Humans of Martech

The marketing landscape is vast, the landscape of doom has as many vendors as their are stars in our galaxy. The T-shaped marketer model is good for folks early in their career — perhaps. I think it’s too regimented, formulaic, and encourages marketers all to acquire the same set of skills — albeit with your own unique depth. I propose a marketing constellation. Bare with me. Like our ancestors staring up the night’s sky, you can use your imagination to come up with your own constellation. Maybe your skillset is an archer or a bull or maybe it’s a lion. Maybe depending on the season of your career, you have a different perspective. So what is the T-Shaped model?Horizontal line at the top - those are your skills. Vertical line that extends down from categories at the top — that’s your depth of skill.  I first learned of the T-shape model from an article Brian Balfour wrote in 2014 where he describes a learning path for growth marketers and encourages them to see career progression shaped like a T with 3 levels. Base knowledge: non-marketing specific, a base layer to build from, think behavioral psychology, analytics, positioning, design and ux, storytelling, research…  Marketing foundation: marketing specific concepts that are used across channels, think experimentation, graphic design, copywriting, funnel marketing, HTML, customer experience. Channel expertise: where most marketers eventually need to make some choices. Channels are ways you can reach an audience. They are ever changing and emerging, think FB ads, social, Seo, content, email, partnerships, product marketing... So the recommendation is that you get as much breadth in the first two levels as possible to get a nice foundation. When it comes to the 3rd level, this is where the vertical bar starts. You still want some kind of baseline across channels, but most marketers eventually become skilled at a smaller number of those channels and a deep expertise means a vertical T. Brian’s model is focused mainly on growth and customer acquisition. Marketing isn’t just about reaching your audiences so to apply this to a more general marketing path, Buffer took a stab at it too. Where is the model useful? I find it super useful when discussing hires with non-marketing folks — explaining that this is the general skills I’m looking for in a new candidate. So why does JT get cranky about it? It pigeon holes marketers and over simplifies skillsets. It represents regimented thinking and I don’t like that. I think it’s an outdated model that doesn’t exactly benefit marketers. I admit, part of this is I can’t put my finger on it.  I’m actually a fan of the t-shape if presented in the right light.  But I do admit it’s a very simplified version of your potential areas of focus. What I like about the model is that it encourages early marketers to get a solid foundation and base knowledge before necessarily worrying about specializing in a channel. What does it mean to be a t-shaped marketer? It means they have a solid foundation of concepts and channels but they are experts in one or a few channels. But it doesn’t mean you need to strive for a T. You can be a Y or a W or an M. you’re career could take you in many different paths.Okay so why a marketing constellation? Because you can’t be grouchy and complain about something without suggesting an alternative! It’s an understanding that — like the stars in the night sky — the potential skills you can acquire are varied and spread out. It requires imagination and storytelling to weave those skills together to create a representation of your skills. I also think it’s more likely to represent the potential depth and specialization of each area. Marketing automation isn’t just one skill. It could be: LifecycleLead scoringProject managementLead managementEmail operations and deliverabilityTechnical integrationsAnd you may be more skilled in one area of operations than another. ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Today we are joined by Roxanne Pepin, she’s currently based out of Spain but works for Rewind-- an Ottawa based startup as a Revenue Operations Specialist. She manages all the tech that powers Rewind’s sales, marketing and success teams. Before carving a niche in operations, Roxanne wore many digital marketing hats working for an SEO agency then a tech company. She’s actually a computer science drop out turned writing grad where she also spent time in content marketing. More than just a fixer or a troubleshooter, she’s a convergent thinker. Roxanne is described by her peers as a poised and knowledgeable Salesforce admin and a Hubspot platform whiz with a knack for bridging departments together. Her journey growing into a role at one of the coolest companies in Ottawa is deeply rooted in mastery and pragmatic problem solving. Roxanne, we’re pumped to finally have you on -- thanks for taking the time and chatting with us. Is being a digital nomad really as good as it looks? Yes, maybe even better. lolRemote commsYou’re servicing a team of what 40+ marketing and sales teammates? How do you effectively communicate and collaborate with your team remotely from your spain office? Honestly, a lot of my role is answering emails and messages, but I find that being six hours ahead and having my mornings free because my team isn’t online yet allows me to hunker down without distractions and get stuff done. Then when people start to come online I have time to focus on them, hop on calls or zoom meetings, and dedicate that time to them. Everyone knows my schedule, they