Feb 26, 2018
How does the world's leading conversation rate optimization expert use email marketing to drive lead-to-customer conversions?
In this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, CXL Founder Peep Laja (voted as #1 most influential conversion rate optimization expert in the world) shares the specific email strategies and tactics that he and his team have used to acquire 80% of the company's new customers directly from their email campaigns.
Listen to the podcast to hear more about the email marketing strategies that CXL is using, or read the transcript below.
Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success Podcast. This is Kathleen Booth. I'm your host, and today my guest is Peep Laja of ConversionXL. Peep, welcome to the podcast.
Peep Laja
(guest): Thank you, thank you for having me, it's a
pleasure to be here.
Kathleen: Well I'm excited to talk with you.
Before we dive into some of the marketing topics we're going to
discuss, tell the audience a little bit about yourself, who you
are, your background, and also about ConversionXL, please.
Peep: I have a diverse background. I worked
in sales, I was a professional fundraiser for non profits, I was a
software developer, a direct response marketer, affiliate marketer
and all that led up to a mix of experiences that served well when I
started my career as a conversion optimization person. So I started
CXL, formerly known as ConversionXL, in 2011 and I started a
conversion optimization agency. I did that for ... Well, the agency
is still there. So I grew the agency and then two years ago
started CXL Institute, which is offering data
driven marketing courses.
So yeah, so I'm
predominantly focused on conversion
rate optimization, but have done a bunch of things.
Kathleen: How did you get interested in
conversion optimization, because you do have such a varied
background. I'm curious why that was the thing you chose to dive
deep on.
Peep: It was two things. So first I had an
SEO company, or I was a freelance SEO person and this was in like
2007. It wasn't very hard to get my clients ranked page
one in google, and I managed that, and they got a bunch more
traffic, they weren't still making more money or just a little bit
more money, not a lot more money. And then I realized making money
online is not just about traffic, there's another component to it.
And then I discovered the first people writing about it, you know,
it was the Eisenberg brothers, this company
out in Malaysia called Mindvalley had a course on
it and I like started digging in. And then years went by, did a
bunch of different things and then I had a start up that failed and
after it failed I was "Well, now what?"
My start up failed
because I did not have any money, any audience, no name
recognition, nothing. So I told myself, next time around, I'll
build an audience first, so I knew I wanted to start a blog. And so
what do I want to start a blog about? So basically I did keyword
and competition research, figured out that conversion optimization
was ... There wasn't much competition, very few blogs around and
that was it.
Kathleen: I love it. So you started the
company, and the company has evolved quite a bit in terms of its
business model. When you and I first started talking, you know, we
were discussing some of the things you've done from a marketing
standpoint that have really fueled the company's success over the
years, and it was interesting to me that one of the big things that
lept out was email. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Peep: So I started the blog 2011 and of
course you need to have good content in order for the blog to get
anywhere, so I focused on good content, and I focused on driving
traffic to the blog, but like what do you do with the traffic? At
first, I wasn't selling anything, so I was just capturing emails,
so that was all that I was optimizing for, capturing more emails.
And over the years, the list grew and grew and is still growing and
now sending emails to people who want to hear from us including
promotional messages is working really well. So I would say about
80 percent of our money is coming from the list.
Kathleen: That's amazing. To what do you
attribute your success with email? I mean, obviously having a big
list is step one, but that certainly doesn't guarantee that
anybody's going to open it, read it, click on it, convert on it.
What's went well for you?
Peep: I guess it starts with the basics. You
need to send people emails that they would enjoy reading and
opening. For the first four years or so, five years, we did not
sell anything to our email list. We were just sending our weekly
newsletter, which really consists up to this day of our blog posts,
so it's kind of like in a way how people are subscribing to our
blog, so we publish great content on the blog, which has made us
known in our space and so email is a way to get those notifications
about the blog posts. So that was what we were doing for the first
four or five years and we weren't sending any promotional messages,
because we were running just an agency and now we're conversion
optimization agents with fees that start from like $10,000 a month
for retainers.
So most people in the list would not be able to afford it. So we were fully aware that it's a complicated product, a long consideration cycle, so our strategy all along was: join our email list, we will prove to you that we know what we're talking about by sending you content, demonstrating our expertise and then eventually, when you have the need and the budget, we will be top of your mind, and you'll look us up. And that worked really well. Two years ago we launched CXL Institute, so we wanted to add a more scalable aspect to the business, and most people in our email list essentially weren't making us any money because they were not hiring our agency, so it was also another way to monetize the people on our list.
