The Pulse by Ortto

My email deliverability sucks — how do I fix it?

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 23:40:07 GMT

Travis Hazlewood, Head of Email Deliverability at Ortto, takes a deep dive into why you might have email deliverability problems, and how to fix them.

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Go-to-market: The marketing foundations every startup needs for success

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 21:43:50 GMT

In The Pulse's Go-to-market series, startup marketers share their advice and insights on marketing for startups. In this edition of Go-to-market, Stella Startups’ Gemma Clancy shares the importance of starting with customer research, and how early-stage startups should approach community hacking and product-led growth.

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The complete guide to building a growth marketing plan

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 06:10:48 GMT

We’ve reached a point where the unprecedented is expected. Even the most well-established businesses cannot expect continued growth, they need to be proactively pursuing growth at all times.

In this environment, more than ever before, a carefully constructed growth marketing plan is an essential part of achieving business objectives. Whether you have an established plan that simply requires fine-tuning or you’re building a plan from scratch, this updated guide to building a growth marketing plan will help you get clarity on the steps you need to take for real, tangible, business growth.

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Lessons from a one-person marketing team: How this marketing manager makes a little go a long way

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 02:00:23 GMT

Marketers have never been asked to do so much with so little. That pressure only intensifies when you’re a one-person marketing team tasked with making a big impact on a small budget. “That really resonates with me,” says Sophia Firth, Marketing Manager at Rungway. “One of my biggest challenges is that I'm on my own, and having the resources that I need to do my job correctly and do it well,” she says. At Rungway, an employee listening platform, Sophia’s been tasked with building the brand’s awareness and delivering pipeline—a lofty goal for a solo marketer. She shares her advice for maximizing success on a small budget.

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Return on investment (ROI): How to calculate it and why it matters

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 22:56:37 GMT

Return on investment (ROI) is one of marketing’s more ubiquitous metrics. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s popular. Most modern marketers have a complicated relationship with ROI. On the one hand, it is a simple calculation that gives a rough sense of whether a marketing investment was worthwhile. On the other hand, ROI is a limited metric that has been known to lead to preemptive budget cuts and short-termism.

In this episode, we’ll look at calculating ROI, when it is a worthwhile metric to track and optimize towards, and where marketers feel it falls flat.

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Strategies for success: 9 marketers share their top tips for data-driven marketing

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 01:36:52 GMT

Harnessing the power of data can provide businesses with valuable insights, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately drive growth. However, embarking on a data-driven marketing journey requires careful planning and execution. We asked nine experienced marketers to share their top tips for getting started with data-driven marketing. They emphasized the significance of setting clear objectives, focusing on data quality over quantity, selecting the right tools, upskilling yourself and your team, and maintaining a balance between data-driven insights and creative innovation.

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"The focus is always relevance": How data can drive hyper-personalized experiences at scale

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 06:22:47 GMT

Personalization is the number one priority for Tom Mitchell, Senior Lifecycle Operations Manager at Sona. The UK-based SaaS platform is used by industries as diverse as social care to hospitality for frontline scheduling. But creating personalized experiences that cater to completely different audiences, each with their own unique pain points and goals can make building personalized experiences at scale a challenge. The answer, says Tom, is having a complete view of all the data you hold on your customers, so you can segment your audiences and target them with the right message at the right time.

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Work smarter: How to build high-performing always-on drip campaigns

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 06:14:43 GMT

When budgets are tight and teams are crunched, using the cost-per-wear analogy on proposed marketing strategies can be a great way to prioritize. In other words, what can you build now that will serve you for months if not years to come?

A well-designed drip campaign can take some time to build, but that upfront investment in time pays off in dividends. In this guide, we’ll revisit the basics and best practices before examples of successful campaigns from real marketers.

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Mastering data-driven marketing: How to make data the foundation of your marketing strategy

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 23:01:47 GMT

Marketing teams everywhere have amassed (and continue to gather) unfathomable volumes of data on their prospects and customers. But not all marketing teams are effectively leveraging that data to drive growth—and that’s a big mistake.

