Actionable Marketing Podcast

For SaaS companies, onboarding emails help establish long-term relationships with customers to understand and effectively use software tools. Yet, onboarding processes and email copy are often overlooked. The best way to learn what customers need is to talk to them. 

Today’s guest is Samar Owais, SaaS and eCommerce email expert. She talks about everything you need to know to make onboarding emails an effective part of your customer acquisition and retention strategy. Samar’s advice on how to talk to customers and identify their pain points can apply to any marketer.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Why are onboarding emails important? Shows how to use tool to solve problem
• Onboarding Emails: Take pressure off customer support and set expectations
• Biggest Mistakes: Don’t hide branding, create copy that starts conversations
• Map Email Journey: What is the purpose of an onboarding email sequence?

Links:

• Samar Owais
• Canva
• Linktree
• ActiveCampaign
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Samar Owais:

“Until and unless your users are not using your app, it doesn't matter whether they're paying for it or not. You are failing at the one thing that you were set out to do, which is solve the problem.”

“We need to onboard with retention in mind.”

“Email is often used as a marketing tool, but it is a communication tool.”

“Email journey is an entire ecosystem. For SaaS companies, you need to map out every customer touch point and then just focus on them.”

Marketers struggle with the fear of focusing on the right things and doing things the wrong way. However, there are ways to use, gather, and apply data to get on the right path to generate a return. 

Today’s guest is Carolyn Lowe, Founder and CEO at ROI Swift and author of Business Growth Do’s and Absolute Don’ts. Carolyn talks about how to use the right data to make the right decisions.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Paid Platforms: Amazon, Facebook make a profit and ad dollars go up in flames
• Margins for Error: Marketers have more leeway at big businesses hiring experts
• Isolation vs. Network: Compare performance to know if you’re missing something
• Self-Doubt: Lack of confidence can corrode team’s ability to be successful
• eCommerce/Marketing Strategy: Test, iterate, tweak to measure and manage
• Business Growth Book: Get basics right and scale core values for positive path
• Brands: How are you different? Break through noise to sell a story, sell a product
• Quantitative/Qualitative Research: Get to know your customer base via surveys
• Best Metrics: Prove what marketers are doing is working or not to be profitable

Links:

• Carolyn Lowe on LinkedIn
• ROI Swift
• Business Growth Do’s and Absolute Don’ts
• Dell
• Chewy
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Carolyn Lowe:

“I like the idea of outsourcing the expertise when you’re small because you can’t know everything.”

“When you’re always self-doubting, it’s really hard to move forward. We used to always say, ‘If you can measure it, you can manage it.’”

“I’m all about test, iterate, and tweak.”

“It starts and ends with the customer.”

What do marketing leaders and teams need to know about gender equity in the workplace? Make it a priority to be a great communicator, highly effective, and flexible to drive change.

Today’s guest is Ashley McManus, Senior Director of Global Marketing at Smart Eye. She is a tech startup marketing leader with extensive expertise in inbound marketing. Her thoughtful branding and organized approach to execution resulted in acquiring the tech startup, Affectiva.

Ashley is able to break down challenges, come up with creative solutions, and drive results quickly within budget. She combines strategic thinking with tactical execution, analyzing problems, and identifying steps to results by being adaptive and resourceful.

Also, Ashley designs strategies for tech companies to position them as industry thought leaders. She does this by deliberately creating high-quality content that resonates with their target audience and is in line with their vision.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Equity vs. Equality: What’s the difference and distinction between genders?
• Imbalances: Promote gender equality by empowering women to be equal
• COVID Impact: Why gender equity in the workplace is a concern for everyone
• Diversity of Views: Output isn’t as helpful when everyone looks/thinks same way
• Marketing Role: Customer targeting and company representation, reputation
• Positive Benefits and Negative Effects: People talk, culture misfits, and churn
• What can women do to get unstuck? Who do they talk to be hired and promoted?
• Gender equity from the ground up:
  • Create inclusive hiring practices
  • Simplify job requirements
  • Don’t ask for salary history
  • Candidates should meet diverse interview panel
  • Build enabling human resources department
  • Allow autonomy to be accountable (flexible hours, remote work, etc.)
  • Give recognition, encourage visibility, and advocate for yourself

Links:

• Ashley McManus on LinkedIn
• Smart Eye
• Affectiva
• Glassdoor
• Slack
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Ashley McManus:

“Equality between men and women, it doesn’t mean that men and women have to become the same. But it’s just that their rights, responsibilities, opportunities, they don’t depend on whether they are born male or female.”