And then we started sending for the first time promotional emails, sales emails. Essentially "Buy this course." And it worked, we started to make money from these emails. The way we did it was also basically everything we emailed was kind of a launch. So we sent people an email that says "Hey, we're about to do a course on xyz, are you interested?" And we just had them reply "Yes, I'm interested." And then we gathered maybe, I don't know, however many people replied to that. Maybe like 3,000 people said "Yes, I'm interested." And only then did we start to send them more emails basically building up the hype about those courses. That it's now, it's coming, it's coming and then it will contain this and that. Until the day the course launched, we sent them an email with maybe a discount coupon and they bought it.
So we instantly started making a lot of money selling courses. And then of course if something is working, your immediate thought is "let's do more of that." So we started to build more courses and sent more emails. And over time, the effectiveness of these sales emails started to come down. Because we weren't sending any sales emails and now we were sending a lot, so people were getting kind of tired and the most motivated people had already bought one or two courses from us and so budget maybe started to become an issues and there is also a limit of how many courses one person can consume.
And then we realized that
we need to do two things. One, we needed to grow our email list
even faster so as to bring new emails in from people who haven't
received the previous sales messages and now they can get them. So
that's one - we need to focus on growing the email list. And two,
we need to start sending more relevant sales messages, because our
first approach was we're sending the same message to pretty much
everybody - you know, everybody on our list. Our list is around
100,000 people and the open
rates and click
through rates were in constant decline, because we were
just bombarding them with sales messages essentially.
Kathleen: So those initial emails, those
sales emails you talked about, were going to everyone in your
database?
Peep: Exactly, we sent an email on "there is
this course coming up" and then we kind of segmented, we only
started to send follow up messages to people who had confirmed
"Yes, I'm interested." So we were sending those emails to
everybody, and we started to realize that this is a road to
nowhere, and tactic fatigue is going to kick in. The people will be
tired of receiving emails from us, and we're gonna die.
Kathleen: Email Armageddon.
Peep: Exactly. Email was bringing us money,
and if suddenly nobody is going to open our emails, we're going to
be not receiving any more money, so it was a problematic situation
to be in. So what we figured out was that we need a better way to
send emails. So you know, we all know we have to be data driven and
all that and you know, mass blasting is so 2009, but still
everybody's doing it. And mainly because your data is siloed. So
you know, you have your web analytics in one tool, maybe you use GA
(Google Analytics) or whatever and then you have your email
marketing software, whatever you want to use, and then you have
your CRM and then you
have your whatever components of your tech stack. And often these
systems don't talk to each other.
So we realized that we have to know who these people are in our email list and what are they interested in. Two, we need to make sure all our data is merged so there is no piece of data that's siloed, so our email marketing tool has to be able to hold data from our sales history so we can email people who have bought product A, but not product B and things like this and then it's like "how do we do this, how do we finally make this data driven email marketing happen?" And sure enough, the answer is now out there and accessible to everybody.
So you have to use something called CDP, it's customer data platforms. It's essentially a piece of software that sits in the middle of all your other pieces of martech, so your CRM, your WordPress website, your Stripe, whatever you have there. It can talk to anyone through an API. We picked a tool called Hull, www.hull.io. It's one of the many great CDP options out there.
CDP's are of course a growing market, they are mostly for large enterprises in terms of their pricing. So if you're a small business it might be difficult still, but I think like with anything in life, like everything that used to be available for only enterprises is becoming quickly available for everybody. So anyway, so we got Hull. How we implemented our data driven marketing process was as follows. We used Intercom as our email marketing tool and Intercom also serves as our CRM. Our website is built on WordPress, so our WordPress is sending data on purchases to Intercom, because Intercom also basically has the email list, names and emails.
So we are attaching their
purchasing history to the database in Intercom and then we added
the CDP Hull and we're pulling all data from Intercom to Hull and
then we are adding Clearbit, which is an email in data
enrichment tool that will add up to 50 data points about every
email you have. Well not every email, it has to be your business
email, so if it's a Gmail or a Yahoo, it's likely it won't find
anything.
Kathleen: Yeah, we've played around with data
enrichment and same challenge. We get a lot of these personal
emails and you can't do much with those.
