Eloqua,  Email Marketing Chief Privacy Officer at Eloqua, Dennis Dayman an Interview Eloqua.

Tell me more about your company?

Eloqua is the category-defining marketing automation leader and
provider of best practices expertise for marketers around the world.
The company’s mission is to make its customers the best marketers on
earth. Thousands of customers from leading companies such as American
Express, AON, Apple, Cognos, Dow Jones, Fidelity, Seagate and Sybase
rely on the power of Eloqua to execute, automate and measure programs
that generate revenue. Eloqua helps companies read and decode their
buyers’ “Digital Body Language”, thereby improving the quality and
quantity of sales leads, increasing marketing effectiveness, and
accelerating the selling process.

How did you get into email marketing?

Actually, I fell into it. My intention when I was younger in my career
was to be in federal law enforcement with either the CIA, NSA, or FBI.
After realizing you don’t make a whole lot of money for a lot of work
in the government and also being offered a great paying job with SBC
(AT&T) Internet right out of college to handle security, policy, and
legal aspects of the Internet it became a natural fit over time for
me. A huge portion of my career to date has been spent dealing with
email from the anti-spam side of things. This allowed me to harness
great knowledge and experience of the years to apply in the marketing
and privacy arena today. Today I have more than 15 years of experience
combating spam, security issues, and improving email delivery through
industry policy, ISP relations and technical solutions.

What was your biggest challenge getting into email marketing?

The biggest challenge for me was removing many heavily embedded
thinking and processes that ALL marketing emails were inherently evil
and also trying to understand the many ways SOME marketing departments
justify their emails with the many confusing naming conventions of
non-standard data points.

What are the main things email companies do that you wish they wouldn’t?

Don’t think for the customer. Marketers should ever assume that
subscribers or visitors will want new information or want you to share
their information further than what they signed up for in the past or
what you promised them. Give them control over their own information.
When you do this, customers stay more loyal. Send what you promised to
send and send when you promised to send. If you have a need to keep
them informed of new information then do so through quarterly
newsletter, surveys, or start monitoring their “Digital Body
Language”

Also, an often overlooked opportunity for marketers to educate
consumers and assure them of good intention is the boring old privacy
policy. If your lawyer is writing your privacy policy you may miss a
marketing opportunity.

Tips for optimizing your privacy policy:
1. Write it for consumers
2. Keep it short
3. Index it or give it headers so people can find what they want
quickly
4. Audit the policy at least once a year (and have non-lawyers read it
for clarity)
5. Link out to relevant sections of your policy to “Contact Us”
features so readers with questions can get answers
6. Inform customers about policy changes, but be sure to do so before
the changes go public and give people a chance to change preferences
prior to launch
7. Highlight the policy throughout the site

What are the main things clients do that you wish they wouldn’t?

Holding on to large sums of dead/stale data or contact points. Too many
marketers think that quantity over quality of a list is the way of
thinking. They don’t realized that those sort of list can be causing
issues for them. If more than half of that list is dead, blocking, or
complaining then it’s impact delivery of the other half. Clients need
to be willing to remove non-active clients to flip the model to
quality over quantity in list management. At the same time, your
metrics will be positioned more favorable to your processes.

Where do you see growth in the email field?

Today, I see more of an alignment with all this new social media talk.
I don’t think social media is going to overtake email, but the support
of social media will be fed through email. The other growth I see is
more and more companies leaving the offline world to support old
communications functions like postal mail and moving to the online
world of email. Eloqua itself has even seen this during this down
economy. Companies are seriously running to change their marketing
channels to online as quick as possible. Possible over time we
hopefully we will see technologies like video evolve to take advantage
of email. I hope to see email become more interactive within itself
vs. having to link someone over to a website to then feel the
multimedia experience.

What new ideas are advertisers coming up with to take advantage of
new trends?

The biggest thing right now is link sharing technologies to articles
or information found in email and websites within social media
products like Facebook and Twitter. Companies like ShareThis
(http://sharethis.com/
) are helping people and companies combine and communicate to
consumers through the multitude of contacts points that any one person
might have today. Right now I probably have 10 or more channels that
companies could touch on but don’t.

What do you do to improve the world?

Volunteering my time within my work or personal communities. For my
personal side I work for the local volunteer fire department, take on
city commissions to work for the citizens either on bond and city
charter issues, and try to educate people/families on what kids are
doing under their parents nose’s (cyber use education). For work, I
help lead several coalitions and alliances in creating current
Internet and telephony regulations, privacy policies and anti-spam
legislation laws for state and federal government.

What do you do that is green?

Recycling as much as possible at home and since I work out of my home,
less driving .

What is one thing about you that not many people know?

It depends on the person. Some people are surprised to see my work in
the local volunteer fire department, some are surprised at my law
enforcement experience (cyber anti-terrorism), and some are surprised
that I used to D.J. years ago.

What is on your iPod?

Music wise I just attended the Edgefest concert in Dallas, Texas which
has me listening to Saosin (watch out for these guys), Death Cab for
Cutie, Blue October, Foo Fighters, Paramore, Seether, Breaking
Benjamin, and Puddle of Mudd in my latest playlist. On my flight to
London this weekend I watched on my iPhone Valkyrie. I probably have
the single widest genre of music on my iPhone. Really depends on my
mood.

What’s your favorite book?

Book? what’s a book? To be honest, I haven’t really picked up to many
physical books in a few years. I tend to read mostly online things and
things that are VERY short in time consumption. I know, I know, that’s
bad. I’m not a big management book reader either, but the last few
books that probably had an impact on me was “The Five Dysfunctions of
a Team” “Good to Great” and “Now, Discover Your Strengths”.

What are your contact details (email, company, blog, facebook,
myspace, forums etc) ?

Dennis Dayman
Chief Privacy Officer
Eloqua Corporation

http://www.eloqua.com

http://www.deliverability.com

Twitter: ddayman

Who would recommend you and why?

Recommend for what? Interview like this?

Stephanie Ann Miller
D.J. Waldow
Josh Baer
Matt Blumberg

Thanks to Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy Officer at Eloqua!