Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Rob Walling.
Rob is the founder of email marketing tool Drip and the owner of SEO keyword tool Hittel.
He's also the author of the book Start Small Stay A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup.
And his blog, Software by Rob, is a top 20 startup blog and is read by about 20,000 web entrepreneurs each month.
Rob, welcome to the show.
Guest (00:54.070)
Thanks very much for having me.
It's my pleasure, Omer.
Omer (00:56.150)
Today we're going to talk about marketing automation.
You know, what it is, why it's important, and how software entrepreneurs can set up well executed marketing automation for their own business.
So, Rob, let's start by giving everyone an overview of what exactly marketing automation is.
Guest (01:15.510)
Yeah, if you know, if you're listening to this and you've heard this term marketing automation, you feel like it's something that big Fortune 500 companies do.
I felt the same way about a year ago and I learned that it's not that big, fancy or complicated, but it is really, really effective and especially for small businesses, you know, small startups, SaaS, companies that are using these tools.
And in essence I view it as like upping your email marketing game.
It's like taking your email marketing one step further.
And so it consists of being able to capture easily capture emails all over your site and not having to go in and edit a bunch of HTML forms, but actually having some type of JavaScript widget, that easy connection and then lead nurturing, which is basically just being able to send email courses that are scheduled, you know, email sequences so you don't have to manually send all these things, but it's just kind of engaging with people, educating them, probably not on your product, but probably on something that they want to hear about.
And then there's lead scoring which is saying, you know, how engaged are these people?
And then you, you sometimes can have like a CRM thing where you can actually do sales.
Drip itself doesn't have that and I don't believe you need that at our scale.
And then there's the list segmentation.
So it's being able to tag folks based on what they do, it's being able to see what events they've done and then it's being able to route them to the proper emails and even send them proper one off emails.
Based on who they are and what they've done.
And that's really how I like to view marketing automation.
Omer (02:46.630)
The last point about list segmentation.
Well, I guess the whole thing about marketing automation is, I mean, one example that came to mind for me was, you know, quite often you'll have you sign up for a list and you'll get a series of emails which will give you a video to watch in a sequence.
Right.
And it's kind of a little pointless if you send somebody the first email and they haven't even watched the video for you then to go and send them the second email and the third email.
Right.
Whereas that's kind of like dumb marketing.
Right.
I mean a much smarter thing would be to sort of figure out, okay, this person hasn't watched this video, so maybe I need to do some kind of follow up there and give them a different type of email and make sure that they kind of complete that step first.
Or maybe this person maybe just isn't the right lead who I should be nurturing and taking further down my funnel.
Right, that's right.
So, okay, let's say I'm convinced that, you know, I'm ready to invest my time and some money in marketing automation.
What, what would I need to do based on, before I start setting that up?
Like what, what do I need to have kind of prepared?
Guest (04:02.160)
Well, I mean, I think the only thing, the only thing you, you don't really need much, to be honest.
I would recommend having maybe a short email mini course, like a five day course that you can use to entice people to sign up to the list.
Because without that, your, your subscriber rates are going to be very, very low.
But at least if you can offer kind of a crash course on something highly relevant to your audience.
And again, you don't want to try to pitch a product, you don't want to try to be educating about your product.
You want to give them something they can use even if they don't buy your product.
That's about the only thing I think you need to start with is some text.
To be honest, we have a lot of folks signing up for Drip and they don't even have that.
And we can go into their blog posts.
If they have a few blog posts on a topic we can turn into a course where they could certainly do it themselves.
Or if you have an ebook or something, you can break it up into a five or six, seven part sequence.
Omer (04:55.410)
Do you have any advice for people who are thinking of creating some kind of content?
What's a good way for them to figure out what a good engaging piece of content should be that they should share with their audience.
Guest (05:13.650)
Yeah, here's my advice on that.
Number one, I think that it needs to be something that, that like I said, your audience can read and take away and does not need to buy your product in order to use.
So they could go do it manually or do it with another product.
But then at the end you basically say, hey, if you want to do it really easily, you know, sign up for our product so you can pitch your product during the course, but make it not reliant on your product.
Number two, I believe they should be pretty tactical because I think tactical advice of actually how to do things is a lot better than maybe more high level theory.
And the third thing I think is if you're looking for ideas, your customers tend to be pretty good gauges of that.
So if people have written in with the same question over and over, like with Hit Tail, we get a lot of questions about, I've heard about long tail SEO, how do I do it?
What does it mean?
And so we wrote a long tail SEO crash course.
You know, I mean it was pretty obvious.
And then with Drip, we give away a, you know, kind of a marketing automation crash course market why marketing automation is the future of email marketing.
