I’m proud to share an update about a recent advancement to our email infrastructure. We now adopt a new technology called DMARC, which stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance.” It is a new and emerging email authentication protocol which helps both email senders and receivers prevent against domain spoofing and phishing.

DMARC provides a method for receivers to identify and take action against spoofing attempts, by utilizing the already widely-adopted authentication protocols of DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). Since this new DMARC protocol does not require any new technologies (just requires DNS record updates) it makes this a promising tool to become widely adopted by both email senders and receivers.

Essentially, DMARC performs a check against both the SPF record as well as the DKIM of the sending domain and gives the recipient MTA (Message Transport Agent) the information it needs to perform action against a spoofed domain. Coupling these two authentication protocols makes it virtually impossible for a malicious sender to spoof a sender’s domain. While not completely bullet-proof on preventing against all kinds of spoofing, it does provide a reliable method against domain-specific phishing attacks. Infusionsoft has been utilizing both DKIM and SPF for many years, so adding DMARC was an easy decision as we continue to evolve and strengthen our email systems.

DMARC is useful to both senders and receivers because it safeguards against domain fraud as well as end-recipient consumer privacy protection. Meaning, large and popular senders can protect against domain and brand spoofing, while the large recipients (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, et cetera) also benefit from ensuring their users are not receiving maliciously spoofed emails claiming to be from legitimate organizations in order to capture email addresses and other private and personal information. This technology has already received wide support from brands you trust including Google, Bank of America, PayPal, LinkedIn, Fidelity, Facebook and more.

DMARC is implemented by making an addition to the DNS (Domain Name System) TXT-type record for the given domain. Once a DNS has had time to propagate throughout the Internet, the receiving-side will pick up on this new DMARC addition and begin sending reports on potential spoofing attempts. This helps in identifying any abusive senders who would attempt to imitate your brand in order to compromise recipient privacy, which would only hurt your company branding and reputation.

Earlier this week, I had my team implement DMARC here at Infusionsoft. We are monitoring and testing this new technology. As the leading sales and marketing software for small businesses, Infusionsoft sends a lot of permission-based email on behalf of our customers. As an ESP (Email Service Provider), we will now better identify if and when our domain is being spoofed, and report such abusive practices accordingly. In short, DMARC is another tool in our email systems toolbox to help Infusionsoft’s email reputation and email deliverability stay strong.

P.S. Infusionsoft’s partner, Return Path has built a DMARC record creation tool which is available on their website. Additionally, by sending an email to checkmyauth@auth.returnpath.net, Return Path will send you a report back so you can see whether or not your email is authenticating with SPF/DKIM as well as whether or not your domain is ready to start using DMARC.

Earlier this year, I shared with you my take on the poignant advice from Daniel Goleman on human relationships and how marketers treat their prospects and customers. If you haven’t read my previous blog post, you should, as this is a follow-up to that post.

Here are two examples for how marketers can strengthen their relationships with prospects and customers through email.

1. Gather Qualitative Data

When you get to know a person better, the relationship builds. If you want to market to people and treat them as a “you” rather than just a contact record, then you must have a system to capture the interactions of the relationship. In short, you need data.

Which data is important? Every marketer will have a different answer, but for starters, you need to know the products people purchase; the emails they read; the links they click on; the webinars they registered for and actually; the brochures, reports or whitepapers they download; and the promotions they responded to (and didn’t responded to). But even having all this information captured in a CRM system loosely connected with an email marketing or autoresopnder tool and a shopping cart won’t ever be enough. Though essential, these pieces are missing a key ingredient to successful, personalized marketing: marketing automation.

2. Take “You” to the Next Level: Automation

One way to stay in the “you” model of personalized marketing is to hire hundreds of passionate customer service folks to answer and proactively send personalized communications to each and every prospect and customer. This is unrealistic and practically impossible for today’s small business owners.

The other way is much more practical and realistic—design a marketing automation campaign around the needs, interests and actions of a given prospect or customer. It can be daunting at first, but our Perfect Customer Lifecycle frames it perfectly for business owners.

I’ll illustrate two examples on this.

A prospect purchases your product and is automatically removed from the prospects group and added to the customers group in your database. At the same time, the prospect-oriented autoresponder campaign is stopped, they are automatically emailed a personalized “thank-you” message, and they are added to the new welcome campaign that has four subsequent campaign steps (two emails, a text message and a direct mail piece) timed to go out over the next five weeks.

The emails, text and letter are all addressed to the customer by name and target relevant products or services that appeal to people who purchased product “X.” If the new customer doesn’t take any further action at the end of the new customer welcome campaign, they are added to the 52 week, long-term customer nurture campaign. This is social marketing to “you.”

Let’s take it a step further. Say you want to run a targeted promotion, so in your CRM you begin filtering your customers to include all those who purchased product “X”, but not product “Y.” You further segment the list for US-based customers that bought product “X” within a certain date range who also registered for, but didn’t attend, the webinar for product “Y.” You send the resulting set of customers a targeted, personalized and relevant email offer for product “Y” assuming they are familiar with product “X.” Again, this is social marketing to “you.”

