relationship. Our brands help marketers better manage search engine marketing, optimize Web sites and landing pages, understand analytics and build relationships by employing e-mail lifecycle messaging. Integration of our brands means we can really make an impact in the way marketers utilize their time and energy, increasing the ROI of their programs. And that’s our goal.
What do you expect from the e-mail marketing world in 2007?
Rendering challenges in e-mail clients such as Outlook 2007, Yahoo Mail Beta and Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail Beta are the hot topic. To combat this, we’ve already integrated our EmailAdvisor monitoring tool with our Lyris and EmailLabs applications, enabling marketers to see how their e-mail will render in more than 50 different e-mail clients, including Outlook 2007.
In 2007 most marketers will realize that deliverability in the form of following permission, design and coding best practices is mostly within their control. Finally, we see marketers shifting toward creating higher-quality lists and increased customer loyalty, avoiding the “grow-the-list-at-all-costs” focus.