That begs the question: How do you build a data-driven marketing strategy that gets results?

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through building a data-driven marketing strategy from the ground up, from deciding what data you need to how to collect and connect it; how to analyze your data; the benefits of a data-driven marketing approach; common challenges and how to overcome them; and finally, the future of data and marketing and how to prepare for it.

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Mea culpa: A marketing leader shares how his biggest mistake led to his proudest achievement

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 23:07:05 GMT

In The Pulse's Mea Culpa series, marketing leaders share their biggest mistakes, and what they learned from them. In this edition, Mable’s Director of Growth Ventures, Matt Gudge, shares how he's made learning from failure business as usual. It all started with a disastrous pitch that reframed his approach to marketing and leadership.

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Automation evolution: How marketers think about and choose email marketing software today

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 04:45:46 GMT

Marketing automation software is both simpler and more complicated than ever before. On the one hand, building a lengthy series of automated messages based on customer data and behavior is easier than we ever could have imagined. On the other, conversations about data privacy, sky-high expectations around personalization, and artificial intelligence’s potential uses demand a lot from our software, and the people using it.

This rapidly changing landscape begs the question: What matters in marketing automation software today?

In this guide, we’ll explore just that with a refreshed look at how your business can benefit, avoiding common automation pitfalls, and how to find software that will serve you now and into the future.

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Mastering AI marketing: A complete guide to making AI a part of your marketing strategy

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:40:09 GMT

AI marketing has evolved from a concept to a transformative force and is being adopted at speed by forward-thinking marketers to help them with everything from lead scoring to personalization to content creation.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in marketing and sales,” notes a report by McKinsey, adding that businesses already investing in AI are seeing “a revenue uplift of 3 to 15 percent, and a sales ROI uplift of 10 to 20 percent”. It’s clear that businesses that don’t focus on incorporating AI into their marketing strategies will be quickly outpaced by competitors.

While some marketers might have concerns that AI will replace their roles, the reality is that—in the near future at least—AI could actually make them better at their jobs. “AI itself is not going to put anyone out of work. I think marketers who know how to use AI are going to put other marketers who don't know how to use it out of work,” says Amanda Laviana, Senior Marketing Manager - Brand & Content at Plenti. “It’s going to be a matter of figuring out how to use the tools to your advantage and use it to automate the parts of your job that can be automated, that don't need that human touch, and use your energy for the creative parts, the human parts of your job.”

In this comprehensive guide to AI marketing, we’ll dig into what exactly AI marketing is and why marketers should be using it; use cases for AI in your marketing strategy; the pitfalls of using AI and how to overcome them; real-life examples of how marketers are already using AI in their day-to-day; and how to start incorporating AI into your marketing strategy today.

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Email benchmarks part II: How you should measure the success of your email marketing

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 14:00:36 GMT

As promised in Part 1 on the perils of relying on industry benchmarks to measure the success of your email marketing, Travis Hazelwood returns to the discussion to talk through some practical steps you can take to both improve your email marketing strategy and gauge its success.

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Automate that: Types of marketing automation and how they're evolving in the AI era

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:01:26 GMT

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the way businesses think about automation. Once the conversation centered around taking daily, mindless tasks off the plates of busy marketers. Today it’s about how AI can predict outcomes, personalize content, and forecast results.

In this updated guide to types of marketing automation, we’ll explore how these technological advancements are changing how we work and what to look for when you’re reassessing your tech stack.

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Mastering omnichannel marketing automation: A comprehensive guide to building successful campaigns

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 05:04:51 GMT

Omnichannel marketing automation is often misconstrued as a 'set-it-and-forget-it' activity. In fact, the opposite is true. When you take the time to analyze and optimize every automated campaign, from essential communications to strategic journeys, you can improve on almost every business metric.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll revisit the basics, guide you through set and common pitfalls in implementation, share real-world examples of automated campaigns that drive results, and more.

