287: All Things Marketing Automation - with Shay Howe

EPISODE SUMMARY

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, marketing automation has become a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. To dive into the world of marketing automation and its potential, I sat down with Shay Howe, the Chief Marketing Officer at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is a product known for its versatility, offering hundreds of pre-built automation that span transactional email, email marketing, marketing automation, e-commerce, and CRM.

Shay, a product leader with a diverse background in design and engineering, spearheads the marketing, customer activation, partnership, platform strategy, and ActiveCampaign postmark teams. In this new episode, host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach Matt Wolach drills down on the details as Shay Howe shares his insights on marketing automation, the evolving role of a Chief Marketing Officer, and the value of staying close to customers.

PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE

Podcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt Wolach

Episode: Episode No. 287, “All Things Marketing Automation – with Shay Howe”

Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor

Guest: Shayne Howe, Chief Marketing Officer at ActiveCampaign

TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE

• Embrace the Power of Marketing Automation
• Unlock Personalization through Marketing Automation
• Address Misconceptions About Marketing Automation
• Enhance Customer Engagement and Automation

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• The Dynamic Role of a Chief Marketing Officer
• Final Thoughts and Advice on Marketing Automation

TOP QUOTES

Shay Howe

[10:58] “Marketing automation is incredibly approachable.”

[17:20] “Don’t over-automate; leave room for that human touch.”

[22:40] “Build automation to create surprise and delight.”

Matt Wolach

[21:18] “Stay close to your customers and follow their lead.”

[25:06] “Find your way through building a product where folks are jumping into use it faster.”

LEARN MORE

To learn more about Active Campaign, visit: https://www.activecampaign.com/ 

You can also find Shay Howe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shayhowe/

For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com

Get even more tips by following Matt elsewhere:

• Sales Tips
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Instagram

Transcript

Matt Wolach: 0:10

You know, we all love the idea of marketing automation, something that can actually do things in the background while we're focused on other stuff. It's pretty powerful. It's pretty amazing. But what happens if we don't set it up? Right? What happens if we don't have enough personalization or what if that automation gets wrong and it just keeps running in the background the wrong way with the wrong messaging to the wrong people, that's bad. Fortunately, Shay Howe he's with ActiveCampaign, they are the leaders in automation, he came in to share all of his best tips about how to set up your marketing, how to set up the automation, how to make sure it's personalized, how to make sure it doesn't go off the rails a bit and go to the wrong people with the wrong message. He gives some great insight and tips here. And this is a really important episode if you're looking to scale.

Intro/ Outro: 0:50

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach,

Matt Wolach: 1:06

and welcome to Scale Your SaaS Thank you very much for being here. I am Matt, I am your host. And I am here to make sure you are scaling your SaaS just like the show is called. So we're gonna teach you how to grow your leads, grow your customer base XL at sales, and get an awesome team to help you do it. And somebody who knows about a lot of those things very well is with us today. Shay how che how're you doing?

Shay Howe: 1:30

I'm doing well. Matt, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Matt Wolach: 1:32

I'm super excited to have you here. Let me make sure everybody knows who you are Shay. So Shayis the Chief Marketing Officer at ActiveCampaign a product that I use myself and love. Shay is a product leader with a design and engineering background. He leads the marketing customer activation, partnership platform strategy and ActiveCampaign postmark teams lots going on where to a lot of hats. And earlier before we started, he mentioned that his role seems to change every six to 12 months, which that's kind of how things go in. In early growth stage companies. I love that. Can't wait to dive in more about that. But if you don't know ActiveCampaign, this is a product that gives businesses of all sizes access to hundreds of pre built automations that combine transactional email and email marketing, marketing automation, e commerce, marketing, and CRM for powerful segmentation and personalization across social email, messaging, chat and text. They do a lot of stuff. So I'm super glad to have him here. Shay thanks for coming on the show.

Shay Howe: 2:28

Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited. This should be fun.

Matt Wolach: 2:31

I'm excited as well. So tell me what's going on with you lately. And what's coming up?