And that because it was just such a common question people were asking.
The other thing you can do is if you have a blog or have any type of content already, you can go and look at which of those pieces had the most tweets or which of them have the most visits and views and maybe, you know, those are probably the most popular and so that you're able to mine those and help turn, you know, create a course from those.
Omer (06:34.700)
So in the email crash course on that people can sign up for on getdrip.com um, do you mention anything in there about Drip, the, the product or, or is it completely sort of separate from that?
Guest (06:49.450)
I do, we do mention Drip and I do think that you should mention your product for sure because people, I don't, I don't think people are offended by that.
But, but I don't do a hard sales pitch either.
You know, in the first, like in the first email, I tend to say, here's what you're going to learn and here's your first nugget and make that first email really, really good.
Right.
It maybe has to be your best email because you got to get the people to engage with it.
And then typically I'll either above the Signature or Even just a P.S.
and it says, hey, if you want to, you know, if you kind of want to skip to the end and really bite chomping at the bit to get started site, you can sign up for a free trial drip here and kind of learn as you go.
Right.
So it's kind of a, it's very non salesy and it's not pushy at all.
And then the cool part is since you know, it is marketing automation, that PS line is has an if statement around it in the email.
So if you're already a customer and you're receiving this marketing course, you won't see that.
So that's another example of kind of how to customize it to the receiver.
Omer (07:45.580)
That's a good tip.
Yeah.
Okay, so let's talk about step two.
I've got this email crash course set up on my site and now I'm getting some people who are ready to sign up for a trial of my product.
So what would I need to do on the back end to sort of make that happen seamlessly?
Guest (08:06.230)
Sure.
I mean, I think so.
I think there's one step maybe before this is you have this email crash course.
You need a way to kind of easily capture emails on your site.
And I would recommend finding something that is, like I said, a JavaScript widget.
Whether you use Drip or use a tool like optinMonster or use Sumome, it's nice to be able to just drop that in and be able to configure, hey, pretty much every page, every page except for this or that, you know, give away the course.
And so now you're building that marketing list.
Okay.
And you can do a few things with that marketing list.
While you're encouraging people to sign up for trial.
If someone say clicks, you have a link in one of those emails that is about, you know, topic A.
And let's say that that topic is Google AdWords.
You know, you're a consultant and so they, you can say, everyone who clicks that Google AdWords link, I want to tag them with Google AdWords.
So now you start to build a little bit of a profile.
And you know, if your list is 100 people, you might see, oh, 10 people are interested in Google AdWords.
And if you have other links that you know are maybe about Facebook ads or about LinkedIn ads or something else, you start to get an idea A of which is the most popular and B, who is interested in what.
So I think that's kind of A, it's a cool step to start seeing just Even in your marketing, before you get people to sign up for trial, you know what they're doing.
The neat part is that follows you all the way through.
Now, you know, we come back to the step you were talking about, which is signing up for that trial and then they become a customer.
Later on you can go back and look through their whole profile, you know, and see the, all the interactions that they went through.
And so you have a really nice kind of idea of who they are in terms of your actual question, which was how do you kind of get that wired up?
In essence it's really just a single line of JavaScript or you can have a single line of server side code on the back end and it just calls out to an API.
And this is the same with Drip or infusionsoft or any of these marketing automation tools.
It's kind of like tracking events.
Like if you've done wired up kissmetrics or mixpanel or segment IO, all these APIs are very similar.
You might have an identify call where you say this person with this email address is here and they just did this event.
And that's all we have our apps wired up to do.
You know, is is in Drip.
When you sign up for a Drip trial, it throws an event to the Drip API and it says someone just signed up, here's their email address and here's when their trial expires.
And I can do that because.
Or I need the trial expiration because we actually include it dynamically in the emails we send them.
Okay.
Omer (10:29.290)
So I think, you know, thinking about using something like aweber or mailchimp, I think one of the challenges there is if you want to move somebody from your email crash course list to maybe a trial sign up list, there isn't really an easy way to do that, right?
I mean otherwise you either have to start working through like, as far as I know, like either through like the Mailchimp API or you have to try and get like a third party tool with AWeber which can maybe do something like that for you.
And so I think, I guess that's one of the benefits of using a marketing automation tool, right, that you know, you can kind of seamlessly move people between different lists as well.
And so if somebody signed up for a trial, don't keep sending them, you know, sort of messages from an email crash course which says, hey, sign up for a trial.
Guest (11:28.710)
That's right.
No, that's right.
Yeah, you can do, you know, mailchimp did launch some automation stuff.
You can do some stuff.
But there's still pretty dramatic limitations.