“Gender equity - that means fairness. Fairness of treatment for men and women according to their respective needs.”

“Equity really leads to equality.”

“Women are responsible for, I think, 70 to 80 percent of customer purchasing.”

It’s smart to organize content when you have a core piece of pillar content linked to several smaller pieces covering sub-topics around your main topic. Also, it’s about knowing what to include in a topic cluster and how to organize information within a hub-and-spoke content model.

Today’s guest is Skyler Reeves from Ardent Growth, a content intelligence consultancy. Building out topic clusters can be expensive, especially when mistakes are made. How much time and resources does it take to produce multiple pieces to make something like the hub-and-spoke model work the first time around?

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• How to use content intelligence to create better topic clusters
• Content Intelligence: Intersection between content strategy, business intelligence
• Marketers should care about topic modeling when building topic clusters
• Tedious Topic Process: Takes time if marketers don’t start with parent keywords
• Content Value: Where should marketers prioritize things to get the most value?
• Budget: Two ways to do things—do them right or do them again
• Data and Decisions: Go with gut feeling and/or accurate data to make decisions
• Current Constraints: Does business need more awareness? Sales material?
• Tools: There’s things they can't do that you want them to do, so create your own
• Conversion Data: Where it is going to take a minimal amount of effort to get ROI
• Problems: Avoid wasting time, energy, and budget by creating a bunch of content

Links:

• Skyler Reeves on LinkedIn
• Skyler Reeves on Twitter
• Ardent Growth
• Traffic Think Tank - Slack Community
• Superpath by Jimmy Daly from Animalz
• HubSpot
• Ahrefs
• ActiveCampaign
• QuickBooks
• Xero
• Keyword Insights
• SE Ranking
• Semrush
• Moz
• Keyword Cupid
• Mailchimp
• Constant Contact
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Skyler Reeves:

“Something we're constantly trying to do is figure out ways to simplify things for everyone with the way they do their work, so they can get it done faster and more accurately.”

“We want to know about the content before we actually go to make those decisions. You can think of it as a precursor or an overarching theme to content strategy and content marketing.”

“How do you know what the perfect hub is? How do you know when something needs to be part of hub A or part of hub B, especially when you're trying to rank these things on search engines?”

“One of the easiest, quick ways to solve cannibalization without having to rely on your gut - just go look at what Google's telling you.”

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) typically only stay with a company for only 24-25 months. That type of turnover at the top level of marketing departments is not good for marketers in leadership roles or with leadership aspirations.  

Today’s guest is Mark Donnigan, a marketing consultant. He talks about why CMOs need to think more like business strategists to better connect where marketing fits into the big picture within your organization rather than thinking about marketing as a set of tactics that are separate from what the rest of the business is doing.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Why marketing leaders need to understand the business objectives
• Gartner: Average buyer over 50% through buying journey before making contact
• MBA Playbook: Where CMOs go wrong by following a concrete buying cycle
• Solution: Spend time with CEO to connect with company’s strategy and revenue
• Attribution: Avoid ROI issues by shifting from cost center to revenue perspective
• Pitfalls: When marketing leaders focus more on building, not understanding skills
• No Excuses: Marketing leaders need to be business-aware, business-oriented

Links:

• Mark Donnigan - Growth Stage Marketing
• Mark Donnigan on LinkedIn
• Category Design Presentation
• Founders Marketing Playbook Presentation
• Gartner Global Research and Advisory Company
• Play Bigger by Christopher Lochhead
• The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon
• HubSpot
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Mark Donnigan:

“No longer is it sufficient in today’s fragmented buyer journey to just basically build your whole program around a nice funnel.”

“The average B2B buyer was...over 50% of the way through their buying journey before they even contacted the first vendor.”

“You have the marketing tools to execute. There’s no need to go to another marketing seminar, another martech seminar. Instead, spend time with the CEO.”

“To be able to contribute in a sales meeting, you better know about the business.”

How well do most CMOs know their CIO or IT director? Not as well as they should. It’s important for marketers to build strong relationships with their technical teams to achieve marketing success.

