Humans of Martech

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...

Hey everyone, this is part 2 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 episode, we covered research tips and questions you should ask yourself before the audit. In today’s episode, we’ll cover the actual audit and what to look for, tips and tactics. Next week, our last episode of the series will cover what email improvements to suggest and experiment with.Alright JT, let’s get to it. There’s three crucial things I want to make sure we cover today as part of any email audit.A theme that you’ll hear throughout today’s episode is timing your emails around your user’s journey, and not selling too early or to users that aren’t ready to buy. But let's start with the confirmation email and the welcome email. Regardless of what you're auditing, those will be part of the starting journey for all new users right?Confirmation emailDepending on the scope of your audit you need to decide if you’re going to audit individual emails or more high level improvements. I prefer the former. I go email by email, not starting with the Welcome email but the confirmation email. That’s really the first email touch point. We want to maximise the chances that this email reaches the inbox. To do that we want to keep it short and simple with a single CTA, confirm your email. We don’t want too many images or text or links. We need this to land in the inbox and get through most spam filters.Such a balance of beautiful design and impact versus sneaking past email filters. Too much HTML gets caught.Welcome emailWe had a full episode dedicated to really making this email stand out, and that’s the core goal of this email. Everyone expects it. Most companies have a huge fancy HTML template with heavy brand and a bunch of helpful resources and links to get started.The danger with overloading users too soonSomething that lives rent free in my brain when I think email onboarding is Val Geisler’s dinner party strategy. When you host people over for a dinner party--be it a backyard BBQ or a fancy social event, the evening itself has many tracks. You welcome guests, Take their coats, introduce them to othersYou take their drinks order and show them to a seatthere’s the appetizer round, a main course, side dishes, and dessert, and then you invite them back. If the Welcome email has 10+ links to tutorials and courses and help articles, it’s almost like your guest’s arrive to your house for the dinner party and before they can take their coats off you shove the main course sprinkled with dessert in their face. I like this dinner guest analogy a lot. I think it's also a lot about coordinating with product. Combined, you set the ambience. The smell of food, the setting, the dress code -- email needs to blend in to the decorum. Seeing how the product<>email experience jive is a big opportunity.Instead of overwhelming users with links, Welcome emails are great starting points to train users to open the next emails. This can be done with storytelling and standing out. We should be training users to open our next email and pushing them to 1 specific moment of delight back in the product. Consider a stronger CTA to push users to finish their onboarding. They could try "Add your first subscriber" or "build your first landing page" instead of "Log in".There's an opportunity to tell the Convertkit story instead of just welcoming them to the family. Users starting an email tool are also trialing competitors. So they are getting similar emails. Selling too earlyEarly in the journey we want to nudge users to complete steps in the product that nudge them to moments of delight and getting value from the product. You don’t want to turn off users and start selling to everyone, especially not users that haven’t done much in the product yet. The best way to get users to upgrade to a paid plan is to let them try the product and reach success. Instead of talking about the benefits of upgrading to a paid plan right away, we should be telling users how and why Convertkit is their best choice.We want to be delighting the user and making sure they are accomplishing tasks in the product. Working on the user's timeline rather than asking them to upgrade right away. Mindlessly forcing people through a user journey is bad. The idea that you need to be everything to everyone is equally bad. Segmentation is key, behaviour based triggered emails are also key. That’s actually part 3/3 of our series. We covered what to do before the audit in part 1, part 2 was the actual audit and the most important aspects of the first two emails in your sequence and part 3 next week is what you should be suggesting as part of improvements. We’ll specifically be touching on segmentation and behaviour based triggered emails. Chat then.✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Educational series, product onboarding, upsell sequences… regardless of where you look in your funnel, there’s marketing emails to be audited. Like any investigation, an email audit combines thorough observations, deductive reasoning and extra points for style and bold decisions. Our hope with this 3 part series is that you can add another feather in your detective hat. Whether you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service or you’re in-house and you want to level up your company’s email game. We’re going to cover research and questions you should ask yourself before the audit, what to look for in your actual audit, tips, tactics and finally what improvements to suggest and experiment with.Today’s main takeaway is:Users have ideal paths to discovering your product or service, understand these moments deeply and use email to guide users along this path. Alright JT, email onboarding is close to my heart, I’ve built many of these in-house but I’ve also had the pleasure of consulting