Tag: Email Careers

How to set your annual goals as an email marketer

Kristin1 Comment

It’s the end of the year, and you’re probably working on your performance review self-evaluation and/or setting goals for next year. I’ve had people ask me about the best ways to go about this since I’ve led several email teams in my career, and I thought it would be a good time to write about it.

Your HR probably showed you some slides during a meeting a few weeks ago telling you to make your goals S.M.A.R.T!!! (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). And while that’s a great concept, it’s not always super clear how to translate that into actionable things you can do, and then later evaluate yourself on whether you “Did not meet expectations”, “Sometimes Met Expectations”, “Met Expectations”, “Sometimes Exceeded Expectations” or “Far Exceeded Expectations”. (Seriously, can we please stop using these 5 point measurement systems??? It is so confusing, and unless you and your manager specifically outline the difference between each level, it’s very hard to justify the highest ones. That’s what they want, by the way. Ever had a company say “Almost NO ONE gets Far Exceeded!!!” We expect most people will fall in the ‘Meets’ or ‘Sometimes exceeds’ bucket, and only have space for a few top performers?” That’s how they justify not giving raises. Because they surely would WANT to have most of the staff performing well, just not when it comes to handing out pay bumps. At least… in my experience at some jobs in my past. Anyway.)

So how DO you set goals where you can actually confidently say your work “Far Exceeds Expectations” when you do your performance reviews? How do you make it indisputable that you deserve a raise and/or a promotion? And what if your work isn’t necessarily as quantifiable as some email work? (For instance, if you work in B2B and your emails support sales, but aren’t the primary contributor because sales reps are closing the deal, or maybe you’re at a non-profit and sending newsletters that are more about awareness and not so much about fundraising, you can’t easily use the “My work generated this much revenue” goal.)

Here are some things you can set goals around that aren’t revenue related, how to make them S.M.A.R.T., and how to go above and beyond (and prove that you did!):

  1. Work Quality/Accuracy: Have you had email mistakes and “Oops” emails happen? (Of course you have. You send emails.) Set a goal around improving QA and reducing mistakes. The way you accomplish this goal could involve better documentation, a checklist, a specific new review process, adjustments to the production process to allow for more review time, etc. It’ll depend on a lot of variables based on your company/work, but spend some time thinking about where things have gone wrong in the past, and then make a plan of how you want to fix it in the future.

    Your goal can then be something like: “By [date], I will create a QA checklist for our emails to reduce errors by X%, and I will present it at [whatever team meeting] and implement it for all emails.”

    Specific: The actual deliverable is you’re making a checklist and presenting it
    Measurable: Did you create the document? CHECK! Did you reduce errors? DOUBLE CHECK! A note on this – you’ll need some kind of benchmark to know if you actually reduced errors. So you’ll need to dig up how many mistake emails you had this year (maybe that’s a spreadsheet that lists them all and what the mistake was, maybe it’s some other format. You do you. But you need a baseline so you can show you’ve improved.)
    Achievable: It’s just a checklist, and there are plenty of resources out there with ideas for what to include
    Relevant: Hello, you need this and it’ll help your team do your jobs better!
    Time-bound: You gave a timeline for when you expect to complete it

    So how do you make sure you “Far exceed expectations” on that one? Deliver it WAY before your deadline. Make it extremely detailed and work hard to get full adoption from the team. Be a loud champion for your new process to the point where your coworkers maybe tease you about it a little bit, and try to get buy-in from higher ups so they also help with getting everyone on board with it. Before making the goal, quantify the number of mistakes you had last year, and show that after your new process was implemented, it actually helped reduce mistakes, ideally more than the percentage you laid out in your goal. BOOM!
  2. Process improvements: Is your workflow chaotic? Are you constantly chasing feedback, that last bit of content, or approvals? Fix it! There are lots of ways to approach that, and again it’ll depend on your larger team and the work you’re doing, but think about where the hiccups and roadblocks are, and what could fix them.