Peep: So for some things Clearbit will know
something, hence it's also important that in your email capture you
ask people for their work email, not their personal email, although
that is also a problem, because people change jobs, what, every two
years.
Kathleen: Right.
Peep: So, you know, your email list will
become obsolete in two years once they change jobs, so in that
sense you want the Gmail, because that's permanent.
Kathleen: Yeah, somebody's gotta invent a
data enrichment solution for Gmail.
Peep: Exactly. And then another problem is
that if you wanna build custom audiences, you know
for Facebook
advertising or Linkedin advertising, nobody has their
Facebook login or Linkedin login as their work email. It's always
their Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail. So if you put a bunch of work
emails and you want to build custom audiences on Facebook, it
doesn't find anything, because there's nothing attached to that
email.
So it's still an ongoing
challenge, like should you get Gmails or work emails? But if you
get work emails, you can enrich them. So we're using Clearbit for
it and it's amazing and it's cheap, so there's no reason that every
single person shouldn't do that. Every small business as well, as
it's really affordable. I think for 50 bucks a month, you can
enrich up to 5000 emails a month.
Kathleen: Yeah that's really
reasonable.
Peep: So basically you should set it up any
time you capture an email, so it's enriched right away. Now what
happens is you get data about what kind of a company it is. Is it
e-commerce, B2B, B2C, etcetera? You get information about their
revenue. It's an estimation of course, but still it works. It's
like these guys do above ten million a year, or under a million a
year. You get job titles. You can target people whether it's a
marketing manager or an SEO person or someone in HR. So if we have
a course on product management coming out, we're going to email it
to product people. And we're targeting people based on their title
so all the SEO and conversion people are not getting any emails
about it and the product people who are receiving the promotion
about the product management course, they're likely to be actually
interested in it.
And this is assuming that
your product that you're pitching is actually good, which in our
case always is, you know, if I may say so.
Kathleen: I would hope that that would be how
you felt about it.
Peep: Yeah, so if you're sending content,
emailing content to people, your content needs to be good. If
you're selling courses, it needs to be good. That's a prerequisite.
Everything needs to be good.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Peep: But relevancy is all about enrichment.
Beause you could survey your people "Hey, are you interested in
topic ABC?", but you know, how many people fill out the survey?
Getting the data is very difficult, especially if a list is tens of
thousands of people.
Kathleen: I also think a lot of times people
don't realize how much they are interested in things that they
don't mark off.
Peep: Yes.
Kathleen: Or they don't know what they don't
know. So in fact data can be valuable.
Peep: Yeah, exactly. That kind of solves this
segmentation issue. If you can target people based on whether
they're a manager or not, their job role, type of company they work
in, and a bunch of other stuff like location and basically, like,
your imagination can go wild with 50 data points from
Clearbit.
With Hull there's also a website tracking feature similar to Google Analytics, so we can see which URLs have visited us. So now I am able to send sales emails to people who've read blog posts on certain topics. So if you read three articles on copywriting, I'm going to guess you might be interested in copywriting. I'm going to send you a promotion about a course on copywriting. And so on.
So the options here are
endless. So in this day, in 2018, there is really no excuse anymore
to do mass email blasts. Of course, there is an added complexity
here, so you need to figure out and think logically about "What
kind of segments make sense for targeting?" So we have a
persona-based approach when it comes to job roles. So people like
managers, who are head of digital, they have certain types of
interests. And our personas for email marketing are
largely based on their job role. Like what are their goals,
aspirations, things like this. It's a mental model that helps us to
think about personalization,
it's not an accurate picture of the world.
Kathleen: So you have this CDP in place and
I've got so many questions I want to ask you about this. The first
is: that's such an interesting approach, because when you describe
your tech stack, you have Intercom, you have WordPress, you have
Google Analytics, you have all these different pieces and you went
in the direction of getting Hull, which is the CDP, to be the thing
that tied them all together.
Peep: Yeah.
Kathleen: Why was that the right solution for
you as opposed to trying to go in the direction of more of an
integrated marketing
automation platform that has the CRM. A lot of our
listeners use HubSpot for example. So instead of
going in the direction of using something that has a marketing
platform, an email platform, a CRM, all in one, and instead go to
the CDP?
