Erin Hintz, Urban Airship’s CMO, Included on Mobile Marketer’s List of “Mobile Women to Watch”

Each year, the industry news magazine Mobile Marketer publishes their list of 25 “Mobile Women to Watch.” The 2017 list was announced this week, and we’re proud to say that Erin Hintz, our Chief Marketing Officer was among the honorees.  

Erin joins two other Urban Airshippers that have been on the list in years past: Alyssa Meritt, Head of Strategic Consulting and Karen Pattani-Hason, Head of Agency and Strategic Alliances North America.

According to Mobile Marketer Editor in Chief Mickey Alam Khan, the list “has one defining characteristic: extremely smart executives who are thriving in an era of rapid technological change.”

As part of the honor, Mobile Marketer included a profile Q&A with Erin — see what she had to say below. Congratulations to Erin and all of this year’s Mobile Women to Watch!


Mobile Marketer Q&A With Erin Hintz, Chief Marketing Officer, Urban Airship

congrats-to-urban-airship-cmo-erin-hintz-for-being-included-in-mobile-marketer's-annual-list-of-25-mobile-women-to-watchWhat do you like most about your job?

The opportunity to learn from some of the best minds in mobile: our customers and our experts here at Urban Airship. I enjoy being a part of helping our clients deliver the best mobile experiences to their customers.

It’s a proud moment when I get to answer the question, “What does Urban Airship do?” where I can point to my iPhone screen and show them just a few of the amazing apps we power with mobile messaging, as well as the fascinating experiences our customers are creating through mobile wallet marketing.

What is the biggest challenge in your job?

Marketing organizations always have limits in resources: people, budget, time. Being really good at prioritizing is key to success, especially as we’ve expanded product lines from one to four, including a new freemium solution.

We also just unveiled new platform services that will allow businesses to send rich notification-style messaging to any marketing channel in their stack – from chat messaging services and email to smart home devices and vehicle information systems – as well as use real-time customer data from any business system.

This expansion of our mobile growth platform will further compound our need to focus on the best use cases that will help our customers unlock their biggest growth opportunities.

Just as challenging is refining our processes and collaboration across marketing, product, sales and business systems teams to streamline technology and operations.

Lots of people have different pieces of the puzzle, so there’s a strong collaborative element that needs to happen, which can also be made more difficult with rapid growth.

What is your work priority for 2017?

Job No. 1 of any marketer is to drive adoption of new products while continuing to grow existing products, all while making the right tradeoffs within resource constraints.

The more interesting opportunity, and Urban Airship’s biggest area of focus, is expanding the industry’s rather narrow view of mobile marketing from one of business-centric promotions through apps, mobile-optimized Web sites and advertising, to focusing on contextually rich, in-the-moment customer experiences.

Industry data shows business promotions are dramatically less effective than they were just two years ago by more than 100 percent.

Things like mobile wallet marketing dramatically expand the number and type of businesses that can form a direct, personalized mobile connection to their customers, while the most sophisticated businesses can reap the most growth by mobilizing all of their business operations and injecting every customer experience with individualized real-time data from every channel and platform.

What will it take to attract more women to mobile?

Mobile is one of the hottest areas of technology and the place to be in order to reach customers today, so it’s an exciting and dynamic field.

I believe in order to attract more women to work in technology, we need more programs that introduce girls to the opportunity at a young age.

Urban Airship is very supportive of organizations like Women in Tech and Girls Who Code, and also promotes a life-work balance that is a big part of the reason we attract top talent, men and women.

Your proudest achievement in mobile?

The best marketers want to make a big difference for both their company and their industry, sparking those breakthrough moments that change the status quo for everyone.

We’ve had great success creating definitive content like our State of Mobile Wallet Marketing report to expose new, massively growing mobile marketing opportunities.

As a result, we’ve grown adoption of our mobile wallet marketing solution, Urban Airship Reach, by more than 400 percent year over year and powered global defining moments like Brexit with Politico’s EU Referendum Tracker for Apple Wallet.

It took Politico Europe less than three weeks to deploy this highly interactive mobile wallet item, and in the single week from launch to the vote, it surpassed its goal of 10,000 mobile wallet pass holders, 74 percent of whom were new to the organization’s database, driving 300 percent greater Web traffic to their stellar Brexit editorial coverage.

We’ve also ramped up our blog to showcase talent and expertise across the whole company to help our customers understand what is possible.

Are you as excited as Erin is about growing your business on mobile? Get started with our free mobile messaging and mobile wallet solutions today – or contact us anytime to chat about how we can help you get where you want to go with mobile.