Shay Howe: 2:36

Oh, as you kind of alluded to, there's no shortage of exciting things happening. And we can take that question in a dozen different directions. For me when I think about what we're up to in what's going on, obviously, to kind of come back to our product at the campaign's that very product, lead organization and business. We're always trying to stay close to our customers connect with them. So, so much feeds and stems out of that even the go to market motions come back to and for us. We've been doing a lot on the product front, I'd say in the last 12 months, if you will, as is I think largely most folks have oriented, digging deeper into some of the AI capabilities and functionality. It's not something that's new for us. We've had forms of predictive content predictive sending when probability in the platform but taking that idea of generative AI a little deeper. So we've implemented that into our platform where you want us to write an email for you or text in different forms, you can do that. I think it's been interesting. And we've done it maybe a little bit differently than others. And you can actually talk to it. So your customer, Matt, you could go in there and say, Hey, draft an email to go out about Shea's episode, we talked about x y&z and we would write that email for you. And you could say, why make it more friendlier? Right, you can go in there and actually just talk to AI and have it changed the tone. And you could say, make it shorter, that's too long, things like that, where you actually start to play with the content, which has been really interesting. And then taking that a step further, and even rolling out this week, and kind of an early access program where you can just describe to us an automation you want. So you could say, hey, I want to send an email about this topic. I want to wait two days, send another email, want to wait two days and send one more email and try and get folks to convert into booking a demo or call with me. And you just type that in open tax free form. And we will build the automation for you. So don't wild thing we're doing around that.

Matt Wolach: 4:29

That is it sounds amazing. Yeah,

Shay Howe: 4:32

you should test it out. Give me some feedback if you go there and give it a shot. A lot of other things happening too. We've done much deeper into our E commerce capabilities and functionality. So how can you segment customers based off some of their purchase history and send them more targeted messaging that includes bringing order status inactive campaign improves, bringing the product catalog into ActiveCampaign so you could do related or recommended products, just going deeper into that vertical for a moment and maybe visit with throw out a new email designer, as of recently, so completely reevaluating just how to make that even more user friendly and powerful than the one we've had in the past number of new integrations coming out via Facebook, lead ads, Google and LinkedIn ads. So a ton happening honestly, in the back end of ActiveCampaign, and you'll see that directly transcend into some of the sales, messaging and positioning kind of go to market motions as well.

Matt Wolach: 5:25

Very cool. And earlier, when when we were just talking pre show, we're talking about how your role has changed. I mentioned it in the in the introduction. What does that meant to you? And what what how have you felt? Has it brought you energy to have different things going on throughout your career there?

Shay Howe: 5:42

Yeah, I consider myself a bit of a month in a generalist, right. So we've done I actually went to school in Arizona, not far from where from where you're at, and studied design. Oh, yeah. Design in the sense of how to use design to solve a problem and have traditionally just worked throughout my career and hypergrowth b2b SaaS companies where I've been a designer, I've been engineer, I've been a product manager, I've been a marketer, I've led teams doing all the above. And you kind of have to, that's just the way it goes when you don't have the bench or death of a team to go do that. And that has described my path, that active campaign to have led the design team, I've led engineering, I've led marketing, I've built up new teams around partnership management, Developer Relations, like corp dev acquire a company, I've had them sit in my org for a while to kind of lead and grow them and integrate them in Active Campaign. So yeah, every six months to 12 months feels like a completely different job. And that really, I believe, puts me in a state of flow, where about the time I haven't figured out, it changes enough to make it a little more challenging, and puts me right on the edge of uncomfort, to where I'm continually, like just growing and learning in it. And that, that suits me. So well, that is like the state I want to kind of perpetually live in as uncomfortable as that actually may be.

Matt Wolach: 6:59

I think that's smart. Because that's the only way we can grow a similar way we can stay, you know, mentally energized into what we're doing. I think you and I are like how, after a while, we would kind of get stale and get bored with it. But if you can continue to find new challenges and new things to think about and focus on, I think that that keeps our focus up, it keeps our motivation up, and it makes us better overall.

Shay Howe: 7:23

Also feel like I haven't been dropped so far into the deep end, that I'm almost paralyzed and don't know what to do, when I have no idea this is so above far beyond my realm of skill set. I haven't felt that either. So it's that state of this isn't too easy, but it's not too difficult. And I had the pleasure of growing with Active Campaign to write so when I started, we're little over 100 employees put that in context. Today were north of 800 employees, when I started, we were somewhere around 25 million in revenue. Now several 100 million. So that challenge has also evolved as the organization has grown. And I think that's a skill set on its own just to learn to scale and continually kind of reinvent yourself within the business as it continues to grow. It's out.

Matt Wolach: 8:15

So cool. I love it. You've talked before about owned channels, what if you can share with our audience does owned channels mean and what's the value of them?