Peep: Well it's a matter of a freedom of you
can connect any, any piece of software to each other and you can do
whatever you want. You're not limited by the feature set of your
particular marketing automation software. Because, you know,
whether you're using Marketo or whatever you do, there
are always limitations to what you can do, so for me this is about
the control and the ability to just hook anything up with each
other.
Kathleen: Yeah, it's certainly not an either
or, because I guess you could use the CDP with Marketo or
HubSpot.
Peep: Oh yeah, for sure, because I mean if
you start look into it, the CDP opens up new doors that you can't
do with HubSpot or Marketo, right now. I recently attended this
higher education marketing conference, so basically colleges who
were trying to recruit students. So recruitment marketers or
whatever you want to call them, and the universities, the people
that I talked to, they were telling me awful stories about data
being siloed. They have their student enrollment database and they
have their website that has like application forms and then they
have their web analytics and then email marketing is separate and
all these pieces are not talking to each other. It's like "Oh my
God, you guys are running a huge organization with a lot of
complexity and these different pieces are not talking to each
other."
And when I asked why, it's different departments with different
often conflicting goals and they have different budgets and
different tech stacks and so again, you put a CDP in the middle of
those, and the problem is instantly resolved. Everybody can still
be in their own silo, but the data can still flow between
departments very easily.
Kathleen: That's great. When you talked about
sending sales emails and the kind of decreasing returns you were
seeing, you mentioned there were two things you did to address
that. One was put in place the CDP, so that you could really do
more contextual, personalized marketing. The other one was you
wanted to grow your email list. So tell me a little bit about what
you did to try and grow that email list beyond organically
attracting people through great content.
Peep: Right, so the personalization
dramatically helped our open
rates and click
through rates, you know, like when sending a promo email to the
overall list versus a personalized segment. We're personalizing to
an extent of not just "Hey Judy," but "Hey Judy, you're a product
manager, right? So for companies of your size that are doing ten
million plus and using Google Tag Manager in your tech stack,"
because I can see it with Clearbit. I can personalize the whole
thing about their email and they're like "oh my God, how?"
Kathleen: Who is this man and how did he read
my mind?
Peep: Exactly. So open rates went up.
People responded to the emails like "How did you do that?" You
know?
Kathleen: Did
anybody respond saying "This is creepy, why do you know so much
about me?"
Peep: Actually no creepy comments. I received
a lot of compliments from fellow marketers, like "Oh my God, how
did you know?" Or sometimes Clearbit had their title wrong, like
their previous title and they're just like "I'm a director now."
You know?
Kathleen: Right. I feel like it's a power you
have to use with care because it can verge into the realm of creepy
if you don't do it right.
Peep: Sure, but I think we're also human
beings living in 2018, we're just getting used to the
creepy.
Kathleen: Yeah, totally.
Peep: Creepy is the new normal. So that's one
thing. And growing the list... So there is this thing that is the
bane of all marketers called tactic fatigue, right?
Like popups when
they became popular again in like 2012 or whatever, oh my god, what
were the opt-in rates like 15 percent, 20 percent? It was crazy.
And these popups that take over the full screen, what do they call
them?
Kathleen: Oh the overlays, yeah, they're
terrible.
Peep: Yeah, when those first came out, oh my
God, how effective they were. It's ridiculous, I think like I had
35 percent opt-in rates and then of course everybody started using
them and tactic fatigue kicks in and the effectiveness goes down.
So now when you run a popup, and you get a higher opt-in rate than
one percent, you're doing fine. You know, two percent is
great.
Kathleen: It's like direct mail response
rates.
Peep: Yeah. So growing lists the old way is
hard. And of course we're not even going to talk about static
opt-in boxes on your website, like in the sidebar or the bottom of
the blog post. The performance is so horrible for those that popups
are still better. It's still the best thing you can use on your own
site. Just the effectiveness is down and you know.
So for us, we are basically lbuilding anding pages for free email drip courses, so like "ten lessons about conversion optimization" or whatever it may be and then we're driving paid traffic onto those landing pages so we're building the landing pages with pixels, using Facebook and Google to try to retarget traffic. In order to do that, you need to know how much you should pay for an email. It's very easy to pay 20 bucks per email...it all depends on the keywords you're bidding on and you know, all that stuff, plus your conversion rate on your landing page.