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"It's about getting creative": Achieving remarkable results on a limited marketing budget

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 14:00:53 GMT

Marketers everywhere face the same challenge: Achieving measurable results with limited resources. “I’ve been there in the past,” says Lara Barnett (nee Vandersluis), Head of Marketing for Logicalis Australia. She has a few ideas for marketers working with tight budgets—and how to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of their efforts. More than anything, “it’s about getting creative” and working with what you have to strengthen your brand presence.

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Mastering lifecycle marketing: A comprehensive guide to marketing throughout the customer journey

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 14:00:15 GMT

Marketing isn’t just about the top of the funnel—it's about nurturing relationships, boosting customer value, and creating brand loyalty. Enter lifecycle marketing: an essential strategy for every marketing team, allowing you to connect with your customers at every stage of their journey, from initial awareness to advocacy.

So, why should you embrace this strategy? Because it's your ticket to enhancing customer experiences and driving long-term success.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll take you through building a lifecycle marketing strategy that gets results, from laying the foundations for effective lifecycle marketing, crafting targeted nurture campaigns for each stage of the customer lifecycle, common pitfalls to avoid, and how to overcome them, and how to measure and optimize your campaigns for maximum impact. Yes, it requires effort, but the rewards are well worth it.

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Out of the weeds: How to build a high-level marketing automation strategy that drives better customer experiences

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 14:00:03 GMT

Automation is a critical component of modern marketing that enables timely, relevant, and personalized customer communications at scale.

It is so ubiquitous that many marketers see it as a tool or tactic that helps bring their campaigns to life, rather than a strategy itself. This may not cause any near-term headaches when marketing automation is being used sparingly. But as you increase the number and complexity of campaigns and your customer base expands, marketing automation without strategic direction can negatively impact the customer experience, and your bottom line.

In this article, we’re getting out of the weeds and looking high-level to demonstrate the merits of a marketing automation strategy, show you how to develop one, and how it can inform existing and new campaigns or tactics.

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Go-to-market: How combining digital tactics with human connections can help a startup soar

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 02:05:10 GMT

In The Pulse's Go-to-market series, startup marketers share their advice and insights on marketing for startups. In this edition of Go-to-market, Paypa Plane’s Head of Marketing, Katie Norbury shares why going old-school can be key when competing with the big guys.

Brisbane-based startup Paypa Plane has had a bit of a dream run, attracting top investors and leading Australia’s shift to real-time payments and PayTo. Now the payments software provider is taking on the US and its Head of Marketing and Communications, Katie Norbury couldn’t be more excited—if a little daunted.

While Paypa Plane is all about modernizing payments, its marketing strategy combines digital tactics with old-school networking. Given the startup’s success in Australia, it’s an approach the business will replicate overseas as they compete with big US fintechs and their equally big marketing budgets.

Katie’s experience at not-for-profits means she’s adept at using a limited budget to make a meaningful impact. While she admits there is “no clear recipe for success” in startup growth marketing, one thing continues to help Paypa Plane soar – building personal connections.

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“Never miss a chance to reward a prospect or customer”: One marketer's blueprint for lifecycle marketing campaigns

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 02:24:08 GMT

Lifecycle marketing is about “helping prospects to identify their pain points, educate them on it, discuss solutions—and do all of this before we begin to talk about ourselves,” writes Amber Bogie, Senior Director of Global Demand Generation at Reachdesk, a data-driven gifting platform that’s all about the customer journey.

Amber shared her approach to lifecycle marketing at Reachdesk with the Pulse, common mistakes and how to overcome them, and why you should “never miss a chance to reach out and reward a prospect or customer.”

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Building your martech stack: Why the customer experience should be at the forefront of technology decisions

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 02:28:37 GMT

Customer experience should be the driving force behind every marketing technology decision, according to Jessica Kuipers, Marketing Manager at My Wealth Solutions, an Australian financial advisory firm where providing a personalized experience is paramount.

“For us, everything comes back to the customer experience,” says Jessica, reflecting on the company’s marketing strategy. She applies the same principle when it comes to adding or subtracting new tools from her marketing technology stack. She shares her approach to reviewing her current stack, and how to choose martech tools that will enhance the customer experience.