Shay Howe: 8:24

Yeah, to be an own channel is one that you own, that's simply said. But what I mean by that is it's it's the channel you control. That can be your website can be your blog can be your email or subscriber list, maybe it's you're sending messages through SMS, but you haven't direct access to that, and you control the end to end experience of it. That's not something like social media, where you're playing in the realm of a different platform, and you don't have the control over, hey, is my message going to show up next to one of my competitors is going to show up next to a meme of some sort elsewhere. You have more control over the cost of that too, right? So paid acquisition might be a channel where you're competing with your competitors on the cost of that. And then even the platforms running that just fundamentally might increase their prices, they could change an algorithm that will change your bidding structure, or even just the placement of your content. Those are not own channels. So we talked a lot about own channels on the ways where you build that audience directly in and close to you in a way where you truly have that control over.

Matt Wolach: 9:33

Yeah, I love it. I think it's super powerful and really important. So let's say people don't have that built for their companies just yet. Maybe they're on those those other channels like you mentioned social and such, what is the best way to kind of convert their audience from that that? I don't know known channel over to their own channels.

Shay Howe: 9:51

Yeah. Pretty few different ways to think about it. I was kind of thinking about the sense of what if you started in an unknown On Channel, how would you get someone over to an own channel, who isn't born as a business, you also just go where your audience is to write, it's, I don't believe by any stretch, we have the Field of Dreams over here that if we build it, they will come, we gotta go get word out there, we have to go out and actually build demand into what we're doing. So there's a, when I talk about lunch channels, I want to be clear that it's not own channels and own channels only, we really think about more of that, that broad sense of it, and how we get folks over into some of the so one of the ways to do that is getting involved in channels that you don't own and truly being a value in them. So it's not going in there. And just being promotional and sharing, here's what's happening in the latest and greatest things, that Active Campaign is literally going in there and becoming a part of what may be a community engaging with them. If it's social, it's liking or reshaping their content, leaving comments on it, actually becoming an expert with them in that field, it's one where they actually start to have some affinity for you as a brand. And then done well, you also turn that person who might be an influence or a thought leader into someone who's going to start to recommend promote you, etc. So a way where engaging through unknown channels, and then providing value to move them in their own channels. So it could be sharing, we wrote this guide on our website, and it's gonna help you learn how to build automation in your business. So drive them over the website. And what do you think that's content and gated ish, where it's, here's this guy, you want to you want this emailed to you as a PDF, or you want to send it to a friend or someone else your business dropped in their email or your email will do that for you. So we're always giving more than we're actually capturing in that sense, if that makes sense. And using that flywheel basically of finding folks through different channels and then giving them good reasons to come to some of our own channels. And that that being we're always being of value in that process.

Matt Wolach: 12:03

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Shay Howe: 14:56

Absolutely. Think about the easiest panelist might be ecommerce, how many times you add something to your cart to then only close the window, sit back for a day and see if they sent you a coupon. It's probably not the best way to capture folks. It works, right? And if I'm running an E commerce business, I'm actually doing it. I don't know if that's going to work in a SaaS business or technology business. Right? So you could do things like I'm gonna run a promotion or offer discounts. That's it, it could work in a small sense. But that's not being a thought leader. That's not them looking at you and saying, Hey, I wonder what Shay or ActiveCampaign thinks about this. And that's not them getting every email from us and saying, I need to open this because I'm going to learn something. And that could fundamentally helped me run and grow and evolve my business. So we angle far more on the lens of that sense of providing value, but value that is, it's practical. It's relatable to you. It's actionable. And we do that, firstly, through automation, right, we're paying attention to what categories of blog posts are you looking at on our site? When you click a link on an email? What is the general sense of what that email is about? Or that links about and kind of always trying to zone in on to who that person is, so that we can be more personal to them?

Matt Wolach: 16:16

That I think that's really critical. How can you be personal to them? So when we talk about marketing and marketing automation? How can you create some of that personalization within your automation? Yeah.

