Mike Dirolf, the young founder of an idiot-proof way to send group emails, is shutting down his startup Fiesta.cc.

Fiesta.cc allowed users to create group email lists from the carbon copy field without ever having to visit another web page.

Dirolf says he lost interest in what he was building. Though everything was going well from a numbers perspective, he decided “life is too short to spend time on something that I’m not 100% passionate about.”

Dirolf was bootstrapping the startup and says it’s too expensive to keep the service running. Dirolf will move out of Dogpatch Labs NY and become a consultant while he figures out where his real startup passion lies.

Dirolf formerly worked at 10gen (the maker of MongoDB) and attended Princeton.

Here’s the farewell email and blog post Fiesta sent to users this morning:

We’ve got some sad news for you: we have decided to stop working on Fiesta and to shut the service down. If you’re interested in why, there are more details at the end of this post. If not, here’s the quick overview of how this affects you: we’ve made an export tool available on the list management page to export your lists. We’ve turned off the ability to create new lists, but your current lists will continue to function until March 1st. Hopefully that gives you time to find an alternate solution and coordinate with the other members of your lists. After March 1st, we’ll be turning off the servers that handle incoming email (so lists will no longer function). At that point all personal data will be permanently deleted.

We owe all of you a huge debt of gratitude for using Fiesta and making it so fun for us to work on over the past 13 months. We sincerely hope that it’s been a useful tool for you. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to get in touch with me directly: mike@corp.fiesta.cc

We wish you way more than luck,

Mike and Dan

Source: SAI

Social media and mobile are quickly establishing themselves as more than marketing channels simply worthy of a test budget. And, as marketers continue to understand how to leverage both social and mobile to meet their overall marketing objectives, they are looking to better integrate them into their overarching marketing strategy, tying them to other more established digital formats, such as email.

According to StrongMail’s annual marketing trends survey, conducted by Zoomerang, the majority (68%) of business executives worldwide said they plan to integrate their social media marketing efforts with email in 2012. In addition, 44% plan to integrate mobile with their email campaigns. Executives were less likely to focus on integrating more tenured online ad formats, such as search and display, into their email strategy, perhaps indicating such integration consideration and action has already taken place.

Additional data sheds insight on similarities in how valuable each of these channels is to meeting overall objectives. Business executives said email, social media and mobile were all effective marketing channels for building customer loyalty and retention. In fact, 67% of business executives worldwide said email was a valued asset to achieving this goal, with 48% saying the same for social media and 35% for mobile.

Almost half of respondents looked to social media to build customer loyalty, while most executives (64%) said social media was most valuable for awareness-building. Awareness-building was the second most-mentioned value for email (51%) and the third most-mentioned for mobile (28%), slightly behind expanding brand footprint (29%).

Business executives said they are focusing on building out social media on key channels such as Facebook and Twitter in the coming year: 39% plan to increase spending on Facebook marketing programs, and 24% on Twitter. A quarter also plan to boost spending on social media management technology as well as viral and referral marketing campaigns, pointing to an audience that increasingly understands the importance of measuring and amplifying the value of social media.

The most common investment business executives looked to make in mobile for 2012 was in building apps (29%). In addition, 22% said they were investing in the general category of mobile advertising, and 20% in sending SMS alerts. Only 15% of respondents planned to invest in location-based mobile marketing in the coming year, a number that is sure to climb as brands realize the value of connecting with consumers on the go and in-market.

The Email Experience Council is pushing to standardize metrics it has developed after a two-year research endeavor that included surveying dozens of email broadcast vendors.

The bottom-line reason for its call for industry-accepted metrics, it says in its blog, is that it has become impossible to compare response and deliverability rates when terms are based on different calculations.

The result of the work of its volunteer committee, Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, is a newly created and vetted list of definitions of key measures,  [pdf]. The EEC is asking for industry input with a survey on its site as well as feedback on the definitions.

Ongoing Debate

Much of this debate has been taking place in the email marketing community for some time. Almost a year ago Loren McDonald, co-chair of the EEC Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, posted his views on why the EEC wanted to see the term ‘render rate’ replace ‘open rate at the Deliverability blog.

“The open rate has become extremely inaccurate because disabled images, use of preview panes and HTML-unfriendly mobile devices lead to an underreporting of the true number of opens,” he wrote. “Fellow EEC Roundtable member Morgan Stewart has done analysis across several ExactTarget clients and estimates a typical underreporting of from 5% to 35%. Meaning a measured 30% open rate is actually from 31.5% to 40.5%.”

Industry Trends

As the industry talks about new metrics it would also be helpful to consider the changes in the larger shifts taking place. In a recent Mailer Mailer Email Marketing Metrics Report [pdf], the company again noted that open rates are becoming less accurate with many people reading email from hand held devices and disabling image downloading.

“The fact that click rates remained fairly steady suggests that people are still reading the messages even though fewer opens are being reported.”

Alternative Measures

There is also a case to be made for considering – if not formalizing – alternative metrics, according to a post by Chad Horenfeldt at Eloqua.

Besides the typical benchmarks such as those provided by MarketingSherpa, Horenfeldt suggested the following:

• Automated Email Metrics. “The goal is to demonstrate that key email metrics such as opens, click-throughs and conversions are much higher while unsubscribes are much lower using an automated program such as lead nurturing when compared to manual email sends (“one offs”). It would be very useful to B2B marketers to have benchmarks to track if their automated campaigns are trending upwards or downwards year after year.”

• How Email Contributes Further Down the Sales/Marketing Funnel. Increasingly marketers need to prove the value of their marketing spend in even greater detail, he says. “Email opens as an example is not good enough. What we need to see is metrics such as the number of marketing touches (including email) that lead to an opportunity and/or closed deal. This data needs to go beyond the communications that marketing is sending but should combine the efforts from marketing AND sales.”

• Database Accuracy Metrics. “I would like to see metrics that include the percentage completeness of contacts for key contact fields and the resulting email response metrics for campaigns that involve data that has been cleansed.”

• Multi-channel Metrics. “It would be very helpful to see which channels combined with email were the most successful in certain situations.”

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Tags: content, email, research, Social Networking

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