I'm actually a big fan of mailchimp.
I used to have four mailchimp accounts.
I know Ben, the founder, like I, it's good stuff.
So I don't want to talk bad about them at all.
But it is a, it's just a different tool, you know.
And now that is the benefit that you get from marketing automation is the ease of doing that is, is, you know, one click essentially.
I mean you go into Drip or infusionsoft or whatever and you just say when someone takes this action, unsubscribe them from here, add them to this one and tag them with, with trial user, you know, and now you have your whole list of trial users in there.
You can message them anytime and you get the added thing.
You know, don't, don't discount the value of having a single view.
An email address equals a person rather than having that email address in five different lists and not knowing are they different people?
Like what?
You know, there's no like continuity of activity or anything like that.
Having single view of everything they've ever done and all the interactions that came from your website, from this referral link.
Then they signed up for this course, they received these three emails, they opened two of them and clicked one of them.
Then they signed up for a trial, it expired here, they became a customer like that.
There's a lot of value in that single customer view.
Omer (12:45.250)
Yeah, but I mean it also sounds like it could potentially become a situation where you end up with a lot of data and you don't do anything with it.
Right.
So how can marketing automation help to kind of turn that data into something more actionable?
So you know, when we think about like during the trial sign up stage, how would you maybe use some of that information to help the user further along the marketing funnel?
Guest (13:13.410)
Well, sure, yeah, that's probably the easiest place to do it because you know, during their trial you're trying to get them onboarded, you're trying to get them to get value out of your product, understand how it works and educate them and, and that is a perfect time to send them a short sequence of emails.
Depending on their trial length, I would say maybe three to five emails.
And based on what they have done inside your application, what onboarding steps they've taken, you can customize those emails.
So if they, you know, with Drip as an example, getting set up within Drip is either, if you're setting up marketing, automate marketing emails through Drip, then it's a four step process.
And if you're setting up like emails you want to send to your customers.
Then it's a three step process.
And so right there we have two different sequences that we route you through based on a button you click in the app if you want to do marketing or customer.
Then if you, let's say you do marketing.
So you're going to do four steps.
If you've already done the first step, we stop telling you to do the first step.
You know, the first email you get says hey, there are four steps and you've already completed the first one, Congratulations.
The next step is xyz.
Click here to do it.
So and then when they do that one, you know the next email will say the third step is blah, blah, blah.
So that's the kind of thing where it's so personalized and on the back end, it's not actually that, it's not really not that complicated.
It's a couple of if statements based on, you know, events.
If they've done this event, then just change the email to say this.
But that dramatically impacts people's kind of the messaging they're getting and they feel like it's really customized to them and it just makes them more likely to go through with it.
Omer (14:50.190)
How would I hook these events between my app and Drip?
Does the JavaScript take care of that or do I have to start writing code?
Customized code?
Guest (15:01.550)
JavaScript.
Yeah, you can do it with JavaScript or one line of rest, you know, just a rest call basically.
Rest API call.
We have wrappers PHP and Ruby at this point.
But so either way it's the same, you know, same way.
And you just basically throw this event, this trial user with this email address just did this like he just completed onboarding step one and then he just viewed your upgrade page and we don't actually have that many.
You could over instrument it for sure.
I think maybe we have, I'm trying to think maybe eight events total, including like signing up for a trial, entering your credit card, which is a different step, canceling actually becoming a paying customer.
And then I think it's the four steps of the onboarding for Drip.
So it's about eight points where we went in, slipped the line in there and from those events I can run a pretty effective, highly customized onboarding flow.
Omer (15:57.060)
Okay, great.
So let's say that the trial comes to an end and we've got two possible outcomes.
Either that person becomes a customer or they don't.
So let's take that the first scenario where somebody ends a trial and they decide not to become A customer.
What could I do using marketing automation to either learn from that customer or still maybe try to persuade them to maybe give it another try.
Guest (16:36.640)
Sure.
I think the best way that I found is because for them not to continue with the trial, they've typically, since I asked for credit card up front, they've had to cancel.
Right.
So they'll hit the cancel button.
And then when the trial ends, I will.
They get an email that basically says, hey, this is Rob, the founder, and I'm just curious why you decided not to go forward.
You know, was it.
And sometimes I'll even make suggestions and say, you know, was it a pricing issue?
Was it, you know, did you.
We're not able to get set up.
Do you need extra time on your trial?
And then wait to see what they reply?
And so we do have interactions with folks who say it was just.
It was too complicated.
And then we try to work with them to figure out if it's right for them.
Other times I just get really good, you know, reasons that it wasn't a fit for them.