know that I’m only online until noon their time so they book meetings or slack message me during that time. As long as we communicate our schedules everything works. I try to both remain flexible if there’s something that needs to be done, but also stick to my working hours so that I don’t just have my face buried in my computer at all hours. It helps to have people on your team that you trust to do a good job and that you can direct others towards as well. How to say noOne of my favorite quotes from a presentation you gave to my students this year while describing your role and journey was:“everything is doable, but it doesn’t mean you should do it” lolMaybe walk us through some of the stories behind that mantra and why it might be helpful for other marketers when it comes to prioritization and concentration.Honestly, I’ve seen too many intermediary platform connections fail. I try to weigh how valuable an automation or a connection will be against how many connections and tools it requires. If you’re trying to eliminate three clicks from a process but I need to connect four different platforms to make that happen, I’ll likely say no because the odds of one of those connections failing is high and then we need to do damage control which will take a lot more time than your three clicks, you know? One thing that I’ve also learned is that everyone thinks everything they ask for is super important. And sometimes these things are only very important until they forget about them two days later. I once spent a few days connecting things and configuring things, working with a platform’s support team to get a couple reports combined that came from different sources that had very different ways of presenting data because it was vital that we combined these two numbers, but then when it was all said and done, no one cared or used the new report. Sometimes if I’m questioning the importance of someone’s ask, I like to let it stew for a couple of days just to determine if it’s really as important now as it was two days ago.I’ve also come across some things where it was like… “hey can do you automate this repetitive task” OR “can you set up a notification for this thing that happens a lot, I need to know when it happens”. Then a few weeks later I get the “hey, can you turn this off, it’s really annoying” message. TrainingAs someone who works in Ops, you don’t always get the chance to play on the front lines and do customer facing stuff. You often need to also focus on your teammates.Walk us through how big of a role training and facilitation comes into play in your day to day?Honestly, it’s in my best interest to make sure my team knows how to use the tools at their disposal. What good is it to me to set up processes and tools if people don’t know how to use them? Then we end up paying for things we don’t need. The other thing is that a big part of ops is to make things as efficient as possible for those customer-facing teams. In the end if I make their jobs easier, they can do more of what they’re meant to do and that leads to more revenue and more growth which is the goal we’re all working towards. No barriers Something I struggled with when I was in an Ops role was that I didn’t always get to pick projects, I didn’t always get a say in strategy. So if you could remove all barriers and constraints, what project or idea would you love to tackle or be known for solving.I love implementation projects. I like new tools and I like setting them up. Which is again another area where I feel like I got super lucky. At the time that I was brought on to the team at Rewind we were looking to implement Hubspot -- admittedly this is part of the reason I was hired -- so I got to spearhead that project and set up our platform from scratch. Now that we’re growing and in need of a better sales tool I’m leading a Salesforce implementation project. In the past I’ve been handed over both of these platforms and have had to learn what the heck people did, whether it was done right, how to fix the things that weren’t -- and trust me there were a lot of those. So I really like being part of the entire planning and implementation from the start. Advice for your past self - What skills would you focus on early in your career?Well.. I learnt pretty much everything I know through doing. I didn’t have marketing training, didn’t have sales or support experience. I went to school for writing and ended up in marketing. So I do think it would have helped to learn more about those aspects right from the start. But honestly, I’ve always been a curious person, my mother will reassure you of that. So I don’t really have any regrets or times where I’ve thought “damn, I wish I’d focused on that earlier” because in the end I may not have ended up where I am and I am so so happy to be here. Maybe some advice for my past self would be to stop doubting myself. We often hear: “fake it ‘till you make it” but I like to think of it more as of “be confident that you can learn what you need to as you go”. But be honest and upfront about what you know while reassuring yourself and people around you that you aren’t afraid or willing to really dive in get shit done. Why Ops?We can dive into some of these roles a bit closer but I wanted to start by getting your take on why you gravitate towards Ops? This is always a funny question for me, because I didn’t really ever think about ending up in an ops role. I kind of just started in a specific role, content writing, then broadened my role when I went in-house as a marketing generalist. 

