The following interview was conducted and published by Authority Magazine and published on medium.com.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your personal backstory with us?
Like many technology professionals, I spent many of my early years in a basement. Taking apart and putting back together computers by the age of 10, fiddling around with software configurations and eventually getting into programming in high school. From there I took a big leap in college to a degree in graphic design. Wandering into the arts was something that really intrigued me, as it was something I didn’t have much exposure to growing up. I think this technical and artistic background really set the foundation for my expertise in Marketing Automation. There’s never an end to the problems you encounter and can solve with marketing automation. It continues to allow me to challenge both sides of my brain every day.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
You know, this is kind of a funny question for me to reflect on. I was really a bit of a loner growing up and in my early adult life. Until landing at ddm, I really pushed myself to be better because I never doubted I could be. It was a long and very indirect path to get to here.
The first day I landed at ddm, that loner mentality started to melt away. We have a profound emphasis on collaboration and problem-solving here. I very quickly felt like I was part of something bigger than myself. I would say I owe a lot of my success to my boss, Christa Savickas. I admittedly have a strange set of experience, from IT knowledge to artistic schooling, to construction planning and drafting. She saw all this and looked at me not as an aimless wanderer, but someone with an innate curiosity and unique adaptability.
From my first days as a Marketing Automation Developer to the very moment I’m writing this she’s been an exemplary mentor in everything from writing clean, concise code to how to manage a team, a project, and even yourself at times. I still learn from her every day and I really can’t say enough about how much she fuels my continual growth.
Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?
Be curious, have a run-through-the-wall attitude, and respect the team.
These three traits are not just something that I take great pride in myself, but also happen to be ddm core values. Curiosity is the cornerstone of self-improvement. I’m never really satisfied with the “what,” I also need to know the “why,” “how,” “when,” and “where.” In marketing automation there’s always a deeper hole to dive down. You have to have expertise in content, design, programming, architecting, analytics, and so much more to be truly effective. You can’t settle for just knowing the “what”, because you’ll never have enough context to build a truly successful campaign.
Marketing automation is nothing if not a series of challenges. You run into walls constantly. You have to have the perseverance and mindset to run through them. It reminds me of the story you’re told as a kid about Edison inventing the light bulb. No one remembers how many times he failed to produce a functional lightbulb, only the functional result. Don’t fear failure, it’s part of the process. Each barrier makes you stronger.
Respecting the team may seem obvious, but it’s so critical to success. Marketing automation is not in use in a vacuum. It’s part of an ecosystem. Think about all the stakeholders and parties that are affected by the success of your marketing automation. Web, social media, customer success, marketing and analytics, sales, and customer relationships. If you’re not actively working with your team, understanding each other’s challenges, and working toward a common goal, then you’re working against them. Nobody works in a bubble. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Your team is your strongest asset.
Which skills are you still trying to grow now?
Can I say all of them? There are so many things to know!
Right now a big focus of our marketing automation team is strategic insights. How can we effectively and affordably provide our clients high quality insights based on measurables? This includes building dashboards, managing data, and integrating platforms. Everybody’s budget is tight right now. We really want to maximize each dollar spent, and make sure budgets are being used where they’re having the greatest effect.
Communication and education are also big ones. Marketing automation is a big cookie to bite. I often find myself in a role of strategist, implementer and educator. Communicating the complexities of marketing automation is tough, and so many of our clients are so new at it. We’re really that focused on simplifying that experience for our clients so we can put them in a position to build their own success.
Let’s talk about marketing automation. What impact has marketing automation had on streamlining and enhancing your team’s operations, KPIs, and overall efficiency?
Efficiency is the name of the game right now. I alluded to it when I talked about growing in strategic insights. Everyone is working with slimmer budgets and slimmer teams.
What’s your favorite marketing automation tool and the way in which to use it?
Journeys, workflows, engagements: They go by a lot of different names, depending on your platform. But these are the real strengths of marketing automation. The ability to set up automatic email sends and actions based on subscriber responses and behaviors is what marketing automation is all about. When you have good data, you can use these tools to set up onboarding, welcome experiences, alerts, and so much more. They can be customized to your specific industry and business, and they use all the facets of marketing automation to operate. This is where email, data, lead generation and scoring, and measuring progress all come together.