So it all plays a role
and you need to optimize
your keywords and your paid campaigns, you need to
optimize your landing page and so let's say that you pay 20 bucks
per email, which in some niches is cheap, like if you're in
insurance, you know, it's ... You pay way more.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Peep: So in order for that math to make
sense, well, you just need to know your unit economics. Unit
economics meaning I pay 20 bucks per email, and what is the
conversion rate for all these people that I got through this
landing page? How many of them will actually buy something within a
certain timeframe? So you need to have proper tracking in place.
And of course, depending on what you're selling, you often can't
just come to the landing page and then buy something, you know,
right away. Your product needs to be very simple and very cheap.
For us, selling courses and predominantly we want to sell a
subscription, so we're talking $300 to $500 per purchase. That's
expensive and the product is complicated.
So we need elaborate drip
campaigns in between. So we drip them the course content, add value
and eventually we'll ask for a sale or ask them to buy something.
And then we need to be of course measuring the conversion
rate and how much they pay and tie that back to our ad
spends. If you do that, basically you need to make sure that you
have all the data available. Without that, you might easily just
spend all that money trying to grow your list and end up with
nothing.
Kathleen: And what kind of audience targeting
are you doing for those ads? You mentioned you're doing some
retargeting, so obviously people who have been to your site or
looked at certain things.
Peep: Exactly.
Kathleen: And you're doing some keyword
targeting. Are you doing any other demographic targeting or
lookalike audiences or anything like that?
Peep: We do lookalike audiences. What we also
do is we buy email lists. And not to email them, because it doesn't
work, it's spam. So we buy email lists of people that we're trying
to target, but we use those for lookalike audiences. So we run ads.
So like for instance, we bought a list for growth people, people
whose job title is growth manager or growth hacker, bla bla bla.
And then we have their emails and a bunch of other data points and
we advertise to them and try to get them to opt-in to our
list.
You can of course build those lists yourself. Especially if you
have a sales team, you have BDRs going through Linkedin, maybe
using Linkedin Sales
Navigator or Datanyze, one of those
prospecting tools, and you can build your own lists. You can do B2B
sales to them, that's fine, but you can also just mine emails and
just use them for your list, because retargeting and lookalike
audiences and display is so much cheaper than doing keyword
bidding.
Kathleen: Yeah, that's such a great idea, I
love the "buy a list and then use it to retarget." One thing I
think is interesting about inbound
marketing is people can get really dogmatic about it and
say like "Buying lists is not inbound-y ", but it's not about
buying a list, it's how you are going to use the list you buy and
that is a great way to use a list that is inbound-y.
Peep: Right, because even Facebook, you know,
when it comes to targeting your ads, there's one thing that is
missing. You can't target people who are in a group, you know,
because that would be amazing, because that's exactly how you could
really target people based on their interests. And you can't target
people based on their job roles, you know?
Kathleen: But you can do it on Linkedin. It's
just more expensive in my experience.
Peep: You can, but Linkedin advertising is so
ineffective, you know, the click through rates are zero point zero,
zero, zero, and the cost per click is like ten bucks.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Peep: So it's not economically viable for
most, maybe if you're P&G or I don't know who you have to be to
make it work. You know, for a small business like ours, the unit
economics just don't make sense, but buying a list, you can buy a
list I think ... And sometimes you get these cold emails, you know,
some of the list vendors pitching and then I used to always just
delete or hit spam, but now I'm like "hmm, okay, tell me more," you
know. So like recently I think I was offered a list of 180,000
marketing people for like I think $4,000. And I bought a list of
like 2,000 growth people for like $200, something like that. And
you can heavily negotiate. You know, whatever, they say "Ah this is
$20,000." You say "I pay $2." And that's it.
Kathleen: You put on your serious face when
you said that. People can't see that when they're listening to the
podcast, but I just got to see Peep's serious negotiation face, I
think.
Peep: Yeah, because you know, being a list
vendor, I think is a hard job, because you get so many nos, because
as you said, it's-
Kathleen: "I pay $2"
Peep: There's a dogma against not buying
lists and it's true, because you should not email those people, but
it's all about just refining your targeting for ads.
Kathleen: So I'm assuming that that has been
an effective approach for you and that you're seeing more list
growth come out of that.
Peep: Yes, exactly, so to be honest this is a
pretty new thing for us, we've been only doing it for a couple of
months now, this list thing, but so far, it's been I would say our
emails per day, which is a key metric for us, emails per day has
significantly gone up.