What’s up everyone, this is part 2 of our two part episode on email deliverability and getting into the primary tab in Gmail.If you haven’t yet, start with last week’s episode where we covered 2 crucial classification factors according to Google. The content in your email and how users interact with your emails. Here’s today’s main takeaway: Most email marketers understand that email domain and IP reputation play a critical role in your ability to land in the inbox. But most email marketers will admit they are easily spooked by all the accompanying fancy authentication acronyms. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, they just mean allowing Gmail and other email clients to verify you as the sender. We’ll break those and many more email deliverability tips right now.Today’s episode will cover things you can do that would help with other email clients, not just Gmail. We’ll cover sender reputation, authentication as well as tactics in your automation tool to improve deliverability. 3. Sender repWe know for sure that factors that influence the spam folder are also factors in the inbox vs promos tab, that’s who the email is from. There’s an IP behind the sender, but there’s a domain behind the IP.Domain reputation vs sender ip reputation. There’s two main types of email reputation that can affect your sending: 1) IP Reputation and 2) Domain Reputation. Both reputation scores are calculated separately but as you’ll see as we unpack things, both scores are closely related as your sending ip is mapped to your domain.Mailgun has a dope article on this https://www.mailgun.com/blog/domain-ip-reputation-gmail-care-more-about/ Mailgun claims that things like domain age, how the domain identifies across the web and whether it identifies with entertainment, advertising or finance industries can all impact your domain reputation. They believe domain reputation ultimately matters more to Google.Other suspected factors by rejoiner.comDomain reputation / Past behavior of the senderIf you’ve been sending heaving promo/spam offers through email to hundreds of thousands of people for x years, you’re bound to have a mountain of recipients that marked you as spam. So just because a subscriber is new, it doesn’t mean you start fresh. A lot of senders actually have a ton of baggage from previous sends. Google is quite clear about this: When messages from your domain are reported as spam, future messages are more likely to be delivered to the spam folder. Over time, many spam reports can lower your domain’s reputation.Gmail best practicesGoogle provides a list of best practices for sending to gmail users, it’s not overly helpful but it has some valuable tips. Aside from the obvious, don’t impersonate another company, don’t test phishing scams and make sure your domain is marked as safe, here’s 3 things Google recommends:Authentication: Allow Gmail to verify the sender by setting up reverse DNS (domain name). This means pointing your email sending IP addresses to your company domain. Small number of sending IPs: Google recommends you stick to just 1 sending IP. They add that if you must send from multiple IPs, use different IP addresses for different types of messages. Ie; one IP for blog, subscriber emails, one for important product updates, one for upsell and promo. I often hear email marketers say that if you are getting stuck in the promo tab, just start a fresh new sending IP. The problem there is that this is a short term benefit. If you don’t make changes to your domain, that new IP is still authenticated to the same source with the same baggage. I have heard anecdotely that using separate sending IPs for customers vs leads greatly helps. But I know companies that don’t use this well and still have solid metrics. Different senders: Along the same lines, Google encourages you to use a different ‘from sender’s for different types of emails and that you don't mix different types of content in the same emails. Ie, your purchase confirmation/new customer onboarding flow should be sent by jon@company.com and never include subscriber or promotional content. Your promotional emails should be sent from phil@company.com. So stick to as little sending IPs as possible, but switch up your sender for different types of emails. Domain authenticationThere’s different ways of setting up authentication for your sending IPs with Gmail. The process will be slightly different depending on your hosting provider and your ESP. There’s currently 3 main authentication methods to prevent email spoofing; aka spammers from sending emails that appear to be from your domain:SPF record (sender policy framework)DKIM keys (DomainKeys Identified Mail) DMARC record (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)SPFPublish an SPF record for your domain. AKA Pointer (PTR) record. Every SPF has a single TXT file that specifies servers and domains that are allowed to send on behalf of your domain. You do this by uploading your updated TXT file on your domain provider settings. DKIMTurn on DKIM signing for your messages. DKIM lets a company take ownership of an email. This is why the reputation of your company domain (not your sending IP) is the basis for evaluating whether to trust the message for further handling, such as delivery. DKIM uses a pair of cryptographic keys, one private and one public. A private key aka the secret signature is added to the header of all your emails. A matching public key is added to your DNS record. Email servers that receive your messages use the public key to decrypt the private key in your signature. That’s how they verify the message was not changed after it was sent.Google has a simple guide for doing this, you start by generating a key for your domain, and just like your SPF record, you add the key to your domain's DNS records.DMARCPublish a DMARC record for your domain. DMARC is used in combo with SPF and DKIM, should be setup after. Specifically helps you prevent spoofing, aka a message that appears to be from your company but is not. It checks whether the From: header matches the sending domain in your SPF/DKIM check. Once you start sending after DMARC is setup, you can start to access reports from email servers...