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Part I: The perils of relying on industry benchmarks when measuring the success of your email marketing

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 02:51:33 GMT

Marketing is one of those fields where KPIs and industry benchmarks are used constantly to prove success to higher-ups and in-betweens.

But when it comes to email marketing benchmarks, the numbers don’t represent the truth to the degree that other fields might, which can make comparing your email marketing performance to industry benchmarks not only unreliable but also outright wrong.

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Playing the long game: How this company is nurturing customers of the future

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 03:04:13 GMT

Entrepreneurs are Dinero's bread and butter. But with fewer people starting businesses than ever before in Denmark, where the online accounting platform is based, Dinero decided it needed to experiment with new approaches to expand its market and nurture potential customers over time, says Nicklas Aabech, Digital Marketing Manager. He sat down to discuss the company’s new approach to its marketing.

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Building an automated lifecycle marketing campaign: A step-by-step guide

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 03:01:11 GMT

The ability to deliver personalized and relevant messages to your prospects and customers with the right message, at the right time, and at scale is critical to the success of any modern marketing strategy.

But that level of personalization is almost impossible to achieve if you’re not leveraging automation in your lifecycle marketing. From welcome sequences to targeted nurturing campaigns, automated journeys empower marketers to deliver the right content to the right people at crucial touchpoints throughout the customer journey—and achieve scalability without sacrificing personalization.

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“Don’t test for testing’s sake”: Why this marketer is taking a hyper-targeted approach to testing and personalization

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 04:21:21 GMT

"Test everything" has become a popular mantra in the marketing world, with marketers everywhere—but perhaps particularly those working in the SaaS sector— encouraged to test absolutely every element of their marketing campaigns, right down to something as small as the shape and size of their call-to-action buttons.

“I think it’s quite easy just to test for testing’s sake,” says Sophia Firth, Marketing Manager at Rungway.

While Sophia acknowledges she’s been down that route before, conducting A/B tests on extremely granular elements, she also notes that, more often than not, “you're not necessarily learning a lot from those kinds of tests.” She still thinks testing has its place, but that marketers should focus on testing elements of their campaigns that will actually move the needle.

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Orchestrating the customer journey: Laying the foundations for lifecycle marketing campaigns

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 04:25:30 GMT

Lifecycle marketing is one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal for nurturing prospects and retaining customers, allowing you to cater to your audience’s needs at every stage of the buyer journey.

But what does it take to build lifecycle marketing campaigns that work? You must lay the groundwork first, by honing in on your ideal customer profile (ICP), mapping out the customer journey, identifying key metrics for success, and tracking the data that will allow you to refine your campaigns over time.

Once you have those foundations in place, you’ll be able to automate lifecycle marketing campaigns—from welcoming new users through to customer retention and reactivation—that not only allow you to target your customers with the right message at the right moment, but scale those campaigns over time.

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From insights to action: Why user research is “the single most important thing you can do”

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 04:48:52 GMT

“Talking to your customers is the single most important thing that you can do,” thinks Martin Gontovnikas, Co-Founder and GTM Advisor at HyperGrowth Partners and former Senior Vice President of Marketing & Growth at Auth0. But most product and go-to-market teams just aren’t talking to their customers enough, he thinks, leaving them with a poor understanding of the customer experience—which can hurt everything from their marketing efforts to the product itself.

One of the reasons teams aren't talking to their customers enough, he believes, is a simple one: “It's very scary,” he says. “It's hard to talk to people you don't know. I think people are scared of not knowing what to ask, scared of wasting their time, scared that what two or three people say is not going to line up with what the rest of the audience says.”

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“Marketing is an art and a science”: Why empathy is key to building successful email nurture campaigns

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 04:35:34 GMT

Nurture campaigns are the foundation of any modern marketing strategy. But creating nurture campaigns that convert requires a delicate balance of head and heart—and a lot more complexity than you might think, believes Lara Barnett (Vandersluis), Head of Marketing for Logicalis Australia in Sydney, Australia, an expert at building out multi-layered email nurture campaigns.

