1871 Invades Park City

By Erik Severinghaus, founder & CEO of SimpleRelevance

The Email Insider Summit in Park City, Utah is one of the leading conferences around the present best practices and future direction of email. Since 1871 houses a number of companies that are re-imagining email, it should probably be no surprise that the we had a lot of representation out there. While I was at the conference, however, I spoke with a number of participants who were struck by the participant and leadership of companies in Chicago.

First from the Chicago contingent, Andrew Kordek of Trendline Interactive led a 25 minute talk on 25 new email trends. Andrew is a long-time Chicago expert on the topic, having held positions running email at Sears & Groupon among others.

Most prominently, Toby Fallsgraff of Obama for America gave an incredibly well received keynote where he detailed the methods and results of the Obama email campaign. You may not know that they raised over $500M through email which undoubtedly had a huge impact on the election. Forbes recently published some of my thoughts on what marketers can learn from the campaign here, but hearing the details from Toby directly was absolutely awesome.

Next, SimpleRelevance was privileged to sit on a panel with Avi Levine of PhilterIt. The replay of the panel, “Evolution of the Email Ecosystem,” is available here where we discussed relevancy, big data, social, and the general direction of how email is being reinvented. Also on the panel was Automated Insights, a Raleigh based company that boasts Chicago based (1871 sponsor) OCA Ventures as a lead investor with Jim Dugan on their board.

After our panel, Phil Davis, the CEO of 1871-based Rapleaf, was on another panel that focused on Big Data and how it is affecting and will continue to change email. That lively discussion was really interesting, and is also available online. Incidentally, Phil and I recently recorded a webinar at 1871 on best practices for email with e-commerce.

It seemed like everywhere we turned there were leaders from Chicago driving the conversation and discussing disruptive innovation both current and future. As we Chicago-based entrepreneurs work for more recognition nationally, it’s important that we raise our game and influence the dialog not just regionally but around the country.

Erik Severinghaus is the founder & CEO of SimpleRelevance, an 1871 based company leading the way on developing next generation tools to help companies personalize digital communication. Prior to that he received a patent while in IBM’s IT Optimization organization, and helped co-found iContact – a leading Email Service Provider. In his spare time, Erik loves any sport that takes place in the mountains.