    Your goal can then be something like: “By the end of Q2, I will create and implement an email brief document and request process to streamline email creation and shorten production time from [X days – current amount of time it takes to get an email out the door] to [Y days – a much faster/shorter amount of time]”

    Specific: The goal here is twofold. You’re creating the process and email brief/request form, but you’re also actually using it to shorten production times.
    Measurable: Did you create the process? Cool, nailed it. Did it quantifiably reduce production times? Great!
    Achievable: You can do this! Again, lots of examples and templates exist, and if you’ve been making emails, you know where the pain points are, so focus on fixing them.
    Relevant: This literally helps you do your job more efficiently!
    Time-bound: By the end of Q2 (this can be for whenever you want, but I like to space out my bigger project goals like this so I’m not trying to do everything at once)

    How to show you exceeded the goal: Finish before your deadline, make the production time changes even better than you outlined in the goal, and show that there’s positive feedback from team members on the new process (scroll down to see a plan for how to do that…).
  3. Brand work: Are you going through a rebrand? Designing and building new email templates? Developing an email style guide for your brand? Awesome! As you know, that’s a huge project and probably not easy to quantify. This could be an entire post on its own (by someone else who designs things…), but this totally warrants its own goal.

    Your goal can then be something like: “By the end of Q3, I will design, code, and QA a modular email design system with # different modules, and migrate [the monthly newsletter, the onboarding series, whatever your first emails to migrate over to new design will be] to the new templates to improve email engagement and reflect new branding.”

    Specific: Shows exactly what you’re doing – designing and coding the design system
    Measurable: Quantifies how many modules will be part of the design system
    Achievable: Make sure you’re giving yourself plenty of time, and that you have appropriate resources for this (maybe you’re not designing AND coding, but rather working with our team members who will do those parts. Maybe you’re more of a project manager/strategist for this – that’s okay too!)
    Relevant: Maybe your company recently changed their logo or color palette and your emails need to reflect it.
    Time-bound: Give yourself plennnnnnty of time for this one.

    How to show you exceeded the goal: Do more or do it faster! More modules, or move more emails over to the new template. Or, be ahead of schedule.

  4. Learning and developing new skills: We all know that email is constantly changing, and there’s always something new to learn. Whether it’s a new feature or tool in your ESP, a skill you’ve always felt a little shaky on, a certification, or even something else that can help you in your career like public speaking, setting aside time to work on this -and making it part of your job- is a great way to get there. Many companies have professional development budgets that rarely get used. If you have it – use it! Take that class, sign up for that certification test, or go to that conference.

    Your goal can be something like: “By the end of the year, I will study for and earn the SFMC Email Specialist Certification.”

    Specific: This is a very specific certification, with clear steps to achieve it.
    Measurable: It’s pass fail, so pretty easy to confirm if you did it!
    Achievable: You can do this! There are plenty of training courses and study guides available for this. Put in the time, and you’ve got it!
    Relevant: If your ESP is SFMC – super relevant. In your test prep, you may learn parts of the tool you’ve never used before, and better/different ways to do things you’ve been doing (I’ve earned 2 certs and am working on a third – even after 15+ years using SFMC, I’m still learning new things every day!)
    Time-bound: By the end of the year! Give yourself lots of time for this type of goal, especially if it involves studying/taking a class. The reality is, those types of things tend to fall to the back burner when more pressing work comes up, but they’re a great thing to work on whenever you have down time.

Other areas you can think about for potential goals: Work Volume, Meeting deadlines, KPIs you can actually influence (such as optimizing whatever parts of the email content you can), training other team members, Migrations and project management, creating documentation of all of your automations or journeys. Really, anything that you think will help you do you job better!

How to fall into the “Far/Exceeds Expectations” group
In general, here are some ways to show how/why you exceeded expectations. You can think about these things as you’re creating the goals to ensure that you ARE able to exceed them (I’m not saying to aim low in your goals necessarily, but I am saying – make them so unquestionably Achievable that you’d have to really be slacking off to not at the very least, meet them):

  • Better numbers than what you outlined in the goal
  • Faster timelines than what you planned for
  • Positive feedback from other team members
  • Any other unexpected positive outcomes – maybe something you did inadvertently saved money, improved customer experience, or did something else that helped the company in some way (example: You streamlined the email production process, and had more time to do something else!)

Keeping track of your progress:
Document EVERYTHING! There are lots of ways to do this, but here’s what I usually do:
1. Keep a document (can just be a Word or Google doc, or whatever format you like) that lists out each goal exactly as they were input into your goal-setting software. Add notes to it throughout the year highlighting the work you did and any notable achievements. This will make it MUCH easier to write your self evaluation at the end of the year or review period. Throughout the year as you’re adding to this, maybe even write them in the same format you would in your self evaluation. End of Year You will be grateful.