and auditing the onboarding series for a few SaaS and tech companies.It’s fascinating to get to see all the different ways you can welcome users to your product via email.Before we talk about what order to tackle things, let’s talk about great email onboarding.What’s great onboarding?Great email onboarding consists of guiding/helping users through a series of “aha” moments as they interact with your brand and product. Users receive units of value for each step as they gain confidence in the product’s ability to complete their jobs to be done. In a product-led company, this should be corroborated by the product/ux team. What wow moments exist in the ideal path, and use email to guide them along this path.Data is part 1, story is part 2 and where marketing shines. What are some examples of aha moments?Aha moments exampleI’ve been thinking through what an “aha” series of steps might look like for a free Convertkit user:A close friend recommends Convertkit as the ideal place to start for my newsletterI have a quick read through backlinko’s guide to convertkit and get a real good sense of what the product can doI’m able to quickly signup and import my subscribers from MailchimpI’m able to build my first signup form and connect it to my WP siteI watch a 20 minute video tutorial on intro to advanced automations in Pro plansI successfully connect my signup form to my WP siteWhat email onboarding should and should not beUltimately, great email onboarding convinces users to stick around and boosts overall engagement and retention.Email onboarding should be used to:Tell the company’s storyAnswer questions/objectionsDemonstrate how the product solves user’s pain Nudge users to specific common conversion actionsShow the art of the possibleTie what the user has done in their accountEmail onboarding should not be used to:Get everyone to buy immediately Send the same call to actionSeem cold and impersonalAn extension of your brand and productCoordinate with product experience to be integrated with itDoesn’t trip over the feet of product-based emails or sales emailsBuild trust/rapportBe referenceable down the line when user needs info, point of contact, etcUnderstanding your customers and usersBefore diving into any email audit, it’s important to get into your users’ headspace. Obviously this differs whether you're leading this audit in-house or as a consultant. Often when you are contracting, you won’t have a ton of customer research data available to you. In spite of customer research/interviews and jobs to be done insights, here’s a few places to spend a bit of time reading:Review sites on G2, capterraTutorials on getting started with the product from the communitySearching on twitter @company threadsThese spots really give me a sense of the language used and what problems are being solved as well the steps users need to take to be able to “hire” the company for a specific job. Gimme some JBTD examples with something like Covnertkit?Jobs to be done exampleUsers signup for Convertkit probably because they want to grow their personal brands, sites and businesses. Not because they want an email marketing tool. Some of the common themes and jobs that were highlighted throughout reviews and tutorials were:How to build an email listSend automated email remindersSell services/contact or products/ecommerceBuild a personal brand, start an audience, build a web presenceThe predominant themes and categories of use cases were:Artists, designers, filmmakers, photographersAthletes, coaches, influencersMarketers, bloggers, podcasters, makersYoutubers, streamers, musiciansDiving deep into a few tutorials highlighted a few prerequisites for hitting what are likely common conversion actions or moments of delight in the early web building journey:Having a subscriber baseHaving a form connected to your site to accept new subsShare a link to your new landing page on socialSend a broadcast email to subsUnderstanding the customer pain point precisely the moment before they start looking for you.So we just covered part 1 of our 3 part series on email audits, we talked about what great email onboarding should and should not do, we gave you spots to look for user research when there’s a whole lot to start with, and we chatted a bit about jobs to be done and user pain points. Part 2 next week dives into the email audit itself, specifically what you should be looking for in the first two emails. Catch you next time. ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Back to office, staying fully remote, flexible hybrid setup. Global pandemics gave millions of knowledge workers the taste of remote work. And a lot of them are never going back.A global distributed workforce means access to untapped talent but it also means time zone and synchronous meeting challenges. Getting everyone from your local Toronto office to show up to the same meeting at 10am EST is pretty easy. Running the same meeting with a team spread across 5 time zones makes this much more challenging. Especially if you want to promote autonomous and flexible work schedules.The solution isn’t less meetings or hybrid meetings. The solution is asynchronous communication.In today’s episode we’re going to cover what async means exactly, being able to say “I’ll get that done on my own time”. We’ll dispel some of the misconceptions and dive into the stages of transformation towards autonomy. Hopefully you’ll be better positioned to encourage async in your day to day, whether you're in-house or freelance adapting now is key for leading any teams in the future.IntroHundreds of companies declared themselves remote first and digital first last year. A lot of them are massive corporations too. This transition will be excruciatingly slow and painful for big orgs. These orgs are studying companies who have been doing this for decades. Remote work isn’t