Inbound Success Podcast

Sandy Donovan - otherwise known as “The Email Lady” - helps ecommerce brands get better customer acquisition and retention results with email. Her work generates an average 68X return on brands’ investments in popular email marketing platform Klaviyo, and she’s been able to increase revenue by 600%+ in under 60 days.

How does she do it?

On this episode, Sandy explains why it all starts with proper segmentation of your email list. Whether you’re an ecommerce marketer, or a B2B marketer, the same lessons apply. She breaks down the demographic and behavioral criteria any marketer can use to segment their list, along with strategies for activating and nurturing different segments, guidance on how often to email your contacts, how to craft a winning subject line, and more.

For ecommerce brands, nailing a paid ads strategy is critical. And that takes lots of testing and iteration.

Brighter Click CEO Colby Flood specializes in building scalable paid ads strategies for ecommerce clients, and in this episode he breaks down the testing process that he and his team use to refine their approach and improve the ROI of their clients’ ad campaigns.

In addition to covering his testing framework, Colby shares how he thinks about the role of ads throughout the funnel, what metrics to track, how much you should be prepared to spend, and how the lessons he’s learned from working with ecommerce brands can be applied to B2B SaaS businesses.

Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Erik Huberman’s company Hawke Media has audited and developed marketing strategies for more than 4,000 businesses. Over time, they’ve distilled their process, along with lessons learned, into a methodology for marketing they call the “Hawke Method”.

In this episode, he breaks down how the Hawke Method approaches what they call the “three principles of marketing”:

• Awareness

• Nurturing

• Trust

We dug into all of this, plus the problem with using ROAS to measure advertising effectiveness, why TikTok holds so much potential for marketing, and more.

Beyond open rates, what metrics should you be using to measure email performance?

AWeber customer evangelist Emily McGuire has dedicated her entire career to email marketing and knows what it takes to craft a good email.

In this episode, she explains how email tracking has changed in the wake of recent IOS updates and which metrics you can use to determine whether your emails are actually performing, including:

• Click rates

• Click to open rates

• Conversions

She also offers tips on things like formatting your email, whether and when to include rich media, how to write your email to elicit a response, and more (including a KILLER tip on allowing your recipients to opt out of specific campaigns they might not be interested in receiving - don’t miss that one!).

What does it take to build a high performing marketing team?

Tim Parkin has built his career around answering that question. His approach centers around the thesis that people times process equals performance. What does that mean? Tim digs into it in this episode.

It starts with documenting what you’re doing as a team. From there, the next step is to evaluate the team and identify who needs training, coaching or support - and what kind of organizational change is required to support the processes that have been documented.

In this conversation, Tim gets into the details of his process, including what a well-documented process looks like, how to train your team to create processes, the tech stack he uses to support process creation, what a good meeting cadence and format looks like, and resources you can turn to to learn more about building high performing marketing teams.

Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Bobby Gillespie spent years working in marketing and observed companies making the same mistake over and over again. And that mistake was trying to do marketing without first building a solid brand foundation. To address it, he created his own agency — Propr Design — where he helps companies do just that.

In this episode, Bobby describes the process he takes clients through, including:

• Defining the company’s purpose and core values

• Identify your ideal customer profile

• Establishing a brand personality

Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

When Eric Stockton took over as head of marketing for SharpSpring by Constant Contact following the company’s acquisition, he immediately set about shifting the focus from outbound to inbound marketing with the goal of building a pipeline of high intent hand raisers. The result was a doubling of the company’s demo attend rate, from 20 to 40 percent, and a 23X improvement in the number of leads that turned into closed won deals.

While making that shift sounds simple, in practice it requires top to bottom organizational buy in.

In this episode, Eric breaks down exactly what changed, how he built a solid foundation for it via internal communications, what the company’s new demand generation motion looks like, and the new KPIs he’s using to track success.

Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

How did Tulip Media Group lower its customer acquisition cost (CAC) by 10X, from $40,000 to $4,000, in a matter of weeks?

As a Storybrand certified agency, it was all about taking their own medicine. They started by interviewing their customers to determine their ideal customer profile, along with their pain points and the keywords that they would need to focus on to reach them.

What they uncovered in those interviews led to a shift in the company’s messaging away from what they do and instead, towards the problems they solve, and away from a strategy focused on events and SEO to one heavily focused on pay per click advertising.

They rolled the new messaging out on their website and in their Google ads and within a week, saw a massive improvement in inbound lead flow at a much lower cost. And they have since applied that same framework to get similar results for clients.

Want to learn more about how they did it?

Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

How does a website get more than 3 million visits per month with zero dollars spent on paid advertising?

For Visme, it was all about an on- and off-page SEO strategy focused on creating great content for relevant keywords and then investing time in promoting the content and building up quality backlinks.

The strategy worked so well that they developed a SaaS tool to manage it, and now that tool - Respona - is available for anyone to use.

Farzad Rashidi is the marketer behind the strategy, and in this episode he makes the case for why marketers should be spending more time on content promotion than they are on content creation. He also breaks down the exact process that both Visme and Respona use to get backlinks, and shares what other marketers can do to replicate his results.

LinkedIn has undergone a renaissance in the last several years and today is a central focus for many B2B companies’ marketing strategies. But what does it take to do LinkedIn right?

Mark Raffan of Content Callout is an expert at using LinkedIn for organic social marketing. In this episode, he explains why you should be putting twice as much effort into individual posts as you do company posts, along with advice on things like:

• When to use branded versus non-branded content

• How to create a strong hook

• How to know what you shouldn’t post

• Overcoming objections from subject matter experts who are reluctant to build their personal brands on LinkedIn

• Why responding to comments on your posts is so important

• How to structure your LinkedIn posts to get the most engagement

Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.