In 2013, Google rolled out “A new inbox that puts you back in control” that allowed Gmail users to split incoming emails into different tabs. Today, 1 in 5 users enable the promos tab. It’s got a bad reputation: The promotions tab. Companies that send marketing emails are still trying to find ways out of the promos tab and into the primary tab. Here’s today’s main takeaway:Most companies should accept that their marketing emails are destined for the promos tab in Gmail. Instead they should focus on standing out from all the other newsletters. --and consider themselves lucky they aren’t in the spam folder. But there is good news. If your business is willing to radically change their HTML heavy templated email strategy in favor of a personal 1-1 text based strategy, brands can find a way into the primary tab.To get there, you need to get past two gates:The first gate is the spam filter and your reputation scores, the second gate is the category filter in Gmail and all the different signals that help classify incoming emails.In this two part episode we’ll walk you through the best ways to get past both of those gates.Gmail filter classification factorshttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gmail/how-gmail-sorts-your-email-based-on-your-preferences Google has said that Gmail’s classification system is pretty complex. It uses machine learning to choose which tab to put an email based on a bunch of factors.We’ll cover 4 main buckets over two episodes:1. Email content What’s in the emails, html, links, content types2. Personal actions Gmail says the most important factor in determining where an email lands in your inbox is your personal actions and preferences from that sender. 3. Sender rep The first factor they list is who the email is from. We’ll cover domain and IP reputation as well as authentication.4. Other things in your ESP that could help you reach the inbox1. Email contentThe default tabs/categoriesGmail has 5 default tabs/categories. They provide loose definitions for both, but the titles are pretty self explanatory. Primary, social, promos, updates and forums. Still though, businesses sending marketing emails will be asking how they can bypass the promos tab and get into the primary tab.Instead, businesses should accept that they live in the promos tab and they need to stand out from other newsletters and other onboarding emails. From the little bit we know about how Gmail classifies tabs, we can conclude that emails that land in the primary tab are:From people you know, not businessesNot from social network sites or forumsNot marketing or promotional based, not newsletters or CTA emailsNot notifications or updates or billsThat being said. There is room for marketing emails, or emails from brands in your primary inbox tab, if you treat that content from a brand like it was someone you knew and frequently communicated with. How? Use as little HTML as possible. Write like a person to a person. Instead of sending your email from newsletter@clearbit.com, they send it from Brad. An actual person on their growth team.It doesn’t have a fancy HTML template with a bunch of images. It’s straight up, it’s funny, it’s helpful. It’s almost as if, despite working for a brand, this email came from someone you know.That’s how you get in the primary tab. Get your users to interact with your email.What are other content elements to keep in mind?We’ve talked about this one before, most gmail users treat email as a personal medium. Google knows if you’re sending an email with the words “discount” or “promotion” or if your html/image to text ratio is way too heavy html you’re destined for the promos tab, and without a major overhaul in your email strategy, you’re staying in that tab. Google recommends the obvious like, follow internet format standards, follow HTML standards, make sure users know where they’ll go when they click links, sender info should be clear, subject should be relevant, etc… But one thing lots overlook is how Gmail treats dynamic content/hidden content in emails.Don’t use HTML and CSS to hide content in your messages. Hiding content might cause messages to be marked as spam.Many ESPs offer “dynamic” or “personalized” content, meaning you can change the message based on the recipient. Sometimes ESP are simply using CSS and HTML to hide parts of a message.2. Personal actions Past behaviour of the recipientIf you haven’t opened someone’s newsletter for a while or you never clicked in an emailVs if you opened the first 3 emails and clicked on each and replied to 2 or you added the sender to your list of contacts Huge difference in signals to Gmail.Spam filter: Add to contact listThere’s really just 1 tip listed by Google currently on how to help prevent valid messages from being marked as spam or going to the promos tab:Messages that have a From address in the recipient’s Contacts list are less likely to be marked as spam. -> encourage new subscribers to add you as a contact in Gmail. Make it easy for them. Keep in mind