Ensuring a personalized customer experience is crucial in today’s marketing landscape. How do you balance automation while maintaining a human touch?
Your messaging service, such as Marketing Cloud or Marketo, gives you a lot more flexibility in templates than you might think. In fact these platforms can often make content decisions for you. We do it all the time with our clients. Dynamically rendering a subscriber’s first name is a great first step. It feels way more personal than a simple “Greetings!” or “Hey friend.” But that’s only scratching the surface. You can change the content of an email based on the plan type a subscriber has, previous products they’ve been interested in, or recent changes they’ve made to their account. It’s all about sending the most relevant message.
Data is also a cornerstone of effective marketing automation. How do you utilize data-driven insights to continuously refine and optimize your automated campaigns?
Building the experience is the easy part. Maintaining it takes a steady hand and a close eye. I cannot understate the importance of reporting. You need to be analyzing each communication and understanding what your subscriber base is reacting to. You in turn should be reacting to what they want. In this cycle you can always gear your content to be relevant and valuable. By analyzing an individual’s data, and using custom fields, you can even begin to micro-target based on specific interests. When you send quality information rather than communications in volume, that’s when you really start to build that relationship with your subscribers.
As AI and machine learning become more prominent, how have you integrated these technologies to not only automate tasks but also to provide predictive insights?
These tools have been in play for marketing automation for quite a while. Lead scoring, send-time optimizations, unengaged lists, and dynamic content are all examples of this. By giving your platforms specific parameters ― when to increase lead score, when to send a message based on lead score, when a specific user is most likely to open an email, or what content to use in certain situations ― the platform can take care of the rest itself. It’s all generally baked right into the basic function of marketing automation platforms. It’s all in what data you have, how you use it, and what parameters you can provide your platform.
What strategies have you found most effective in integrating marketing automation with other departments, such as sales or customer service, to create a cohesive and efficient end-to-end customer experience?
Sales, customer service, and marketing may feel like very different departments with different functions, but they’re so similar at their core. You’re all focused on providing a great experience for a customer, and often that customer must pass hands through each of those departments. A robust and well-considered customer journey map provides so much insight into where each team has touchpoints, and what the customer can or should expect at each step in their journey. For us they may be passing hands many times, but for the customer, it should be a seamless and simple experience. From prospect, to lead, to converted sale, to retention and back to prospect the customer journey map helps bring all stakeholders together in a unified strategy.
Once that customer journey has been mapped out, your marketing automation team can begin to identify opportunities. You know where and when you’re going to have to communicate. Now you can prove your value by reducing overhead at each step. Anything from a single message to a series of emails, forms, and decisions splits can be handled by automation, leaving sales and customer experience with more time to focus on high value activities and outreaches.
Implementing marketing automation can come with a certain degree of change management. What tips do you have for introducing a new tool or process to a pre-existing team?
There are a whole sea of options at your disposal in the realm of automation. Some are good. Some are … challenging. If you want a smooth and gratifying experience with a new tool, I strongly suggest consulting with the experts. Whether that’s outside help from an agency, working with the platform owner directly, or providing yourself the proper education, this is not a place where you should skimp. The world of marketing automation is vast, and its problems are many. Without the proper experience, many of those issues can go unnoticed until it’s too late. And when you’re setting up a database, automation, or integration that will become an integral piece of your day-to-day activities, it’s far more expensive to correct any mistakes than it is to seek help from an expert.
What are 5 Ways to Use Marketing Automation to Improve Team Efficiencies?
1. Lead generation — everyone wants it. Most have it, but is it efficient? Here’s a great example. We have a client who had may forms for collecting leads throughout multiple sites. Every week a digital marketing specialist would have to pull all their form submissions from different locations and gather them all in one form, then deduplicate. They also had a rampant issue with spam submissions. I would estimate less than 1 in 10 leads were quality, actionable leads. Their lead generation really wasn’t worth the time it took to gather them.
We were able to use their Pardot instance to embed forms into their website. Those contacts would all flow back to their Pardot database and be automatically deduplicated and gathered in one place. We also included a CAPTCHA challenge to vastly decrease the amount of spam they were receiving, leaving them with a much higher percentage of quality leads. The whole restructure saves them several man-hours per week.