Kathleen: Great. One thing I'm curious about,
because we have a fairly large email list and we're looking to grow
it and the thing that keeps me up at night is how do we get our
heads around the experience that an individual person in our
database is having with regards to the emails that we're sending
them. They can be subscribed to the blog, they can be converting on
different offers in our resource center, they can be registered for
a webinar. You know, they might be getting a sales or promotional
email and obviously with the right systems in place you can
certainly go in and look at that cadence, but from an organizing
standpoint, like when you're running your marketing, how do you
control that and ensure that your audience isn't feeling
overwhelmed?
Peep: Yeah, it's a very valid point. So some
tools, like Intercom does this, it will show you a list of people
who are getting too much email. And then you can save those people
as a segment and exclude them from your mailings. So in your email
marketing tool, you need to have a way to craft the segment of
people that have received five emails in whatever time period and
just exclude them from the regular mailings.
I think the tools are
still not good enough and I think in a couple of years maybe we'll
have more intelligent email marketing systems that this can happen
automatically and there will be dynamically changing segments and
stuff. I mean, segments can change dynamically right now, but this
over emailing aspect ... Yeah.
Kathleen: It's a big challenge, yeah.
Peep: Yeah, yeah, email fatigue. I mean,
somebody who is looking for a start up idea.
Kathleen: There you go.
Peep: That's a problem to address for sure,
email fatigue.
Kathleen: The other thing I'm curious about
kind of on the opposite end of that spectrum is ... Or maybe it's
not even the opposite end, but gray mail. People who are disengaged
with your content. Do you have any particular strategy either for
excluding them or for trying to reengage them?
Peep: Yeah, so I do the strict MOFO strategy
where I email people who have not opened my emails for six months
and say "Okay, if you're not going to open this email too, I'm just
going to unsubscribe you in bulk." And I do it. So typically, the
open rate for that email is sky high, everybody opens.
Kathleen: What is your subject
line?
Peep: The subject line is "I will unsubscribe
you."
Kathleen: Great.
Peep: And then people will say "Oh, no please
don't." Some are also really offended, and I get emails like "Ah,
this is the rudest email I've ever got."
Kathleen: You can't please everyone, that's
for sure.
Peep: Yeah, so I'm like "Well you haven't
opened my emails for six months and I'm paying for you to be on
this list, because that's how email marketing softwares work." So I
think the dead weight just needs to go, because you know, your list
size is kind of a vanity metric. "Oh my list is 200,000 people."
You know?
Kathleen: Right.
Peep: But how many actually click and buy? So
once a year, I purge my list and I delete 10,000, sometimes 20,000
people at a time.
Kathleen: Got it. Really interesting. Any
other kind of actionable takeaways you would offer to somebody
who's listening and wanting to get more mileage out of their email
strategy. I mean, anything from like, things to know about subject
lines or any of that.
Peep: If you want to dramatically increase
response rates to emails, so you know, people actually hitting
reply and replying to you, or taking action like clicking on
something, then try to limit your email to two sentences. People
are busy, they won't really read a long email. But like ultra short
emails, I mean, this is what I use in my personal emails. Like my
question to somebody is the subject line and ... so for instance
yesterday I emailed my friend Morgan Brown and my subject line to
him was "Do you know anybody who could teach a course on SaaS
retention?" And the email copy was "Need somebody to teach a course
on it." So, you know?
And then I get an instant
one sentence reply back, you know, with a name and that's all. I
could have gone on "Hey, how's it going, how are the kids, the
family?" And bla bla bla.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Peep: But this is how you get responses,
especially if you're sending cold email. So ultra short emails
really work well.
Kathleen: That's really interesting, I'll
have to test that out. I have a couple of ideas I wanna use that
on.
Well there are two
questions I always ask every guest that comes on this podcast. I'm
curious to hear what you have to say. So the first one is: company
or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really
well right now?
Peep: There are three start ups that come to
mind. So one is this sales software Close.io I think these guys came out of
nowhere, or so it seems, and now they're everywhere. They're
founder now is like a celebrity speaker at every conference,
because their blog is just good and it's everywhere. They're doing
a great job at content promotion.
Same goes for Drift, the messaging software. They have their podcast, which is becoming very, very popular. They have their blog stuff and like, overall, they push the agenda of like branding is the new growth hack. And so they think like their approach or thinking is of content marketing as branding. And they're doing a great job at it. Growing like wildfire.
