#emailvision

New post published on http://emailblog.eu/2013/10/09/emailvision-is-now-smartfocus/

Emailvision is now SmartFocus

Emailvision is now SmartFocus, to better reflect what the company has to offer to the market.

Quoting Brad Wilson, CEO of SmartFocus:

Our business has evolved to the point where the name Emailvision no longer reflects the wide range of ways that we help our customers. At SmartFocus, we’re committed to delivering real-time personalized marketing across channels at each stage of the customer lifecycle. This enables us to help businesses to find a smarter way to focus on and connect with their customers.

In the global email marketing industry, Emailvision, now known as SmartFocus, has grown to a cloud marketing business sending out more than 50 billion messages per year.

The message greeting you when you visit the Emailvision website:

Clients include Airbus, Brazil Hospitality Group (BHG), Clintons, Editora Globo, Elemis, European Tour, Kaspersky Lab, L’Occitane Brazil, Nuffield Health and more.

The fact that Emailvision is now SmartFocus signals a change in online marketing. Online marketing is becoming a spread out spectrum of channels for the marketer, where consumers use many touch points. Email is not the main channel or point of contact anymore. Even though it is still much loved for its high ROI, other channels like social media, online gaming and communities have become a bigger factor in the whole marketing mix.

Check out the new brand’s website here.

Related Posts:

@smartFOCUS DIGITAL

Today is the day that smartFOCUS officially becomes EmailVision.

Mike and I would like to thank everyone at Chilworth, where we spent a lot of years. You are all part of the best team that either of us has ever worked with.

Your competence is shown in the way that email volumes grew by 80x, since Email Reaction was was acquired by smartFOCUS, with clients usually seeing the swan and not the legs paddling furiously underwater.

We also never made the kind of cock-ups highlighted in my other post today xD

A good guide to the future of what was Email Reaction, and perhaps the past, is The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen, which I discovered recently.

The smartFOCUS Chilworth and Bristol offices were organizations in different "value networks", a bit like Woolco and Woolworths in the book. Standardized product for small clients, vs customised product for big clients. Hundreds of orders, vs dozens of orders. Flat management, vs deep hierarchy.

Not good vs bad, just different business models. But it caused a few misunderstandings.

EmailVision seems much more similar to Chilworth than Bristol, in this regard. So it will be fascinating to see how events play out. I think the future could well be positive for you all.

I wish you well.

- Pete

MarketingXD visited Internet World 2011 at London Earl’s Court Exhibition Center. The show was quiet today, but several people said it was much busier for the first 2 days. The visit mainly gave me a chance to catch up with many contacts and friends in the industry.

Looking around at the stands, there were a few market sectors that seemed highly represented:

Usability Consultants / Testing

Seo

Email Marketing

Content Management Systems

Outsourced development operations, mainly in India. 

Hosting and Cloud Server Providers.

Some coupon networks.

I think the types of companies who were there showed how the industry is changing and maturing. These are the areas where there are big sales to be had to corporates.

But some marketing sectors weren't well represented - except by marketing technology giants like Alterian - giving the show a retro feel, more like 2007 than 2011. For example:

social (except that facebook had a stand),

mobile (nobody was demoing phone software),

tablets (just one exhibitor had an iPad),

gamification

Apart from those integrated offerings, these are some of the emerging sectors where the new players can't yet justify the costs of the stands.

It was an interesting show, and for me it confirms that there are some huge gaps in the market. There are many opportunities out there.

The sale of smartFOCUS (and smartFOCUS DIGITAL, formerly EmailReaction) to EmailVision completed this morning.

Here's a previous post in MarketingXD about the sale and the first report from Reuters today. Tim Watson attended the meeting, which was pretty much routine, and has tweeted about it. I was at the internet world show, today, and was able to pass the news on to several people at both companies.

Neither company has put out a press release, as far as I can tell, presumably so as not to distract from the above-mentioned show, where EmailVision had a stand.

The end of an era. It was good working with you all.

Update on 13 May 2011: the deal has been formally approved; but "delivery" will take a few weeks; it's as though you bought something on Amazon but it's not yet arrived. See the Reuters link for details.

Update on 13 May 2011: smartFOCUS Client Summit 2011 cancelled. These EmailVision guys move fast!