Today’s guest is Theresa O’Neil, CMO of Zylo, a SaaS management platform. She talks about what and why CMOs and marketing leaders need to navigate side by side with IT to get the most from their technology, to make sure they're not bleeding their martech stack budget, and to ensure that they're collectively driving the most ROI possible.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Marketers: Use the right tools to get the right jobs done for the right people
• How many SaaS applications does the average company purchase? A lot
• How many of those SaaS applications are not actually being used? A lot
• Marketing creates pipelines so sales can close deals and generate revenue
• Win-Win: Marketing and IT team up to make people happy, effective, productive
• Shadow IT: Marketing and IT collaborate and crowdsource selected software
• Goals and Objectives: How to build a bridge between marketing and IT
• Technology is great when it works, but who fixes the problem when it doesn’t? IT
• Maintain and grow lifecycle mentality by putting technology, processes in place

Links:

• Theresa O’Neil on LinkedIn
• Zylo
• Coupa
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Theresa O’Neil:

“In marketing, to do a great job, you need the right tools, and it's never been more important than it is now.”

“The average company has over 600 SaaS applications. Most of them, IT doesn't know about.”

“38% of licenses go unused every month. Just think about it. If you could reclaim 38% of your tech budget, for a marketer, that could absolutely be found money that you could use for a new initiative, or program, or something else that can really help you meet your goals.”

“By partnering together and making those employees happy and productive, you're also making sure you're not wasting budget.”

What does email automation look like, how does it work, and what are its benefits? Discover how to grow, scale, and mature by owning and not making the same mistakes.

Today’s guest is Jeremiah Utecht, Lead on Marketing Automation and Business Intelligence at CoSchedule. He takes the mystery out of marketing automation and makes it work.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Jeremiah’s Role: Build, maintain, and refine CoSchedule’s email marketing
• CoSchedule’s Mission: Send the right email to the right person at the right time
• Happy Anniversary! Marketing automation message triggered by attribute/context
• Marketing Automation Internally: Means most relevant content at relevant time
• Successful Multi-Channels: Website customization and email for CoSchedule
• Clever or sophisticated? Trial-and-error process for practices/platforms that work
• Automation Attributes: Anything is possible with simple and flexible forms
• Oops! Emails: Marketing automation at scale is an incredibly unforgiving practice
• Communication and Confidence: Freeze, validate, test, isolate, fix error, move on
• Data Manipulation: Start small, create email list, and capitalize on investment
• Benefits: Marketing automation is data driven, use tools to try and test emails

Links:

• Jeremiah Utecht on LinkedIn
• MailChimp
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Jeremiah Utecht:

“Marketing automation at CoSchedule seeks to always send the right email to the right person at the right time.”

“The irony of my job is that it’s more about not sending certain emails and saying, ‘No,’ a lot than it is actually blasting things out.”

“Marketing automation is triggering marketing content messaging based on an attribute, a context.”

“As a rule, being super clever almost always blows up in your face.”

Do you create great content for an awesome business but still find it challenging to be found on the internet? Building relationships with the right partners can build your audience by getting in front of the audiences of others.

Today’s guest is Brett McGrath, Vice President of Marketing at The Juice, a content distribution platform for B2B content. It’s like Spotify, but for business content. Brett shares how to develop content partnerships to launch ambitious new companies.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Content Collaboration: Takes time and effort to work the correct way
• Priority #1: Meet people and have conversations with them
• Learn Two Things: If marketing messages resonate, what’s on marketers’ minds
• Podcast: Having a show helps build partnerships and talk about passion projects
• Mutual Benefits: Build relationships to create, present, share, and add value
• Mindset and Philosophy: Launch product and company with people
• Biggest Win: Streamlining content process to create content with social proof
• Where to Meet/What to Say: Be comfortable and confident in social communities
• Podcast Practice: Ask questions, facilitate feedback, and promote people/brands

Links:

• Brett McGrath on Twitter
• Brett McGrath on LinkedIn
• The Juice
• The 3C Podcast: Curating Content Creators
• Leah Friedman from Guru
• Jimmy Daly from Superpath
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Brett McGrath:

“When I joined The Juice, priority #1 was meet people and just have conversations.”

“Reach out to people and do it in a way that is authentic and natural in building partnerships.”

“We, as B2B marketers, need to move away from me-centered marketing or marketing for our own KPIs and our metrics or what our bosses want.”