And Intercom, I think the Intercom blog is top notch.
They have a wide range of topics like their engineering people talk
about engineering and their HR or managers talk about how to run
one on one interviews with developers and they release a lot of
these books, you know, like their guide to growing a business and
their guide to this and guide to that. So there's a significant
content production machine happening. The blog is also visually
stunning. So yeah, those three.
Kathleen: Awesome, I love it. I'll have to
check all of those out.
The other question is how
do you stay educated and on the cutting edge of what's happening in
marketing? Obviously our whole conversation today, or a lot of it,
has revolved around technology and how quickly that's changing, and
I think that's one of the biggest challenges that I hear people say
to me as marketers is just keeping up with everything. So, what are
your sources for that?
Peep: Yeah, you know, I used to read
ferociously, I used to spend multiple hours a day reading, when I
was starting my business. Now I have a team. The company has
evolved to a new stage and I just don't have the time to read a
bunch of stuff and look for great content. So for me, curation is
everything. So I need to go to places where there are curated
lists. There are very few blogs that I constantly read. Like the
only one that comes to mind is co-elevate by Brian Balfour. He writes these
growth essays, which are amazing, but this is like once a month
that he writes. But otherwise I rely on Twitter, some people that I'm following, what are
they tweeting, so that's kind of like validation, somebody has
still done the curation for me.
Too, I use this extension for chrome called Zest, so every time I click a new tab in my chrome browser, the plug in, the extension opens up like a curated list of articles. And sometimes I find something. Half of it is garbage, half of it might be interesting.
I used to look at Inbound.org, but I think the content there is just ... I think they're on their way out. My subjective opinion, it's just garbage. Or it's just very ... The audience there is just somebody who just doesn't know anything about anything. It's very low level, basic content.
Growth
Hackers, again mix and match, hit or miss, sorry. Yeah, so I
don't google stuff, I just have other people curate it for
me.
Kathleen: It's interesting that you mention
Twitter. I had this conversation with another guest, because I had
taken a Twitter break for a while and this year I decided I was
going to really get back into it and the big game changer for me
was removing 80 percent of the people I was following who just were
tweeting about stupid things that I wasn't interested in. And as
soon as I did that, it was like this revelation of Twitter is now
so interesting for me and so relevant. So you know, when you talk
about curation, I do think a lot of people, a lot of people think
that Twitter is useless and the advice I always give is you really
have to look at who you're following, because it's all about
that.
Peep: Right and you know, you need to use
like a Tweetdeck or some sort of a
management tool, because if you use just Twitter.com, the feed is
overwhelming. You need to organize it.
Kathleen: Yeah, agreed.
Peep: Yeah, so I have organized it by topics.
These are the UX people talking, the analytics people talking, the
CRO people, etc. So like by topic I'm watching the feed, so that's
how I filter it.
Kathleen: Before
we go, you have an event coming up that I think a lot of our
listeners would be interested in. Tell me a little bit about
that.
Peep: Mm-hmm (affirmative). CXL
Live 2018. So it's taking place March 28-30, and it is a three
day conference about four topics: Growth, Digital Analytics,
Customer Marketing, and Conversion Optimization.
We have a killer line up, like top optimizers, growth people from like, Instagram, Shopify, and Dell, you name it. Look at the speakers, it's very impressive. So, you're going to get really, really good content, but even, I think, more important than content is what we do on the networking side.
So this is the place
where you can meet other great practitioners doing interesting
things because the best learning happens, not by reading blog posts
but by talking to other people, learning how they do stuff. So our
event is unique because we book a resort that's on the outskirts of
the city, like far from everything, and everybody stays at that
resort. Everybody stays together for three days, parties last
all night long.
Kathleen: Oh boy, get your sleep now.
Alright, I love it and if you want to register for the
conference use the code
"impact-sent-me" for $350 off your registration
fee.
Great. Well, thank you so much. This has been really interesting
and I appreciate you sharing all this. This is the first deep dive
we've taken into email on this podcast. So a lot of good takeaways
that I think people are going to appreciate.
Peep: Thank you for having me.
Kathleen: It's been my pleasure. Well, thank
you all for listening and if you found this useful, please give us
a review on the platform of your choice and if you know somebody else who's
doing really great inbound marketing work and getting awesome
results, please tweet me at @WorkMommyWork and let me know. I'd love to
interview them. That's it for this week.