though that using different senders makes things trickier in this case.Category filter: Similarly, Gmail says the most important factor in determining where an email lands in your inbox tabs is your personal actions and preferences from that sender. They list 4 things users can do to teach Gmail over time to classify an email from a certain sender to your primary tab. One of them is the same tip to stay out of spam filters (add sender to contact list). Click a drag a email from the promo tab to the primary tab, you can instruct gmail to remember this preference in the future from the same senderCreate a filter that marks emails from a sender as important or destined for primary tab Add senders to your contact listReply to the emailThose are all great things to encourage your fresh email subscribers to do to encourage they land in the right spot in their inbox.There’s something dishonest about asking right off the bat that a user adds you to their contact list, or drags your email out of the promo tab into the primary tab or even less create a filter and mark the sender as important lol.Reply to the email seems as the most legit way to get users to tell gmail that you are legit and you deserve to be in the main inbox. Benchmarks Google also lists how gmail users have interacted with similar content as a classification factor.  You have little control over this one.I think that’s enough for today, we covered half of the classification factors, the content you have in your emails, consider a radical change in strategy if you really want to get in the primary tab, if not, make the most of your spot in the promos tab and consider that users are treating it as an extension of their inbox. Google also says one of the most important factors is how individual users treat and interact with incoming emails. That’s why it’s important to get subscribers to reply to the...

What’s up everyone, today on the show we are joined by another local favorite marketer, Manuel Bárcenas.She’s a personal growth enthusiast and a startup marketer on a mission to help managers & their teams work better together. By the age of 18, Manuela had lived in three different countries: Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. In 2014, she decided it was time for a new challenge and moved to Canada. She’s a journalism and communications graduate of Carleton here in Ottawa. She caught the startup marketing bug pretty early interning with Startup Canada right out of school and then working as a community developer at Carleton University.  In 2018, Manuela was marketing hire #1 at Fellow.app one of the hottest startups in Ottawa. She’s been living the startup marketing life for nearly 3 years.At Fellow, she helped launch the successful Supermanagers podcast, she runs a huge newsletter (Manager TLDR newsletter) and self taught Hubspot and Google Analytics and much more.Manuela is a rising star and a must follow on marketing Twitter, she tweets about mindset, marketing and management. Manuela, thanks so much for coming on the show.Early journeyWhen you started at Fellow as the first marketer, did you have any idea what you’d be doing? Bring us back in time to your first couple months at Fellow.What was/did you have a 'calling moment' for marketing tech / marketingWhat was your biggest hurdle(s) as a 1 person marketing team and how did you adjust as the team grewWhen you look at the t-shaped marketer today, where do you see your specialty and how that’s evolved in the last 3 yearsMarketing tech Your journey learning Hubspot and other tools The newsletter and the podcast. Talk to us about the engine behind the scenes and the growth of both of these huge projectsMiscTalk us through your journey of writing and learning about management and then becoming a manager yourself and now leading a teamWhat advice do you have for early marketers that want to become managers?We always end by asking how you balance everything in your life and how do you stay happy :)Some awesome tweets from Manuela:https://twitter.com/ManuelaBarcenas/status/1337155886545039362 https://twitter.com/ManuelaBarcenas/status/1395077830250225664 --Manuela on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuelabarcenas/  Manuela on Twitter: https://twitter.com/manuelabarcenas Fellow.app: https://fellow.app/Supermanagers Podcast: https://fellow.app/supermanagers/Fellow blog: https://fellow.app/blog/Manager TL;DR Newsletter: https://fellow.app/newsletter/✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Delve into the thrilling world of growth marketing experimentation, where data meets creativity. Discover how marketers can harness the power of bold ideas while balancing analytics and user behavior. Explore the three superpowers of marketing leaders: doers, drivers, and dreamers, and how each contributes uniquely to growth. Learn the importance of creating a knowledge base for sustainable experimentation and why insights sharing is key for innovative success. Get ready to shake up your marketing strategies!