2. Have a “Wins” label or folder in your email inbox to keep track of any positive feedback you receive related to these goals (or your work in general). If this kind of feedback comes on Slack or Teams, take screenshots and send to yourself and save in this label or a folder somewhere else. This will help with showing the positive impact you’ve had – it could be emails from colleagues or customers thanking you for your work on the project, or any other nice messages you receive (Bonus side project: Write these yourself to other people throughout the year! Everyone likes seeing that their work is appreciated, and it helps create a culture of recognizing each other’s work. Super easy way to strengthen relationships with your coworkers, and.. it’s cool to be kind!) This collection of evidence that your work is appreciated is also just a nice thing to have as a reference if you’re ever having a bad day or feeling less confident about your work.

3. Check in! Set reminders on your calendar to check in ever month or two on your goals doc and make sure you’re still on track. If your work priorities change throughout the year (it happens!), talk to your manager about how that will affect the goals you set, and then you can decide if you need different goals. You should also check in with your manager regularly about your goals anyway, so they know you’re working on them and so you can get any support you need.

Bonus uses of all this:

A cool thing about setting your goals in this way is that you’ll end up with awesome bullet points of accomplishments you can then put on your resume:

For example, that first goal –
“By [date], I will create a QA checklist for our emails to reduce errors by X%, and I will present it at [whatever team meeting] and implement it for all emails.”

…Becomes this on your resume: “Created and implemented a QA checklist document across a 10 person team, which reduced email errors by 45% from the previous year”

Annual goal setting can be overwhelming, but I hope this framework makes it a little easier for you! One of my goals for next year is to write more things like this. Let me know if there’s something you’d like to see!

Happy goal setting!

On my honor, I will try…

Kristin4 Comments

After a very much needed almost 3 month hiatus, I’m happy to announce that I’ve accepted a full-time job at Girl Scouts of the USA as their Senior Email Marketing Specialist. I’ll be spending my time helping to standardize their email programs across 112 councils all over the country, writing documentation, educating marketing teams about email best practices, and being their go-to person for my favorite ESP.  While it’s obviously very much still in the email world, it’s taking a step away from mass producing emails every day, and it’s exactly what I want to be doing. I start next month, and I’m extremely excited about it! In all of the years that I’ve worked in marketing in various industries, I’ve learned that I’m much happier when I’m marketing a product or service that I genuinely believe in and care about. While that’s not possible for every job and every company, I’ve found that it’s something I need to be successful and happy in a job. That’s why I’m absolutely positive that this is the perfect fit for me. GS VestsI’ve been involved with Girl Scouts since I was 5. I started Daisies when I was in pre-school, then I continued through Brownies and Juniors over the next 7 years. I remember making a point to sell 350 boxes of cookies one year so that I could go to a 13-day horseback riding camp for free. I loved being a Girl Scout. My mom was our troop leader, and most of my happy memories from when I was that age have to do with Girl Scouts. In the summers when I was a kid, I’d spend hours reading and re-reading my Girl Scout handbook, looking for fun craft projects to do and badges to work on. Twenty years and a bazillion moves later, I still have both of my uniform vests. In the last few years, living in NYC and not knowing any girls here, my involvement had been reduced to buying a lot of cookies (often online, pre-Digital Cookie, from friends in other states who have kids) and liking and sharing social media content. And, of course, being a Girl Scout cookie bakery hipster (according to my brother. I prefer “expert.”). Anyway, I’m really excited that my job is going to be with an organization that’s very near and dear to me. Plus, you know, there will be cookies. If you haven’t heard about it yet, Girl Scouts are making great strides in advancing their programming along with technology. With the recently launched Digital Cookie program, girls can create their own websites to sell cookies, allow customers to pay with a credit card, and sell cookies via an app. After working in techy startups the last few years, and seeing how underrepresented women are in the tech world – I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to have the opportunity to contribute to a program that will get girls interested in tech and digital marketing at an early age. troop3508 I’ll start the job in late March. I’ll be spending the next few weeks wrapping up some freelance projects, going on a vacation with good friends, shopping for professional clothes, and trying to teach myself how to organize an Outlook email account at the same level of OCD that I take with my Gmail accounts. (Any tips on that, pretty please? I haven’t used Outlook in a while.) The break that I’ve taken the last few months was an excellent choice for me. I knew I was burnt out and needed to take some time off, but I didn’t know just how badly I needed it until a few weeks in, when I was finally able to stop feeling guilty when I felt like spending an afternoon relaxing instead of trying to figure out my next professional move. But it also helped me realize that I actually really do enjoy working. I get more satisfaction out of doing something productive than watching five seasons of Friends on Netflix (but I’ve also learned to accept that it’s okay to sometimes count finishing a season of a show or clearing out a Tivo queue as “productive”). Re-charging is important and necessary in order to continue to do actual work, and sometimes we all need to take a moment and acknowledge that. I’m so happy that I’ve found a work environment that offers the level of balance that’s been missing from my professional life for a while and projects that I can’t wait to dive into. It’s been fun hibernating this winter, but now I’m refreshed, relaxed, and completely ready to go back to work full-time… in a few weeks.