“What makes a great marketer is empathy — being able to step into your customers' shoes, see through your customer's eyes, think through your customer's mind,” says Lara.

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How to protect your email sender reputation: Don't underestimate the power of a strong password

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 04:30:48 GMT

Did you know that the strength of a marketer’s login security can affect the success of their email marketing strategy? Marketers rarely have cause to think about cybersecurity and its effect on their job, thanks to their internal IT teams and the robust security configurations of whatever SaaS platforms they use.

Like most non-cybersecurity professionals, marketers’ engagement with cybersecurity is almost entirely related to logging in—often perceived as more of an annoyance than anything else.

But what many marketers don’t realize is that the strength of this one element can be the only thing standing between them and weeks, if not months, of deliverability problems for their email marketing.

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Adapting to the changing buyer: Why your messaging must change to reach today's decision-makers

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 04:44:30 GMT

“We have to change the language we’re using to speak to decision-makers,” says Simon Walker. “The tech buyer has changed. For the last thirty years, the technology industry predominantly sold hardware to technical people. But that paradigm has shifted with the prevalence of SaaS and technology moving from hardware to the cloud, which means that everyone in a business can now be a technology buyer.”

Walker, the CEO and founder of Proposition, an integrated marketing agency based in Auckland, New Zealand, thinks many tech companies still haven’t caught up with that change, and, as a result, their marketing and sales teams aren’t speaking the language of the new buyer in their marketing campaigns.

“Often tech companies still want to talk about their products in terms of how they work and all of the whiz-bang features to an audience who doesn’t really care about how the technology works,” he says—they’re interested in how your product is going to make their work easier and solve their problems. “You need to appeal to their emotions; the problems they have, and make sure they’re comfortable they're being understood and the brand speaks to them."

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A world-class content engine: Why this marketing director is “building a newsroom inside a marketing department”

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 04:41:12 GMT

“You either have to do content well or not do it at all,” says Michael Oliver. For the Director of Marketing at MBK Search, that means steering away from basic how-to blogs and listicles and taking a journalistic approach to content that targets, nurtures and ultimately builds long-term relationships with the top-tier risk, audit, and compliance talent the UK-based global recruitment firm wants to attract.

Oliver, who has been charged with overhauling MBK Search’s marketing strategy, decided that neither route was right for the company. “We don't want to position ourselves as a recruitment company in that sense.” Content is going to play a “massive” role in that strategy, says Oliver, “because that’s what’s going to differentiate us from our competitors."

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The retention mindset: How growth marketers can pivot from acquisition to retention for sustainable growth

Wed, 17 May 2023 00:31:42 GMT

Marketing teams have prioritized acquisition-first strategies with a "growth at all costs" mindset over the past decade. But during the downturn, they'll need to shift their mindsets to focus on retention to ensure they continue to thrive in a tough economy.

In this guide from Charlie Windschill, Director of Growth Marketing at Ortto, you'll learn how to adopt a retention-first strategy and empower your marketing team with the know-how to reduce churn and drive growth, including:

Why you need to adopt a retention-first marketing strategy
A new framework for building a successful retention strategy
Case studies and expert insights from marketing leaders

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A modern approach to lead scoring: Why traditional lead scoring falls flat in a product-led world

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:38:31 GMT

Traditional lead scoring is fundamentally flawed, but it's still foundational to the way many SaaS B2B go-to-market teams generate leads. It's time for that to change. Go-to-market teams need a new framework for lead scoring that reflects the way customers buy now.

In this guide from Andrea Warmington, Senior Content Strategist at Ortto, you'll learn:

Why traditional lead scoring doesn’t work anymore
What a product-qualified lead is and a modern approach to scoring
How a product-led approach to lead scoring can accelerate growth
How to implement a product-led lead-scoring framework

Listen now and get ready to transform your approach to lead scoring.

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