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!--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 podcastTalk to us about your process for booking guests on your show and your journey to becoming the Joe Rogan of Marketing podcasts. Knak pagesEarlier 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 benchmarksTalk to us about the process of building that research and what we’re some of the coolest insights?HTML in emailsOne 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 questionPierce, 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?--Pierce on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pujjainwalla/Pierce on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketing_101✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Data, data everywhere! If this conjures up the green vertical parade of binary numbers from the Matrix, you’re not alone in being confused. You might be thinking -- I didn’t sign up for this! You didn’t go to school for statistical analysis, so what makes you qualified to produce a marketing report? There’s a lot that makes you qualified to produce reports, even if you don’t feel like an expert. Marketers, particularly in smaller companies, need to learn enough to be dangerous. The main takeaway for this episode: you need to incorporate reporting into your skillset, and it’s not as scary as you think.IntroWe both have a background working at an analytics companySo much hype around data over the years, whether it’s big or smallIt can be super intimidating thinking you need to be responsible for reporting, and it’s way too easy to overcomplicate thingsThe difference between analytics and reportingThe terms are used interchangeably so often that it’s hard to really understand the difference.I think that one way to think about reporting and analytics -- for reporting, you’ll almost always have a clear understanding on what you need to report on.Analytics, you’ll likely be exploring data and not always sure what you’ll find. This is where having a data analyst is useful -- they can look at a data set and tell you if an insight is relevant or meaningful. Performance and exploration. That’s how I see the difference between reporting and analytics. Most startups don’t have time to prioritize either. But in the venture backed startup world, comes a bit more process and a board of directors that ask for monthly/quarterly reporting updates. A really nice sweet spot for learning to become dangerous is a bootstrapped startup that doesn’t have a big data team or requirements for long tedious reporting processes. But regardless of the environment that you’re in, marketers need to learn these skills if for nothing else -- to be able to show their worth, their impact on key metrics. Every marketer needs some reporting skillsWhere the heck do you start with this skillset?Confusion of reporting and analytics has marketers overengineering solutions to some simple problems. No, you don’t need to learn R and statistical analysis to be effective at reportingThink of analytics as exploring data for unknown insights and buried treasure. We can think of reporting as being accountable for the things you get paid to do.Start there. All my marketing reporting comes back to the question: is what I’m doing making a difference? Reporting on anything else is purely intellectual.So this sounds simple right? Show your impact… Reality is that different marketers will have access to different tools and metrics. But as soon as you start talking about marketing reporting, you quickly get to attribution and then multi touch points and you get lost really easy in all the noise and options of reporting.How do you get to what’s important?This is the ultimate question, and where you as a marketer are incredibly importantThe absolute best data analysts on the planet are the best because they can tie all that data and insight back to business strategyYou need to be able to answer business questions with your reportingYou should start simple. The marketing funnel is the ideal starting point for understanding marketing reporting. Map each stage of the funnel to a marketing metric and then start to fill in the data.For example, Awareness is the total sum of impressions across advertising and social media and interest is all web sessions.Boom - you’re already starting to get somewhere. This is how nearly every marketer structures their reporting and strategy. Start at the top of the funnel and work your way to revenue.Yeah we had a full series on lifecycle, starting at episode 12, check that out. You don’t need to be able to report on end to end multi attribution from the start. Small steps. Conversion rates from one stage of the funnel to the next is an awesome starting point. Even just focusing on one slice of the funnel.Lifecycle reportingWe both know that getting to revenue data isn’t always that easySales and marketing systems often come loaded with data issues or caveats around the processImpressions and sessions are easy to get -- log in to Google Analytics, your digital ads platforms, etc, and throw those numbers togetherThings can get hairy when you start working with contacts, deals, and new customersThis is where lifecycle is so key. You need a set of common definitions to even start getting to reporting