My history with a certain ESP: A love story

Kristin3 Comments

Since Valentine’s day is this week, and I couldn’t bear to dig through all my emails from flower companies and write about them (but if you’re desperate to read about flower emails, you can read my Mother’s day posts here and here), I decided that I’d instead write about the most important relationship every email marketer has: their relationship with their ESP. More specifically, my long-term relationship with a certain ESP.

—

We first formally met when I was working in a boring corporate job. My office was in the same building as his. I saw him on the elevator, embodied by a different cool person every day, wearing his jeans and texting on his iPhone (in 2008, before everyone had them), while I was in my boring business casual with my Blackberry Pearl, thinking about how to write creatively about the recession for the millionth time that week. He seemed so happy, so bright, so… orange. I was intrigued.

We got to know each other, and started actually working together. He introduced me to a whole new world of careers I didn’t know existed. I went to his big annual party, which turned out to be a toooootal rager, even though I thought it would be a bunch of uncool corporate types. Who actually enjoys spending 3 days talking about nothing but email (apparently, a lot of people)? I was maybe just hoping to have a good reason to get away from the office for a few days. But after a few bright orange cocktails, a grey and black messenger bag filled with swag and autographed books, and tales of a cookie waiting in hotel rooms at the exact moment guests drunkenly arrived back from a free amazing They Might be Giants concert — let’s face it. I was hooked.

I left the corporate job, moved to a big city on the east coast, and our relationship became off-again, on-again. I was wearing my bag from the rager over my shoulder outside of a Starbucks in Manhattan, when a stranger with an alliterative name asked me if I worked there. I told him no, but I would like to someday. I was thrilled that I was passing off as one of them. He actually did work there, and was visiting from an office in another country.

Over the next few years, I spent time with others, but always went back to him, my quirky, strong, bright orange, ESP. He decided to go public, and when I bought a few shares of his stock, people close to me were concerned it might be considered insider trading since I talked about him so much, not realizing that I wasn’t actually with him in that way.

I ended up making major life decisions around when I would get to see him, and be with him. After spending a year at a job that worked with another ESP, I switched jobs as soon as I had the chance to go back to him. My actual wedding and honeymoon were at the same time as his annual week-long rager one year (and the wedding was even in the same city), and for a brief moment, I considered postponing the honeymoon to be with him – but only for a moment. There would be other ragers, after all. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t shed a tear at the airport on Monday morning on my way to my honeymoon, as I saw the orange shuttle bus pull up to take people to the party. If only I had known his days were numbered, and this would be one of the last few.

And sure, when I told people about how much I loved him, and why – there were skeptics. He’s not perfect after all. People I worked with mocked my devotion, and threatened to start seeing other ESPs, but I knew nothing could rock what we had. I’m in it for the long haul. It wasn’t always easy to love him. Nobody’s perfect. And even if he had his flaws, I knew him so well that I didn’t even care, and just worked my way around them. And I only called him up to complain about his flaws to his face a few times. 

But eventually, as what happens with most people and their ESPs, I woke up one morning, and suddenly, everything was different. He had some work done to his appearance, and was running with a new crowd, and going by a different name.  He had changed. I know that even with all these changes, he’s still the same ESP I’ve loved all these years. I know that plenty of others have a crush on him too. That’s okay. I know what we had together, and he has plenty of love to go around. And I don’t think our story is over, even if things are a becoming a little too…cloudy. We can weather this storm, and shine bright orange again someday. 

The care and keeping of your email marketing manager

Kristin5 Comments

I’ve been “fun-employed” (by choice, THANKYOUVERYMUCH) for about six weeks now.  And honestly – I don’t hate it. This has been the first time since college that I’ve actually been able to enjoy more than a week off without having to worry about checking work emails and if everything was running smoothly without me. (Okay, full disclosure – I thought about that last part a little at first. But the great thing is, I could remind myself that it wasn’t really my problem anymore, and that things were probably just fine, because my replacements were fully capable and trained really well).