These are just a couple examples, but the use-cases are infinite. I love seeing all the ingenious ways Infusionsoft customers automate their marketing, sales and other business operations with our software. If you don’t have an intelligent rules-based marketing automation engine linking your CRM, email marketing and e-commerce tools together, then it is likely that you are marketing to “it”, and your prospects and customers feel it.

Next time you send a marketing message, ask yourself if you’re treating the recipient as a “you” or an “it.” Are your marketing messages building strong relationships for your business, or are you just pestering people and training them to ignore you? Are you a successful business that is ready to graduate from starter email marketing, simple autoresponders or disconnected shopping carts? If you are, Infusionsoft welcomes “You.” 

Image credit: derekskey

As marketers, we know it’s important to build relationships. To underscore this point, I want to share a meaningful example from a great book, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, by Daniel Goleman. Goleman explains how distinct parts of our brains are activated depending on whether we treat others as a “You” or treat others as an “It.” His advice has a meaningful impact in small business marketing and customer loyalty. I’ll share how this plays out for marketers like you.

Different parts of our brains process situations depending on whether we perceive we are being treated as a “You” or an “It.” Needless to say, it’s generally better to treat others and to be treated as a “You.” Treating people as “You” means the interactions are personable, empathetic and respectful. Treating others as a “You” makes social connections and reinforces neural pathways of affinity and trust. The “It” treatment objectifies, seems unfeeling, impolite and unwelcome. Goleman also suggests we are hard-wired to sense whether we are treated as a “You” or an “It.”

It occurs to me that many online marketers treat their prospects (and especially their customers) as an “It.” If you are sending out shotgun-style email blasts to your list, you are probably treating people as an “It.” Look at the emails you get in your inbox every day. Are the marketing messages targeted to you, identifying with your interests, relevant to your previous purchases, searches or clicks? Has it been many months since you have heard from a company, only to suddenly receive an email that starts with “dear valued customer?” Even if someone signs up to a company’s newsletter, explicitly gives permission for the company to communicate with them, they are likely to mark their future messages as junk or spam if recipients feel like they are being treated as an “It”. We are wired to know almost instantly if a company is marketing to us as a “You” or an “It”.

Allow me to illustrate this scenario for you.

Standard email marketing and autoresponder marketing tools (read: not Infusionsoft) perpetuate this “It” marketing mentality. You know the drill, load up your list, pick a nice looking yet generic feeling template, try to write something catchy and blast away. Someone buys your product or service, but your autoresponder sequence keeps on running as if they “It” were still shopping, continuing to treat “It” as a prospect.

Worse yet, you have a prospect that buys and becomes a customer, but you still have them in your prospects list and blast them a new promotion with a big discount on the product they just bought at full price. Ouch! There is nothing social about this style of marketing, no relationships being built, no connections or affinity being fostered. And don’t be fooled by thinking that putting a link to your Twitter or Facebook account at the bottom of your message makes you a social marketer. All the expense and effort to drive traffic to your site, all the compelling copy and offers to get people to give you their contact information, all the expense of the leads you acquire, all the connections you want with your prospects and customer are literally blasted to pieces as you market to “It”.

We are social creatures and data is the key to social marketing to “You”. How do you make it personal? In my next post, I’ll share specific suggestions on how to shift from marketing to “It” to “You,” which will make you a better marketer and will help your customers and prospects appreciate you even more.

I love to discover new ways of thinking. For years I have balanced three tradeoffs in software development: Fast, Cheap and Good. Pick only two of the following:

1. Build software fast
2. Build software inexpensively
3. Build software with high quality

If you want software built fast and cheap, then quality will suffer. If you want software built fast with high quality, it is going to cost you. If you want software built cheap with high quality, it is going to take a long time.

I heard of this “pick two-of-three” quandary early in my career and it seemed to make sense. I begrudgingly adopted this mantra and reiterated it from time-to-time over the years. However, while seeming intuitive at first there has always been something that has irritated me about this way of thinking about software development.

There is a big problem with framing the world of software development this way. Guess which one of the three loses out almost all the time when a CEO is demanding results? No surprise here, quality loses. Competitive pressure, time to market necessities and customer demand always push for fast. Undercapitalized start-ups and tight budgets necessitate the cheap. Furthermore, ramping additional developer capacity is a somewhat inelastic endeavor. It’s not always easy to throw money at a project (even if you have the money) because of the ramp-up period that all engineers require to achieve peak effectiveness with a new codebase and new team environment. Many software projects do not lend themselves to pouring-in more manpower. Somewhat analogously, nine women can’t have a baby in one month.

Well, I’ve figured out what has annoyed me about this way of thinking about software development. And it feels good to have a new outlook on the perceived tradeoffs!

I’ve been focusing the development department here at Infusionsoft on improving quality for several years. The investment in software quality is paying off. For example, over the last two years, my team has reduced the number of calls coming into our technical support department that are defect related by almost 200%! This has also played a big part in our terrific response time in the Infusionsoft technical support department. We routinely answer the support phones after just a few rings and have under a two-minute average speed of answer (ASA) score.

