Will presented a case study on how upgrading newsletter content grew his brand, noting how competitive coffee markets are considering that it is the third most consumed beverage after tea and water, respectively.

Will's first task was to determine the goal of clickshare, or the estimated share of all achievable clicks that a campaign has received. After a lot of thought and discussion, the brand settled on clickshare as a reliable metric of content utility, moreso than open rate or click rate. The first step was to remove sales pitches from the newsletter, The Scoop into a differentiated Thursday Sales Email (which still gets a 34% open rate).

For The Scoop, Will compared the content goals of his audience (interests and value) with those of Death Wish (products and brand) and tries to balance across both. ​By reducing the number of articles, emphasizing video, personifying the brand, communicating in a natural, casual way and creating a simpler, cleaner brand presentation, Will's revised email newsletter raised clickshare to 76%. This met the company's predetermined goal and raised sales significantly.

Death Wish Coffee realized that sticky content needed formal planning. So, to resist the time-constrained temptation to "throw something together," the company now generates content in regular two-hour "Scoop Sessions" in which the first hour is devoted exclusively to brainstorming and the second hour is used to determine milestones, deadlines and logistics.

One recent session on Best Friend Day developed the idea of coffee being the customer's best friend. This eventually led to a series of humorous videos with one employee dressed in a "coffee" shirt and accompanying another to get ice cream, play catch, etc.

Will also plants "easter eggs" (usually the word "egg" in white text) that is not promoted on social media or elsewhere. The first five clicks to an exclusive landing page win unadvertised premiums that involve significant value (e.g., $60 cooler). This generates substantial social proof and enables Death Wish to test new products.

The non-promotional nature of the newsletter is underscored by the fact that it contains zero product links. The result of 11 weekly newsletters to date have resulted in a substantial newsletter list increase to 101K with an average open rate of 43% and rising brand popularity. 

Will has been working to send The Scoop out at 8AM to generate office-worker buzz among workers looking for a brief escape from the "daily grind." 

Alexandra Edelstein
​Senior Product Manager, Klaviyo
Klaviyo Boston
Boston Convention and Exhibition Center

"Make Money While You Sleep" sounds like a pretty click-baity, if not downright spammy title, but Alexandra opened with statistics showing how flows outperform campaigns, including having average open rates that are 1558% higher.

She then presented a slide of two dozen flows she contended were all important to develop the customer relationship, just as you would nurture a friendship, when most people create four flows and stop there.

Here are Alexandra's tips on a flow-by-flow and topic basis.

Welcome Flow

Add a branch for customers versus prospects at the top and then tie back into the main flow.


Abandoned Cart

Add a split so that only high-value carts get discounts to better maintain margins.
Add a location split to offer free shipping domestically and a discount if international to control shipping costs.


Browse Abandonment

Provide category splits for your top categories to tailor copy just to that topic and send general subject lines and copy to everyone for whom no specific category split has been created. This tactic should be used for many flows.

Data Science

Also, Alexandra urged the audience to use data science by using the lifecycle touchpoint from the Klaviyo library, noting that one customer sent a flow with 9 emails and still got a 32% Open Rate on the ninth email.

Predicted Customer Lifetime Value and Predicted Gender also enable much more targeted flows.

She underscored the importance of continuing to test. Even if you just send to a small sample set an email that reflects an untried idea, you will statistically grow revenue by testing. For example, optimize your series length by testing adding an additional email or two while monitoring engagement.

Finally, Alexandra recommended tagging profiles with first purchase date. One flow tags each profile with the specific date of the initial purchase, then a second flow follows up with specific content to celebrate the anniversary of the first purchase. Depending on how many years are involved and whether additional purchases have taken place since, the content and discount change.

Another example of tagging profiles includes adding categories to target initial purchases, continued purchases and categories abandoned altogether. Flows can also tag customers into particular loyalty tiers: customers who have purchase X times, X+Y times, etc.

To design a flow, consider your goals, triggers, customer personas and benchmarks for open rates, clicks and conversions.

Besides smart sending, tagging recipients as "in flow" (and then running a separate flow to remove the tag) will prevent a prospect from receiving too many emails.

​

Do you:

repeat pitches?
rehash rote processes?
shotgun-blast questionable lists?
cajole visitors into completing forms?
await long turnaround times?

I've heard of Business Process Management (BPM), but this is BPR -- "Business Process Repetition," and it wastes a lot of money. By applying the power of marketing technology to help you deepen relationships through digital  automation, you can stop repeating yourself. That's what automation is all about -- freeing up time, resources and payroll. 

This is some what our panel spoke about at this week's Chamber Connect hosted by the Colorado Springs Chamber and EDC. One important takeaway to get people started immediately on automation is to document marketing channels and the software each uses by making a chart that lists the individual steps that humans and computers perform to move prospects through your sales funnel. After asking yourself which processes take the most time, perform searches in Google using the name of those processes and “automation.”