Shay Howe: 16:29

There's no shortage of ways to do this. I could talk at length about this. One of the things I think about and that is, what data are you collecting about your audience? And that data can come from a plethora of different places, could be the data, they just directly tell you. It's a form on your website, where they say, name, email, location, or answer a few questions. It could be data that you enrich for you take that and you go ask other third parties to say, Hey, this is their their website. How many people work there? Where are they located? Right. So it could be enriched. also love the behavioral data. So what are they browsing and clicking on live site tracking feature Active Campaign to were very similar, maybe Google Analytics, drop a script on your site? And will start to recognize what pages someone's going to are browsing. And that's really cool in the sense. We can send someone email, and I don't know if they go to our pricing page, or no, if they click through to start to configure their pricing, and what type of plan should they selected? And then also, don't they convert it or not? Right? So it's one of them? Can you capture enough data and keep it organized into a manner that is unified and actionable, that then you can start to layer in different experiences and things starting to look at things like their vertical, their stage and your customer lifecycle, and items like that like to actually start to build some segmented audiences change up some messaging, to where you're speaking to that person, as if they're your only customer printouts if you have one, or you know, 10,000. That's kind of the the hope and dream behind a lot of where that data come from, and what you can actually begin to do with it.

Matt Wolach: 18:12

I love it. Super, super powerful stuff. Now, what are some common misconceptions about marketing automation? What can businesses do to kind of make the most of this technology? Yeah,

Shay Howe: 18:22

I love this question. Because this is something as a marketer, we have to think about Active Campaign, right? And how do we get someone excited and engaged into giving us a shot, there's a couple things we noticed almost immediately, and that is, a lot of folks think about automation. And they think, too difficult. It's going to be really complicated, hard to set up. I I'm running, growing my business, I do not have time for that. I could probably figure it out. But that is not something I have time for. And that's wrong in the sense that it's incredibly approachable. The amount of visual editors drag and drop tools and interfaces, the amount of pre built recipes or templates that we have in our platform allows you to get started quickly. And you can dive in and be automating something literally in the next five minutes. That could eventually start to change part of your business. We get someone understand that the next misconception is, okay, I get that. But what does that cost? Because that like that's a dream to be good to be true. I it's a it's probably not affordable, if I could actually do that. And our pricing starts at $29 a month. It's not it's not wild, right? It's you may spend more on coffee each month, right? So easy in that sense. And I think you take those two together. A lot of times you'll start to hear, hey, marketing automation is really only for really big businesses. This is for the enterprise grade class and I business isn't there. And I think that's just fundamentally wrong. And since it is approachable, it's intuitive and you could get started at an end To market price that still allows you to have an incredible amount of capabilities and features. The other thing nowadays folks are, you know, in a sense of, it feels too impersonal, that you're just you're building automation. And then someone starts to feel and realize, that's not a person that's a robot, like, oh, no, I'm not talking to someone anymore. And done wrong, that that's true, you can definitely like feel that sense. I think that's twitter saying earlier, where the data comes in to how you start to build up the structure some of that out. You want to build automation and things to where it creates surprise and delight. And you're actually impressed with how close it is to truly understanding who you are. And we talk about all the time, even as a automation based company, don't over automate, either. Like still you have to have room for that human touch to where you pick up the phone and call someone or, you know, you send them flowers or a special gift here based off a comment or something they said, you know, you, you want to stay close to your customer. So definitely don't over automate what's going on in there. I think, maybe less of a misconception, but something I see folks do I want to encourage them not to is they set something up and then walk away. And, you know, I got this process automated, it's working, it's delivering the results I want. But they go on and do something else and don't realize, hey, you're building out patterns of data to where maybe you can start to experiment and iterate, optimize that. And there could be something more powerful in there. Or maybe there's something else you could be automating in your business that could go a little further. So that idea of set it up, forget it walk away, I would just encourage folks that there's probably more going on there than you might realize. And you can improve that process, make it a bit more personal through automation, or find ways to layer automation into other workflows or processes in your business.

Matt Wolach: 22:01

Yeah, I think that's really, really good advice. I am guilty of that, by the way, setting it and forgetting it, because it is so easy to do. But you're right, there's probably some things we can go back and optimize and tweak and AB test and make sure that it's really delivering what it needs to do. And sometimes things get outdated. I've gotten automations from other businesses where it's like, I don't know, if you really meant to send me this. And so we need to constantly test it, I like to make sure that my team is, is putting themselves through the funnel so that they get those same emails, get those same messages, and they can understand is this still right at this period. And at this point, it's funny, sometimes we find stuff that we're like, ooh, we need to we need to adjust that we need to change that

