Tag: email marketing

Time for a change

Fabrizio1 Comment

You are at a party.

You have been nervous lately at the idea of coming to this party, so while you drive there you rehearse some situations in your mind. You prepare interesting stories, a couple of funny anecdotes, think about how to invite people to your own party next week, and mentally remind faces and names of the people you’ve heard are looking forward to meeting you.

As this happens in your mind, confidence builds and you enter the main room with your chin up high. You walk to the bar, and a guy standing there politely asks: “How are you?”. “Well, thanks. Actually, the most funny thing happened to me this afternoon..”, and you continue for about ten minutes telling your little story.

The nice guy disengages from you to rejoin his friends, and you notice the host a few steps away from you. You approach her and the group she is talking to, and you overhear her sharing that she’d had a problem with her car, and she’d had to walk back home for 10 kilometres, leaving the car on the side of the road. Fortunately, you know everything about cars, so what better chance? “As you describe it, it sounds like a problem with the carburator. I have a list of three things I do weekly to avoid problems with the carburator. First, …”, and you continue with your advises for a perfect carburator maintenance routine for the next five minutes. As the group slowly disperses.

Just after you’ve put something in your stomach (the food is not great, but at least you got to share with some bystanders the story of how you have overcome the challenges of combining work and study, and managed to graduate with distinction), you spot one of the people that you’ve heard wants to meet you. You rush to her with steady steps, and after a quick intro, you invite her to join the party you are giving at your place a week from now. “It’s to celebrate my recent promotion”, you explain, “I am inviting as many people as possible, so that together we can celebrate this unbelievable achievement of mine. Just think I have only been with the company for five months!”.

The party continues, and after the initial confidence, anxiety surfaces once more, as you have the feeling people are trying to avoid you. Why would that be? Did you perhaps choose the wrong stories to tell? Or the wrong words? Is your place too far away from the city center, and people will not join your party for that reason?

You are beaten, and you can’t make sense of what is going on.

Here is how most marketing feels today. Self-centered, obnoxious, bogus and irrelevant. Time for a change?

A better marketing culture

FabrizioLeave a comment

If you’ve worked in marketing, you have certainly experienced assembly line marketing.

That feeling all you are doing is repetition, with no real purpose or strategy, focusing on finding new ways to say old things that lost their effect long ago. Nobody really asking how you would go about solving the problem, and when finally somebody does, they also make it very clear that the urgency of the end of the month, end of the quarter, end of the year does not allow for any approach but the known, trite one.

It is a sad feeling, it’s the reason why marketers have a bad reputation, it is the place where product-focused marketing blooms. Because of course, what else should you talk about when that’s all you know and the next campaign is launching tomorrow among unrealistic expectations?

But in addition to what most of that article suggests, assembly line marketing often starts within the marketing department itself. It might still be due to external pressures, and yet assembly line marketing is a way for marketing heads and leads to keep their people busy, to avoid answering important questions, to give the impression that everyone is working hard, and eventually to keep their job.

There is a huge need for a better marketing culture, for a deeper understanding of what marketing is and can achieve. Real marketing touches hearts and builds relationships, but it takes time to plan, execute and grow. Yet, once it’s established, it cannot be unlearned or abandoned, because it’s the difference between aimless growth and change.

What you are and who for

FabrizioLeave a comment

Few months back I got to know Stripo. I was looking for a way to spice up our internal email updates, and I wanted a tool that could let me build a compelling visual easily and with no coding.

The tool is great, there’s a free trial if you want to check it out. But what really stands out to me after having visited their website few times now, is the perfect way their solution is introduced to the world, right above the fold of their website.

Drag & Drop Email Template Builder – Simple and clear, sets you right away on the right course to understanding what you are looking at. At the same time, they are telling you they are not in the same business as other popular Saas that deal with email, positioning their offering in a very specific niche (“email template builder”). It’s interesting to notice how some of their competitors fail to do just that, because they prefer to put the emphasis on the more common and confounding term (“email”), or because they add complexity with the use of a second term (“content management platform”).

Create professional and responsive email templates fast without any HTML skills – While it is mainly a confirmation of the sentence above, this value proposition statement adds two important elements: what’s in it for me (“fast” = time saving) and why should I stop my research here (“without knowing any HTML skills” = a solution for people with no technical background).

Talk with your customers

FabrizioLeave a comment

Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes (or in anybody else’s, for that matter) is not a great advice.

It might be a good introduction to the context and the surroundings of the customers, but eventually you will most likely end up taking with you a lot of your thoughts, ideas, assumptions, models, preferences, plans. What you will see is what you want to see, not necessarily what the customers see.

A better alternative is to talk with your customers (or anybody else you want to understand). Talk as in sit down with them, with no distractions, listen deeply, ask open questions, listen more, pay special attention to their language, their thought process, their ideas, and what they don’t say. There you can find information worth processing and turning into actions.

Take marketing seriously

FabrizioLeave a comment

Your company is not going to win on features and product.

It is almost boring to say this out loud, and yet many still think that the fact their product is better than their competitors’ is going to give them sustainable competitive advantage.

Your product needs to be good, as infallible as it can get, and that is pretty much the basic expectation of any person who is buying anything. Even more so in B2B. And yet, that is not what is going to make your company successful in the long term.

Few numbers.

Slack went public last week, and they disclosed (among other things) that they invest 56% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Salesforce and Tableau spend respectively 46% and 51% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Out of 205 Saas companies surveyed here in 2017, the median marketing and sales spend as % of revenue was 37 (and by the way, the once who spend more than the median had a marked tendency to grow at a much faster pace).

I like the way David Cancel, CEO and co-founder of Drift (and former Chief Product Officer at Hubspot) explains the importance of marketing and brand in the Saas industry.

In this interview, he describes the current as the P&G wave of Saas. When Saas got started (the Edison wave), few companies were trying to figure out what Saas was and essentially come up with the basics. Then, the industry started to affirm (the Ford wave): a number of companies consolidating practices and growing their businesses. Now, in the P&G wave of Saas, a fast-increasing number of Saas companies (Cisco estimated there were 156,796 third-party apps serving businesses in 2016, a 30x increase in a matter of two years!) need to give buyers a reason to choose them against the competition. And the reason is never the product.

There’s no intention here to claim that merely spending money in marketing and sales is sufficient for success. It is not, as it is not having a good product. The companies that I have mentioned here (Slack, Salesforce, Drift) have excellent marketing people, that know well how to craft a strategy way before moving into tactics.

Nonetheless there’s a clear necessity for Saas companies to take marketing and sales more seriously. Marketing, in particular, is not the interns you are hiring for the summer to take care of your social media pages, nor is it the student you underpay to drive traffic and leads to your website. Make sure you have a solid marketing team that understands positioning, customer research, value proposition and all the elements of a marketing strategy.

Today, there’s no more excuses to overview this fundamental part of building a success story.