2. Data integrations — I’ve yet to encounter a single business who is comfortable with their data integrations and management. It’s an extremely difficult thing to set up without the proper experience. We’ve seen several clients who, through subpar data integrations, frequently have issues with dynamic lists sending to individuals who aren’t intended to receive communications. And it’s through little fault of the team who manages the marketing automation platform. Someone else manages the data, and they simply receive it, using common-sense queries to select contacts. However, when data is inaccurate, you can’t trust your queries. Get your integrations right, define your source of truth, and verify your data. This is the bedrock of your marketing plan.
3. Automated welcome campaigns — You have your form data moving appropriately and someone submits a request to get your newsletter. Great, they’ll get added to the list next month right? What if I told you you’re wasting your most valuable opportunity? Campaign Monitor states that welcome campaigns’ open rates far exceed the standard campaign, at an open rate upward of 50%. You will likely never get engagement like this again. When someone submits their contact data to your form, you should be sending a follow up ASAP. An automated welcome campaign can handle this for you, and is always watching for the next submission.
4. Measure everything — I cannot overstate how critical it is to continue to evolve your campaigns. I often ask my clients what the goal of their email is, and too often the answer is “get it out the door.” Please learn from every send. Look at your open rate, your click-through rate, and track subscribers beyond the email or SMS with UTMs. Have a clear picture of what campaign success looks like. Your KPIs don’t have to be right ― or even reasonable ― when you first start out, but you need to have benchmarks. If you’re not working toward a target, then you can’t be strategic about your improvements. Message content, design, timing, and targeting can all be fine-tuned through proper KPI measurements.
5. Remember it is only part of the whole — Marketing automation is a cool supplemental tool. Using your marketing automation to enhance your entire digital presence is monumental. Marketing automation goes hand-in-hand with your web and digital media presence. It’s all part of the same funnel.
A lead can come in through an ad or post on social media; you then direct them to a landing page which provides additional enticing content and a form, offering additional outreach and offers. You immediately follow up with a welcome email, maintaining their attention and promoting next steps. They click the link, add an item to their cart, and … get distracted. Tomorrow, you follow up with an abandoned cart email, offering a 10% discount if they complete their purchase.
Your lead just touched almost every facet of your digital marketing presence. It’s so important to think of these actions as one whole experience rather than isolated incidents. Every action should offer a next step. With marketing automation, it’s much easier to identify those individuals who need a little nudge.
Can you share a story about a challenge you faced with marketing automation, and how you overcame it?
There are so many to choose from! Marketing automation is a rich wonderland of challenges and solving them is so satisfying. When setting up a large-scale, 8-month campaign for a client, I was tasked with working with several other teams to create a seamless flow from their data warehouse to their marketing automation platform to target messages on an individual level.
This integration included ingesting data from a form (built and maintained outside of the automation platform), running those form submittals through the data warehouse to match relevant data, then pull all that back into the marketing automation platform to determine what communications they received. It was a massive collaborative effort requiring a robust data pipeline. We also had very strict requirements on who we could contact, as the email provided via the form was not always the email provided on the contact record. There were some strict medical privacy concerns in this circumstance.
It took really strong collaboration between my team at ddm, the marketing operations team, and the data management team to pull together this data pipeline, facilitate data ingestion on multiple endpoints, ensure accuracy of that data, and reach a point where we were fully comfortable that the automations would be able to run without supervision. After six months of building, we were able to do so. The whole 8-month campaign has been running on its own for two years at this point with very few hiccups. All-in-all we totaled more than 50 journeys, each with an average of two possible emails, an end-of-campaign survey, automatic gift card code distribution, and one very complex and mutli-faceted data pipeline.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I’ll give a simple answer to a very complex problem. I would inspire people to talk less and listen more. And I mean really listen. Everything from a cross-department stalemate to the greatest of global politics can all be solved if we approach from a common understanding. I find people often lean on their experience and presumptions (myself included) and don’t give space for their fellow humans to make a real case for their concerns. A very small percentage of people on this Earth have malicious intent. Most everyone else is just trying to do what they think is best. When you reach out and meet your counterparts halfway, you’ll find that their challenges and concerns are often very well-founded, and you can work as a team to create a well-considered solution that satisfies everyone.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.