You’ll be surprised what comes up. Take a look at just the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for any of the following: "campaign design automation," "sales funnel automation," "lead generation automation" "LinkedIn connection automation," "auto connection software," "Customer Intake automation," "customer service automation" or "appointment setting automation." 

For every process you can automate, you reduce your workload and free up resources so that humans can spend more time doing what they do best -- building relationships with your customers and prospects.

Here are some automation solutions widely used now, with more coming every day:

• Bots
• Flash Briefings
• CRMs
• Sales Funnel Applications
• Feedback Platforms
• Loyalty Platforms
• Scheduling Automation
• ​Conversation Marketing Tools
• Macro-enabled Work Plans

Each of these helps you raise revenue while cutting costs. It's worth a running a few Google searches to get even a glimpse of what tools are already out there.

We got away from it for a while. By “we,” I don’t mean Relationship Martech, or our industry or even our generation – I mean the whole planet got away from relationship marketing for many years. Those years were known as the Industrial Revolution. Before that, all transactions were based on relationships, going all the way back to the Dawn of Marketing, in fact. By working strictly on a referral basis, consumers got, not just a product, but a relationship with the merchant.

But they didn’t have a lot to choose from. That’s why that Industrial Revolution became so poular: lower prices, wider selection and, eventually, globalization. Sometimes called the Product Marketing Era, its marketing was based, not on relationships, but on features and benefits. Products, like appliances for example, captured global market share by having a smarter feature set than their competitors' on the assumption that the end-users were essentially the same.

Then “smart marketers began to question this approach,” according to Responsys President Scott Olrich. “Why…were we marketing to similarities? Why not differences?”

To market to differences, mail-order catalogs like LL Bean started to segment their mailing lists, ushering in the (re)birth of Relationship Marketing. Mail-order segmentation was followed by databases linked to email, cable television, Internet searches, social media and other increasingly sophisticated marketing tools designed to match different market targets to organizations’ differentiators. These tools have now refined niche markets into highly personalized groups – allowing individual, or 1:1 (personalized) marketing campaigns.

At the same time, many of these software tools have also given consumers the power to speak out about how the products and services work or don’t work. This two-way street has enabled us to reach Relationship Marketing 2.0.

According to consultant Vignesh Subramanyan, that’s the point at which “personal recommendations are the primary driver of consumer purchase decisions at every stage of the purchase lifecycle, for the majority of product categories and industries.” Hence, we’ve now come full circle back to true Relationship Marketing for companies, associations and even governments.

But how can you have true relationships on a global scale? By automating the basic processes and freeing up humans to go deeper with your customers and prospects.


(Image Credit: Photo by Christine Roy on Unsplash)

I remember when marketing departments were a team of media buyers and designers; now it’s much more about data science and automation. I’ve played a small part in that transition, starting in 1987 when I brought desktop publishing to local advertising in Maine. After my first web project in 1993, I managed some of the earliest banner ad and search marketing campaigns, co-founded 2 dot-coms, helped the State of Maryland fight spam, developed social media strategies for clients like Celestial Seasonings and launched one of the first apps on Capitol Hill.

By that time, we all had begun to broadcast personal data about our identities, preferences and whereabouts continually from our pockets, thanks to smart phones. Privacy advocates were alarmed, but billions accessed the increasingly relevant information anyway.

Privacy is important, but relevance is essential: the best and only defense against our very serious 21st century problem of information overload. The novelty of 500 million search results at a time had finally worn off, and relevance had always been my battle cry in my decades-old personal vendetta against spam and junk mail.

At the turn of the last century, the average American encountered about 12 marketing messages a day. Now it’s well over a thousand, so relevant information is more important than ever, and a global economy demands that information processing be automated.

I learned about bots in 2016 when interviewing a guest on my radio show, The Marketing GPS Challenge Hour and became more interested in marketing automation. Soon, martech (short for “marketing technology”--my field finally got a name) was what I was building, speaking and evangelizing on as I found technologies to harness relevant, actionable information from the every-rising tide of data.

The purpose of all of this is to deepen relationships. Wait, am I about to use “computers” and “relationships” in the same sentence? Yes, computers, the great information sorters, are best at sifting through data. If we get computers to do a better job handling the excess and the mundane, humans become more freed up to address what’s meaningful, and it’s what’s meaningful--things you actually care about--that builds relationships.

In fact, marketing has come full-circle from pre-industrial days when you bought goods and services based on who you knew. Then transportation brought globalization, and, in the last couple decades since those first banner ads, the Internet has now made relationship marketing possible again, on a global scale. Marketing automation is the key to streamlining, saving time and labor and empowering those relationships.

Call me a relationship “martech-er.”