new for everyone. Convertkit, Close, Basecamp (60+ actually much lower with recent policy changes), Helpscout, Clearbit, Buffer, Doist (100+) and Zapier is 500 people, remote-first all smaller, very little funding, innovators in the remote space.There’s also the bigger teams too.Automattic, the people behind WordPress are 1,000+ global distributed team and have been from the early days. InVision is fully remote, 1000+, GitHub is 3,000+.Something all of these distributed work pioneers talk about is over-communication in the written form, but specifically, asynchronous communication. In the world of most marketers, and knowledge workers for that matter, very little of your day to day tasks are emergencies, or require immediate action.The nature of async can be summed with a short sentence: I’ll get to that as soon as I get the chance, or on my own time. Async is sending a message and having a common understanding that an immediate response is not expected. Email is usually async. You send it and you expect an answer in a day or 2 or more. Recipient opens that email on their time and responds when they get the chance. Synchronous communication is sending a message and the recipient needs to process and respond in real time immediately. In a meeting with your team on Zoom, you say something, your team members receive and respond right away.When you take the time to think about it, most of what you do in your job could be done with a 1-way written update sent to a single person or a group of people, who can respond as soon as they get the chance. Obviously there’s times when there’s emergencies, or sometimes the nature of your work requires real time collaboration like live support teams or front line sales reps, and there’s different ways of tackling those situations than async.ExamplesInstead of saying: hey do you have 15mins to chat today About this project?Async is saying: here’s two questions I have regarding the last update you made on this project. Instead of saying: here’s an invite to a meeting where I’m going to walk you through a project update and I’m mostly going to be doing the talking, everyone will be seeing this for the first time and I’ll be asking for your attention for 1 hour and immediate feedback.Async is saying: here’s a short summary of a project update followed by a detailed overview of a problem I’m having and specific questions I’d like guidance on. Here’s what I’ve done so far, here’s when I need an answer by.BenefitsDeep work / flow stateA huge % of your workforce is introverted and perform better when they’ve had the chance to think before they are asked to give a response and give more space for flow/deep work.Tons of research shows that increasing response times allows people time to reflect and remove emotion from the equation thus making better decisions. Human centered way of workingAs one CEO, Sudeesh Nair, of ThoughtSpot, very active on Twitter about async, one of my fav quotes from him is: “…the ability to let people in whenever they want to work, however long they want to work in a day…that’s what asynchronous is about. If you think that way, you have to make more intentional changes in the work process, collaboration process, to enable every one of those people to come into the workforce.”Productive night owlsMany people are night owls. We’re all wired differently to be our most creative and intellectual during specific parts of the day, commonly, early morning and night.This is derived from chronotypes, our preferred sleeping patterns. But imagine forcing a pure night owl to work 9am to 5pm. And then giving this same person the ability to work 11-3pm and 9pm-11pm. The opposite is also true for ultra early risers like JT.Async teams give everyone way more flexibility to get their work done when they are more alert and productive. Just gotta strive for some overlap, you can’t NEVER have in-person meetings.Misconceptions / passing baton is too slow / project management tools suckPassing the baton with project management toolsThis might be hard for folks who are used to making decisions in a single room together and talking it out. Or if you’re used to getting answers to questions right away instead of spending time solo and figuring it out yourself. Consider this: globally distributed teams, who work async and master ‘passing the baton’, can get three times more done than a local team relying on everybody to be in an office between 9am and 5pm.This is something that Matt Mullenweg, Automattic CEO and WP founder has pointed out in a few podcasts. A local centralised company that runs on real-time noisy office environments with plenty of all too common consensus-seeking meetings cannot and will not survive in the next few years.Project management tools such as Asana are key to helping you run an async ship. How many sync/update meetings have you had where people go around the room one after the other updating everyone on their asana tasks when everyone knows they could’ve read up on those updates without a meeting. This requires diligence and it’s not for everyone. Project management tools often drive tennis games of back and forths. Avoiding tennis games of back and forthsOne of the biggest knocks against async is that it slows things down and often times, what could’ve been a simple pre-game discussion turned into a marathon tennis game of back and forth.Tips to avoid this:Give context, lots of context, make it skimmableGive action items, deadlines when possibleLevels of autonomy / How you can help change your orgMatt Mullenweg, Automattic/WP founder often talks about his levels of autonomy, it’s modeled after the self driving car level of autonomy. 5 levels:0 - Coffee baristas, construction workers. You need to be in a physical location to do the work.1 - Not remote-friendly, old school but in seats, company space, company time....