“Find the places where people want to go and learn and are like-minded and find ways to engage.”

Marketers understand the value of search engine optimization (SEO), but they need to clearly communicate why it matters to get buy-in from executives, stakeholders, and clients.

Today’s guest is Eli Schwartz, a consultant and growth advisor. Also, he is the author of Product-Led SEO, a new book that describes how to communicate the value of SEO and think strategically and philosophically about SEO to be successful.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• What motivated Eli to write the book? Explain to leaders how to do SEO sensibly
• Sweet Spot: Start SEO when spending at least $1-2 million on paid marketing
• Disparity: How much is your company spending on paid marketing versus SEO?
• Big Problem: SEO blackboxes things and mystifies it intentionally with metrics
• Metrics vs. Outcomes: SEO is about speaking the same language, not keywords
• Big Budget: Put money in to produce content, create product, and make a profit
• Big Consequence: Prioritize SEO or continue to fall behind business competitors
• SEO Do’s and Don’ts: Focus on content but not allocate enough resources
• Monetary Value: Clearly communicate what you need and why to impact ROI
• SEO Standpoint: Create content from a product perspective for user engagement
• Priorities: Base SEO on users, not search volume/traffic, to get biggest benefits
• Leaders don't need to understand SEO, but they need to know the outcomes
• Recipe for Success/Failure: Create product, product flops, and ideas don’t work

Links:

• Eli Schwartz on LinkedIn
• Eli Schwartz’s Website
• Eli Schwartz on Twitter
• Product-Led SEO
• SurveyMonkey
• Ahrefs
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Eli Schwartz:

“I am a huge fan of not creating any sort of content unless you know that there are users that will consume it, it makes sense for users, and it will end up converting.”

“If you don't do SEO, then your competitors move ahead of you. If you don't do the right SEO, you just lose your entire investment. But that's not the way most people think of it.”

“Social media is a little bit lower in the funnel. I think paid marketing is at the bottom of the funnel. Brand marketing is potentially higher in the funnel than SEO. Make them all work together and that's where SEO will be the most profitable.”

“They don't need to understand how SEO works. What they do need to understand are the outcomes, and the work that's going to be done, and of course, the investment that's going to be made.”

Too much marketing is based on guesses not backed by data. Paid tactics, like pay-per-click (PPC) and social media advertising, can burn through your budget when guesses are wrong. How can you use data to make marketing more predictable to forecast performance and adjust to shifts in trends to increase your ROI?

Today’s guest is John Readman from BOSCO, a digital analytics and predictive modeling platform for retailers and eCommerce companies. He discusses what it takes for predictable marketing to be successful. It involves understanding historical data, performance, and trends across a client's channels.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• What is predictable marketing? Getting all data in one place on an ongoing basis
• Why should marketers make decisions driven by data, not gut instinct/intuition?
• Data and Decisions: Depend on volume, understanding data to base decisions
• Challenges: Digital marketing data is used to scale ROI in one particular channel
• COVID Comparisons: Causal effect of supply and demand during the pandemic
• BOSCO: Helps marketers predict future w/ machine learning, Bayesian statistics
• Out-of-Date Numbers: Forecasting runs scenarios, planning, and model analysis
• Different Data Sources: Connect platforms to quickly predict what could be done
• Wasted Budget? Run and identify data models that are hugely, scarily accurate
• Two Key Metrics: Cost per acquisition and understanding that by channel
• Clients/Conversations: People make decisions emotionally, justify them with data
• Control: People get nervous about not doing things the traditional way
• Predictive Analytics Platform/Practice: Get buy-in by leading conversation with potential results, starting small, and using data to quantify progress and success

Links:

• John Readman on LinkedIn
• BOSCO
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from John Readman:

“If we've got the right data in the right format, and we understand what is going on around certain targets, what makes it predictable is understanding the metrics and the outputs we are trying to achieve.”

“Fundamentally, why do people need to make data-driven decisions to really explain where they're spending their money, where are they getting their ROI, and then how can they scale it?”

“It all starts with getting all your data organized in one place, then looking at what I am willing to pay to acquire a customer, and then maybe looking at customer lifetime value.”

“The thing to stand out will be a better proposition, a better product, and a better promotion, which is sort of the traditional marketing going around in a full circle.”