Since my last post, I’ve had quite a few people reach out to me about job opportunities. Normally, on any given week, when I haven’t just made a big announcement that I’m on the market for new opportunities, I get at least 3-4 LinkedIn requests from recruiters about email jobs. But there have been quite a few more lately. Almost all have been for full-time roles, and several are for email marketing manager roles that I “would be perfect for!!!” — because they’re exactly what I’ve been doing for the last few years.

I’ve talked to my email friends who have the same experience level as I do, and this is pretty common. A lot of us have been doing email marketing for about 7-10 years, and we’ve been in email producing roles where we’re the only one in our company working on email. We get very good at it because we have to – there’s no one else to do it, and no one else in our company has any experience with email. Our jobs are very demanding, and come with a very special degree of stress and anxiety. Because of this, we get burnt out really easily, and some of us end up switching jobs every year (or even more frequently than that in some cases). Recruiters lure us away with a cooler startup, more money, or the promise of change. This job will be different – we’re looking for someone who can take our email program to the next level, and you’re perfect for it. We work hard, but we play hard too. We have unlimited vacation as long as you get your work done! (LOL) It’s fun to work for us – we have a ping-pong table! (I’ve heard all of these lines more times than I can count.)

The thing is – we’re really not doing all this job hopping just because we’re entitled millennials. It’s because a lot of these email marketing manager roles are set up for failure from the start, and honestly – we have options. A lot of email marketing managers, especially at startups, are entering roles where they’re the first person to build the email program, and have to deal with not only the workload of building an email program, but also educating the team about IP warming, welcome emails, and why you shouldn’t build that email as one large jpeg. While this can be an exciting challenge, it can be a very exhausting uphill battle.

After I interviewed for (and declined) an email marketing manager job recently, the HR person asked me for feedback about how they should structure the role. I told her that in my experience, especially for companies with high frequency sends, it’s ideal to have at least two people on the email team – one focusing on planning, strategy, reporting, and operations, and one to actually execute and produce the emails. That way, there’s always a back-up person to help out with the crazy weeks, and the strategy side actually happens. The last two email teams I’ve been on started out as just me, and were structured that way by the time I left. Anyone looking to start an email marketing program at your company – PLEASE keep this in mind. If you don’t have the budget to hire two people, please read the next paragraph.

There’s a project management concept that’s illustrated with a triple Venn diagram with three words on it: Fast, Cheap, Good. The idea is that it’s nearly impossible to have all three of those in any given project, so you have to decide which two you want:

I think something similar could be applied to an email marketer’s workload, only replacing Cheap with “A lot of emails.” If you want a lot of emails, and fast – they may not be very good. If you want emails fast and good – you’re probably not sending very many of them. If you want a lot of good emails – it’s going to take some time. I’ve been in a position at several jobs where I’ve been pressured to do all three, and “Good” was always the first one to go. Not a situation I ever want to experience again. If you want all three of these – build a team.

If employers want their email marketing manager to stick around, they need to be realistic about workloads and expectations. Email Marketing is a VERY small world. I don’t know the most tactful way to put this, but – we know that we have a rare, desirable skill set, and it is easy for us to walk away from bad situations. Many of us have recruiters knocking down our doors. We know that our work can generate significant revenue and site traffic. If you want to keep your email marketer – let him or her build a team. Or at least, train other people in the company to help out with email so vacations can actually happen. Email marketers spend a lot of time thinking about how to retain subscribers, and it’s time for their companies to think about retaining email marketers.

The latest trend in email marketing

Kristin5 Comments

…is leaving your email marketing job. Or even leaving email entirely.

This past year, I’ve read emails and blog posts from a few well-known email marketers who have decided to leave their awesome jobs and take a break from email for a while. I’m currently in the middle of the Email Insiders Summit, and there’s definitely talk of lots of people switching companies or leaving their email jobs.

It’s not totally shocking news. As much as we all love email marketing, it does cause a lot of anxiety. It’s easy to get really burnt out, really quickly.

And that’s why I’m joining the ranks of people taking a break.

While I’ve loved email for my entire career (and still do very much),  it’s time for me to take a step away for a few weeks. At the end of the next week, I’m leaving my job at Food52 to do…something else. TBD.