nirvana. If you and sales don’t agree on what constitutes an MQL, it’s going to be hard to be successful creating good reports. The lifecycle series goes super deep into how to set all this up.Lifecycle reporting is probably one of the most useful ways to report on marketing data. This is definitely high level reporting and should map to your strategy quite nicely. As you progress through each stage, you get a series of conversion rates and baselines. Ultimately lifecycle reporting answers the question how effective you are at turning sessions into contacts and then customers.I love this narrative, that lifecycle is at the heart of growth marketing.It’s so easy to over-complicate reporting.One thing that makes things tricky is where your data lives. Lifecycle reporting sounds straightforward, number of impressions > number of views > number of signups… but often you’ll get a different number of signups from your crm compared to your goal in GA compared to your automation system.Every marketer will work with a tool that provides dataGetting the most out of in-app analyticsFirst step in journey to reporting mastery is learning the tools you use on a daily basisHow do you get good at in-app reporting? You see all the time the first thing students do is go out and grab a certification for Google Analytics, etc, etc… Certifications are totally worth it and you should go ahead and do it. Don’t worry if it’s worth it or not. The truth of these certificates is that they demonstrate that you’ve: a) put in the effort to learn an application, and b) learned the fundamentals of a tool.It doesn’t make you an expert -- yet -- and you’ll need to apply those skills to real-world problems to truly master those skills. I learned these tools by always being the guy people came to ask questions. “How many visitors did we get from Organic this month? Is that an improvement?”“What percentage of our traffic is on mobile?”“How many trials did we get last month? Where on our website did they start trials?You don’t need the answer, but you do need the curiosity and discipline to dig deeper.This is one of the reasons I think early marketers should spend time in small startups. You won’t come close to the amount of time or freedom to dig deeper in a big enterprise where tools and data teams are already full fledged.Learning through trying and breaking things right?What makes someone good at reporting?But the data never lies! It might be true but like a rock on the side of a hill, it requires some context and big picture thinking to understand how it got thereSo much of marketing reporting is done on an ad-hoc basis as opposed to a formal month-end style. Of course, you ...

Shannon McCluskey is an analytical marketing leader at the top of her game counting 10+ years of martech experience with amazing SaaS companies.She works out of Vancouver but is originally from Ottawa, she’s got a Bcom from the UofO and a masters in digital technology from university of Waterloo.She got her early start in marketing and UX at Fluidware, an Ottawa based startup with the same founders that are now behind Fellow.appFluidware was later acquired by SurveyMonkey where Shannon went on to spend almost 3 years in marketing ops where she worked with some of the top Marketo experts in the world.She went on to run the remote Ops team at an HR SaaS called Visier for almost 4 years.Shannon is currently Marketing Ops Manager at Clio - a distributed cloud-based legal tech company and she’s building an awesome team with interesting open roles right now.She’s certified by Marketo, Salesforce and Demandbase. She’s spoken at top marketing conferences like the martech conference in San Jose.Shannon-- thanks for taking the time to chat with us today!- Your journey from Ottawa startup to Survey Monkey > Visier and now Clio - What's Clio and what does your team do, how do you market to lawyers - How a remote company of 600 people is run, how your MOPs team is run - What advice do you have for aspiring MOPs professionals? How do you know this path is right for you?- Are you getting lots of applications, what are your thoughts on the supply and demand of martech talen right now?- Describe the current role / pitch the opportunity on your team- Give us an example a project someone on your team would own, like a campaign a nurture, a data hygiene program or a compliance program - In the posting, the JT is specialist, but looking at the exp and the skills required, you’re considering both early marketers willing to learn at the same time as a more seasoned IC with MKTO + SFDC experience. How do you balance that, how do you pick?