Humans of Martech 39: Pierce Ujjainwalla: Creativity in marketing is under attack
Hey everyone, today we are joined by one of the greatest minds in Marketing automation-- Pierce Ujjainwalla.
Pierce started his career in lead gen at Cognos and IBM, working in some of the largest Salesforce and Eloqua instances in the world.
He then spent a few years in startups leading teams that implemented instances of Marketo. Pierce has become a 4X Marketo champion and one of the first original champions, he’s also a frequent speaker at the annual Marketo Summit.
In 2013, he founded RevenuePulse, known today as one of the top Marketo agencies in the world. He’s also the founder and CEO of Knak, an enterprise no-code email and landing page creation platform for marketers.
He’s recently also become a podcast host, launching the Unsubscribed podcast. He lives in Ottawa, Canada with his wife and 2 kids.
Fierce Pierce, it’s an honor to have you on the Humans of martech!
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Here's what we covered:
Creation of Knak -- what problem did you see in the market?
Email design -- is it truly the most difficult coding challenge? Why is it so hard to solve? How is Knak’s approach to email difference and so compelling?
Is no code the future of marketing? How can marketers prepare for this future?
Creativity in marketing and how it is currently under attack?
Email and landing page templates, and why they are dead?
Drink your own champagne day at Knak.
Unsubscribed podcast
Talk to us about your process for booking guests on your show and your journey to becoming the Joe Rogan of Marketing podcasts.
Knak pages
Earlier this year the team stepped out of just email land and entered the world of CRO and landing page building. Walk us through that big change in GTM strategy and how the new product adoption has gone so far?
Knak released its annual email benchmarks
Talk to us about the process of building that research and what we’re some of the coolest insights?
HTML in emails
One of the longest standing debates in email marketing is HTML vs plain text. With huge research studies done by Hubspot promoting less HTML in your emails and tools like convertkit that (used to anyway) have a strong stance against html templates.
Knak is a no-code email builder. Are most of your customers designing heavy html emails and do you disagree with the stance of going plain text over html?
Last question
Pierce, you’re a founder and CEO, you run two companies, you’re a prominent martech figure but you’re also an avid traveller, you ski, golf, play hockey--you’re a lawn care nut and you have two amazing kids…
How do you find a balance between everything going in your life and how do you remain happy?
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Pierce on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pujjainwalla/
Pierce on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketing_101
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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
Cover art created with help via Undraw