So, why?

Lots of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with my current job. I never expected to fall into email marketing as a career. I went to college to be a stage manager for theatre. But I graduated in a very difficult job market, and took the first marketing coordinator job I could get. I learned that email marketing 1) existed and 2) was something I really wanted to do. So I did it. The first few years were in B2B, which certainly has its own challenges for email. But I fell madly in love with this new career option that combined copywriting, coding, creativity, psychology, and analytics. Then, after I moved to NYC a little over 4 years ago, I discovered the joy of B2C email marketing. Suddenly I could attach a real dollar amount of value that my work brought to my company, and that was really exciting – at first.

But that came with a cost. I was responsible for making sure that my emails made money. Online retail brands really depend on email for revenue, and I’ve had to send a lot more emails than I’ve ever wanted to send. As a consumer, I actually barely read promotional emails (but as an email marketer, I read ALL OF THEM).  I’d rather get fewer emails that were really, really good, than daily emails that weren’t. As an email marketer, that’s what I want to send. I think that’s what most email marketers want to send. The trouble is, email marketers work with other digital marketers. And product managers. And CMOs and CEOs who don’t understand email and think the “send” button is a magic bullet that prints money, and it can be pressed constantly.

For my last two jobs, I was hired to be the one person running email. While my background and interviews indicated that I was hired to do strategy and day-to-day email operations, in both cases, my role ended up being a very busy hybrid of producing emails, managing ESP transitions, educating co-workers about email, arguing with designers about whether emails should be built as images or hard coded, and figuring out that whole responsive design thing. There was no time for strategy or advancing myself as an email marketer. I couldn’t often leave for conferences (or vacation days…), because someone had to be there to send the emails, and I was the only person who knew how. Working at startups can be exciting, but in both jobs, I found myself in a position where I was both overwhelmed by the sheer volume of my work, and completely bored with it at the same time. Since there was no one who knew more about email than me to challenge me to do more, I wasn’t really growing as much as I wanted to – I was just trying to get everyone to a level where we could work on emails together.

In both jobs, however, I was able to build up email teams. I have taught several junior level people a ton about email, and they’re now self-sufficient email marketers who are capable of running email for high-volume  brands, (gasp!) without my help. I’ve educated a lot of designers about why we can’t just make an email one large image, and I’ve taught front-end developers how coding email is different than coding for the web. And I discovered I really like teaching people about email. In fact, I’m developing an Intro to Email class for General Assembly in NYC, and in January, I’m going to teach more people about email. Anyone who has met me at an email event or conference, or has worked with me in the last few years, or follows me on Twitter, knows that I get really excited when I talk about email.

When I left Warby Parker, the social media team put this up on their daily white board. My geeky ExactTarget fangirl behavior was a running joke in the office, and for good reason.

http://instagram.com/p/p9n1BbwRkB/?modal=true

Like I mentioned above, there were other factors in my decision. I’ve lived in NYC about four and a half years, and – it’s exhausting. I had wanted to live here my entire life, and I really did love it – at first.  But startups have long hours. I have a long commute. Pair that with smart phones becoming a lot more common in the last few years, and I feel like I’m ALWAYS working (or at least on call).I never have time to actually enjoy living in the city. Many of my co-workers in recent years are exhilarated by this kind of life, and thrive on it. They love having a fast-paced, open office setting. To that, I’m going to have to quote Amy Poehler, “Good for you, not for me.”  In the past few years, I’ve learned a lot about myself and what kinds of work environments I thrive in, and it turns out, “fast-spaced scrappy start-up” isn’t one of them.

So what’s next?

The solution I came up with was to press “pause” for a little bit, and regroup. I’ve taken VERY little time off over the last few years, and my plan is to spend the next few weeks recharging and planning my next steps. I’m going to enjoy spending the holidays with my family and actually be fully present, without having to worry about whether an email is converting enough, or if the customers received their e-Gift cards. And then I’ll look for something else to do. I don’t want to jump into another startup that leaves me just as burnt out as the others, and find myself frustrated, exhausted, and wanting to leave after a few years or even a few months. I want to work with other people who are as passionate about email as I am, and who are better at email than I am.  I want to help other people become as passionate about email as I am, and I don’t want to resent my workload so much that I feel less passionate about email. For now, I’m going to focus on finding something that balances my passion for email with my need for work/life balance. I’m going to keep my options open. And I can’t wait.