- The stack you're building with- You lead a team, you're a frequent speaker and a constant learner, you also have a busy personal life, you’re a mom working from home, how do you balance everything you have going on in your life to stay happy. --Shannon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonmccluskeyThe Marketing Operations Specialist posting: https://boards.greenhouse.io/goclio/jobs/3142437 All job openings on Clio: https://boards.greenhouse.io/goclio ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Hey everyone, this is part 3 of 3 on marketing email audits. Whether you’re in-house or you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service, our hope is that you can level up your email game.In the last 2 episodes, we covered research tips and questions you should ask yourself before the audit and we also covered the actual audit and what to look for, tips and tactics. In today’s episode, we’ll cover what email improvements to suggest and experiment with, we’ll take a nice deep dive in behaviour-triggered emails.So you’ve dived into the user’s world, you’ve gone through all the emails and suggested improvements on the first emails and how to avoid selling too early. Now you want to figure out what you should suggest in terms of improvements.What are some of the highest impact experiments you’ve led? One spot I like to start is inactive users. When it comes to reactivating users, B2C can be very similar to B2B. B2C calls them abandoned cart emails, and they don’t have to be treated too differently in SaaS B2B, but it’s easy to do this wrong.Re-activating dormant usersBy day 3-4 of your onboarding sequence, it makes total sense to sell but probably only to users who have gotten started. 50-70% of free users have either left the product or are kicking the tires on several other options. We call these dormant or inactive users. They check you out really fast and give up. The majority of these are users you will never convert in the first place.But amongst this group of inactive users there's plenty who would convert if they get invited back into the product. The approach needs to be creative and helpful. We need to delight these inactive users, not sell them.The angle should rather be showcasing similar customers who have completed similar jobs to be done.Triggered-based behaviour emailsMost onboarding series are not tied to what users have completed so far in the product, it’s 100% time-based and not outcome-driven and assumes all users are ready to buy 15 minutes into their journey. Outcome driven trigger-based emails (instead of time), based on what users have completed and not completed in the product.Here’s how I’ve approached implementing this as an experiment:I would suggest starting with 3 main cohorts of users: DiscoverGetting startedUpgradeMost series push users quickly past steps 1 and 2 and hammers step 3 for many emails to follow. (1) DiscoverThe first activity cohort (Discover) is all about getting users to their first unit of value. For Convertkit, that might be importing your subscribers from Mailchimp, or maybe creating their first form. This is all about getting users to a quick win, browse all the different signup form options and connect it to your site. Instead of waiting 15 minutes before the next email, a triggered email could send after sign up form creation congratulating the user on connecting Convertkit to their site, reminding them how easy it is to swap forms and pushing them to the next cohort of users.If users who signup become inactive and are not able to create a signup form or do anything else after 15 minutes, it’s safe to assume we’ve lost these folks and instead of pushing them a discount or a promotion, we should be teasing them about existing customer signup pages, focusing on that first win. We need to re-activate these users before we worry about selling to them. Coordinate with the product team here for best results. What is the typical time to conversion event. Also, it is worth thinking about consequences and complexity of moving to an activated track or not.(2) Getting startedUsers enter the second activity cohort/group as soon as they complete their first unit of value. The stage is all about convincing users the product is the ideal solution and pushes them through the rest of the getting started steps. This is where email onboarding can help drive stickiness of the product by building/introducing habit-forming principles.Over time, this section can grow with multiple onboarding steps, but we could start with two simple steps like creating their first email draft or their email footer settings. (3) Upgrade to paid planNow that users have had a chance to try out the product and see parts of their brand in the product, we can start nudging them to upgrade benefits and features. Okay so all 3 of those could be lists in your automation tool. Smart lists or dynamic lists, they update as soon as someone completes an action in the product. Yeah so let’s illustrate this. We have our 5 lists right?SignupsImported subscribersCreated a formConnected form to siteCreated broadcast draftUser signs up, they get a confirmation email. As soon as they click that, send the Welcome email. So far, no segmentation.Next wait step triggers when the user enters our second list, the getting started list. This is when users have imported their subscribers in Convertkit. So we can wait until the user enters our second list, as soon as they do, they get a congratulatory email pushing them to enter list #3. We can add a max wait time on this wait step and send an email pushing users to import their subscribers after 2 hours if they aren’t on our second list yet.Next wait step would be wait until user enters our 3rd list, created a form, congratulate them and push them to connect it to their site. If user is on list 2, send them another attempt at nudging them to the next product step, if they are on list 1, nudge them to import their contacts. Segmen...