The other night I was meeting with my director of software development, Dr. Perry Reinert. While discussing the ongoing quest to improve quality and our vision to take Infusionsoft software quality to yet another level of excellence, we were also reviewing and prioritizing the list of initiatives we want to accomplish this year. After a couple hours of calendaring, capacity planning and prioritizing a big list of seemed to be “A-1, top” priorities, we both got to a place of feeling overwhelmed with all the cool things we want to do to the software. At this point, I quipped the “pick two-of-three” mantra that I described above. So Perry then whiteboards the following:

Yup, that’s it, I thought after staring at it for a few seconds. I now have a new paradigm of the tradeoffs involved in building software.  As it turns out, it is still a “pick two-of-three” decision. However, look at the big “Q” in the middle of the diagram. Quality is a constant that is never compromised!

Intuitively, I have believed this for a very long time and I now see what has always bugged me about feeling like software quality is somehow up for negotiation. When quality suffers, the fully loaded cost (both in terms of time and expense) of software development is far greater. When quality suffers, technical debt accumulates. I have learned that the interest rate on technical debt is a very heavy burden to bear. When technical debt accrues, everything takes more time, everything costs more and perhaps most importantly, quality code becomes harder to achieve and maintain.

In the new model, if you want a lot of software (scope) developed fast, it will cost you. If you want a lot of software developed cheap, it will take some time. If you want software developed fast and cheap, you will be restricted in the amount of software you can produce. Quality is omnipresent in Infusionsoft software.

I’ve often noted how uncanny it is that software development methodologies and paradigms parallel wide-ranging business issues and matters in life generally. If you see parallels or an application of this balancing act in your development shop, business or life then post your comments and share your thoughts.

–Marc

When you hear the word “uncomfortable”, what comes to mind? I’m guessing you have thoughts or feelings with some sort of negative connotation associated with the concept of being uncomfortable. I know that is exactly how I used to feel about being uncomfortable. Not anymore. A few months ago, I began actively seeking-out decisions, tasks and other situations that were intentionally uncomfortable. In doing so, my personal productivity, effectiveness and confidence has shot through the roof!  Let me explain…

I recently read two books that have made a huge impact on me in many ways. The first book is Linchpin by Seth Godin and the second book is 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss. Both books are amazing and packed with gems of knowledge and inspiration.  Of the many ideas and concepts from these books, there are two ideas that I have combined that directly relate to this concept of being uncomfortable.

First, in Linchpin, Seth Godin introduced me to the concept of Emotional Labor. Emotional Labor is bringing guts, ideas, passion and love to work when you and others don’t feel like it. Godin writes about making your “work” your “art”. Seth Godin proposes that we embrace the fact that the only thing we get paid for is doing Emotional Labor. To become indispensable to your organization and become a “Linchpin”, do Emotional Labor the best and you will keep getting rewarded for it.

Next, in 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss advocates intentionally embracing discomfort and uncomfortable situations as a method for making positive change in your life. No doubt, Ferriss crafted the idea of purposeful and voluntary discomfort from his admiration of the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. Tim Ferriss quotes Seneca throughout The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss wants us to expose ourselves to fear, to potential embarrassment, to risk.  Mentally go to the place of the worst-case possible scenario. Doing this helps us very clearly recognize appropriate courses of action. Tim Ferriss has a great video talking about these principles.

By combining these ideas from Godin and Ferriss, I come up with Uncomfortable Emotional Labor. I have found that during times of discomfort… when we feel most uncomfortable… that the most meaningful, forward progress is achieved. Identifying and attacking an uncomfortable issue, task or situation is Emotional Labor.  Put another way, the most effective Emotional Labor is the type that feels uncomfortable. This Emotional Labor is hard, it takes guts, it fully engages creativity, and ignites passion and love.  And the payoff is amazing!  Think about it, how satisfied are you when you accomplish something routine and safe?  Compare that with the level of satisfaction you feel when accomplish something hard to do, something scary, something possibly embarrassing or risky? Big difference, and not just for your personal satisfaction, but also for results you are driving for your organization.

How do you engage Uncomfortable Emotional Labor? Identify uncomfortable tasks and decisions and put them at the top of your daily action list. Have you been putting-off holding a colleague, employee, a vendor, a relative, or (hardest of all) yourself accountable for something?  Do you see something in your life or business that needs to change, but you postpone action in an effort to not “stir the pot”? Take a look at your task list and decide what is the most uncomfortable thing on your list. Then make that item the top priority. The task list approach is good place to start, but it tends to be very tactical. Also, think more strategically and holistically by forcing yourself to think of Uncomfortable Emotional Labor in the context of quarterly or annual objectives you are driving.

Put yourself out there. Get uncomfortable.

I’d love to hear how you apply Uncomfortable Emotional Labor in your life.  For me, the more I focus on these concepts, ironically, the more comfortable I am engaging Uncomfortable Emotional Labor. Quite an interesting paradox… but, I’ll save that discussion for another time.

[Image credit: Rick C.]