Shay Howe: 22:43

I'm giving you an example, where leave some automations running when someone creates a trial and Active Campaign, we send a nurturing to get them become a paid customer. And we have a lot of other automations. They're segmented down to type of vertical, you said you were coming from, what product of active campaigns you're interested in. So whether it's, you know, our email marketing, or automation side versus our CRM or other ends. And we've recently went back and just started to experiment, change some of those automations. And even just the messaging within them. So this idea of, hey, you created a trial, but you didn't convert. So kind of an abandoned cart version of E commerce but in SAS, right. messaging that was like, Hey, are your trials going expire, don't forget to come back, don't free to set up your account that didn't like it didn't have the emotional reaction and draw to come back. It's like, yeah, I kick the tires, and I got busy and I don't have time to finish it, it feels like work, right? Where if we just change that language to, you know, if you do one thing, set up your first automation, that makes it way more approachable, it's the sense of, I got time for that I can go build that one automation, I don't have time to import my list and set up all my custom fields and you know, get the integrations tied, but I can go build that one automation. And so that perform better to change that up to then if you do one thing, do this, and here's the 123, on how to do it, select a trigger, create an action, activate, things like that, like just small tweaks in the messaging, or even just when those emails are delivered based off actions they're taking, has started to show pretty strong gains in a click through rates, but in app activity and adoption of the product, and then falling down into conversion. So even for ourselves, we're not perfect in that we set this up and went did a bunch other stuff and said Oh, should I go back to that wonderful, you make that better? So we're learning ourselves as well.

Matt Wolach: 24:47

I love it and what are you talking about? It's something that I speak with my clients about in the trial. One of the biggest things is getting them to that first aha moment. And for you guys that Active Campaign, I'm sure once they run that automations like wow Look at everything that just did for me. That's amazing. That's an aha moment. And so what I teach my clients is in your system, what is that aha moment and then just in that trial, get them to do that, because once they do it, they're much more likely to stick around and want to keep doing that. So I love that you guys figured that out. That's something we work on with our clients as well. But it's, it's it's really critical to capture them and get that aha moment early. So I glad, I'm glad you just focus on that that one thing. And as we wrap up here, che, I want to I want to ask you, what advice would you give to early stage software leaders who are wanting to grow and accelerate using automation?

Shay Howe: 25:35

Yeah. cliche, perhaps, but this idea of just stay incredibly close to your customers and follow their lead. And having having had the privilege to go build a few different companies and startups, you get into it, because you have an incredibly good idea. But so often, I've had I've been wrong and going out and building something and investing just incredible amount of time, resources money. Where I've drifted from the customer to where it becomes more of my influencer impression versus what the market might want or need. And that disconnect if it gets too wide, can be paralyzing. So they just stay in close to your customers. And in doing that, it's not seeking their advice on what are you looking for? What do you want, it's like, listen to their problem, listen to what they're struggling with, listen to how they're solving some of that today. And then apply the lens of how does technology and the advancements of technology enable us to create a better customer experience for them. And if you can marry those two together, you can actually start to find your way through actually building a product where the folks are jumping in to use it faster than you can really start to control and manage. And it's at that rate where build some automation of the business to help get that funnel going faster and faster to where you're nurturing them. You're enabling them, you're setting them up for success, and even using automation to help capture and solicit some of their feedback along the way, so that you don't lose that disconnection of what are they actually seeking? And what are the value they're finding in your product. So cliche, as they say, to see the cliche to say stay close to your customers, but it's so incredibly important, honestly. And they want to do it at scale. I think automation can be a perfect tool to help you there.

Matt Wolach: 27:31

That is absolutely true. Great advice. Shay. I really appreciate you coming in and sharing all this with us. This is really, really cool stuff. How can our audience learn more about you and Active Campaign? Yeah,

Shay Howe: 27:42

I didn't give me it's just active campaign.com. Pretty simple, straightforward. We have free trials. So truly our aha moment is building your first automation. So there's something in your business that has felt mundane or you're tired of doing create a trial. And honestly give it give it 510 minutes, see if you can build an automation around that. And we may even have some recipes and templates that will do that for you may actually really be surprised at how easy is to get started there. And then for myself. I'm che how across pretty much all the social networks. So LinkedIn, Twitter and elsewhere. So yeah, just search che Howell and I'm happy to connect. Is there any messages? Yeah, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Matt Wolach: 28:26

Very cool. We'll put all that into the show notes. So if you're listening, go ahead and check that out. But Shay, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Shay Howe: 28:32

Matt. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Matt Wolach: 28:37

Absolutely, and everybody else out there. Thank you for being here to again, make sure you're subscribed to the show. Hit that subscribe button now so you don't miss any other amazing leaders like Shay sharing all their wisdom with you. Hit that and then we will see you next time. Take care. Bye bye.

Intro/ Outro: 28:52

Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS. For more help on finding great leads and closing more deals. Go to Mattwolach.com