April, 2019 - Mason Interactive

We have four teams at Mason: An SEO team, an Email team, a Marketing team, and a Media team.

As we grow, we are proud to announce a restructuring of one of the teams to better serve our clients.

Our Media team has been refashioned into two distinct “pods,” or teams. Each “pod” is a group of four people, led by a seasoned professional with at least 5 years industry experience. The teams are named “Turbo” and “Hawk.”

This means that some people on a client team might be changing. In no case will everyone on an account change, but some restructuring of account teams may occur.

There are three strong, positive reasons to do this.

First, this structure gives employees a clearer career path, strengthening institutional knowledge of client accounts.

Second, it gives clients more stability. If person # 3 on Team Turbo leaves, there are still three people on the account that know the business – in addition to the fact that every account is touched by the Director and also the Managing Director.

Third, it lets us train our staff across disciplines. Today, everyone on the team is either Adwords certified, or Facebook Blueprint Certified. Soon, everyone on each team will be certified in both Adwords and Facebook.

These three very strong upsides are worth the one-time temporary disruption of moving one Performance Marketing Specialist from one client account to another.

New clients often ask us “What will success look like?”

That is a very hard question to answer, because it means different things to different brands.

For one of my clients, success is selling all of their left-over inventory. For another, success is “increasing top line revenue by 200% year over year.” A third defines success as “making the board confident enough in the CEO, to reinvest.” A fourth defines success as “being able to survive if Nordstrom cancels our order.” A fifth calls it “growing incremental net sales by 2X Quarter over quarter.”

So everyone is unique.

If you’re a fashion or lifestyle brand thinking of hiring us, and without knowing much about you, specifically, I’d define success as:

Using Search, Social, and Video, to develop a robust direct-to-consumer channel, increasing net revenue
Develop a marketing/sales report that everyone in the organization, from the C-level to the interns, can understand and operate on
Increase your organization’s digital savvy, to compete with today’s digitally-native brands
Tracking every dollar, such that we spend $1 to make $3

We were lucky enough to spend the AM at Casio’s North American HQ, to kick off our new client G-SHOCK watches. Thank you to the entire crew there for your time!

Mailchimp and Shopify are consciously uncoupling.

Quick Primer: Mailchimp is an Email Service Provider (ESP, for short) who integrated rather smoothly into Shopify. When the two systems played nicely with one another, it was a marriage made in heaven. With relative ease, you could develop a full email marketing campaign without leaving the platform.

That’s no longer the case, and it’s a messy breakup. Shopify says “Mailchimp refuses to synchronize customer information captured on merchants’ online stores and email opt-out preferences. As a result, our partner ecosystem can’t reliably serve their customers or comply with privacy legislation.”

Mailchimp says “we asked Shopify to remove the Mailchimp for Shopify integration from their marketplace, because Shopify released updated terms that would negatively impact our business and put our users at risk.”

The end result of this, is that if A) your website is built on Shopify and B) you use mailchimp then C) you need to make changes, and fast.

Realistically, there are two ways to make these changes. First, you can use a third party tool like Zapier to connect the two systems. Second, you could switch to another ESP, preferably Klaviyo.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that email is a strength of ours; we have an entire silo built out around it. Feel free to contact us 🙂