And so that's the learning part you're talking about, you know, of like, oh, it doesn't work really well.
It doesn't work very well in this particular market.
You know, if you're a blogger or maybe some people selling physical goods, like, it may not be, you know, there may be systems out there that are better for you.
So that's typically what I do.
You can be more certainly more forceful or try to encourage people to come back or something.
That's not particularly my style.
And I don't know how effective it would be if someone has gone through a trial and decided not to proceed.
Omer (17:51.170)
And with using a product like Drip, if.
Could I track, like, feedback from those mails?
So could I.
Could I kind of have links in there which just say, hey, you know, three links which basically say maybe why they didn't want to continue with the product.
And can I then automatically associate or tag that user with that information?
Guest (18:13.300)
You definitely could, yes.
Right.
You just wire up each link to, you know, to tag the user.
That'd be pretty simple.
Trying to view it in aggregate, though, would be kind of an issue.
Trying to think if there's any.
I don't think there's a way to, you know, if you really wanted to see how many people said this versus how many people said the second one.
We don't really have a way to view that, although that's not true, because we do have a way to view all the tags.
So that's how we have a tag report where you could say, you know, if they each had individual tagging then you, you could see that.
Omer (18:44.350)
Yeah, I think that would be useful.
Okay.
And then so the other scenario was the trial ends and that person decides to become a customer.
Woohoo.
So how would you then think about marketing automation?
Does it stop there or do you want to kind of still find ways to nurture this customer?
Guest (19:06.390)
I think, I mean, you know, I want to be honest here that the low hanging fruit, if you've never done any of this, is all at the front end of the funnel.
So it's in that initial thing of getting the capture form, nurturing the leads, easing people into the trial and then doing the onboarding flow that I talked about earlier.
I do think that once you have that in place and you've figured some of this stuff out that then doing some instrumentation in your app and saying, like I said, putting maybe an event viewed your upgrade page because it's nice to know if someone's thinking about upgrading.
You could have a viewed cancel the cancellation page so that you could put them on a hot list or even reach out to them and be like, hey, we noticed you were thinking about canceling.
Do you need any help or something?
I also think instrumenting the app, like if you have some more advanced areas where it's like someone creating a project that has some particular complexities to it, let's say your project management software, and it's like the first time they create a project, you may want to know that, that they actually have created a project and you may want to fire off a one off email right then and say, hey, we saw you just did that.
Here is a PDF that helps walk you through.
Or here's the five best ways people use projects.
That kind of stuff.
It's up to you how, how far into this you want to get.
Right.
This is about retention and it's about education and it's about people who maybe they got activated during the trial so they converted, but you're kind of helping pull them in deeper, you know, and learn more about the, the corners of your app and then watching what they do and reacting to that.
Omer (20:48.450)
Okay, so let's talk about step four.
I mean, at some point, you know, unfortunately that customer is going to cancel that account.
Guest (20:58.160)
Sure.
Omer (21:00.000)
And so.
Well, let's talk about what you did with, you know, you talked about Drip and some of the Churn issues that you had there early on with the product.
Did you actually use Drip to help with the Churn?
Guest (21:14.560)
Drip I did, absolutely.
Yeah.
We use Drip in all my, for all my products.
And it was as simple as the email that I mentioned, you know, where it just says, hey, I have a quick question for you.
And it asks why you decided to churn or why not why you decided to churn.
That's.
That's our verbiage.
But it was like, hey, I wonder why you decided to cancel.
And I got a ton of.
That's where a lot of that feedback came that made me decide to think about marketing automation was people were saying, oh, it's too simple.
Have you thought about allowing me to, you know, be able to click a link and move people from this to that?
And so that's where those, and those conversations then began.
Because it's email.
Right.
So I would reply and we go back and forth.
So it definitely helped me figure out where to.
Where to head next with Drip.
Omer (21:54.320)
Awesome.
Great, Rob, that was really helpful.
Thank you for sharing that with us.
And you know, if folks want to use a tool like Drip, they can go and sign up for a free trial@drip.com or get on to get onto that email crash course.
Guest (22:11.760)
Indeed.
Yeah, it's at.
Get.
Get drip.com.
Omer (22:14.250)
oh, I'm sorry.
Thank you.
Thank you for clarifying that.
Guest (22:16.650)
No problem.
Getdrip.com.
Omer (22:17.930)
yeah, did you ever try to buy that domain?
Guest (22:20.330)
I've contacted the guy.
Yeah.
It's a parked domain.
It's like a squatter.
And he said he wanted six figures for the domain.
So I said, all right, I'll take my seven letter domain.
I rank number one for it for Drip in Google, which is probably all I need, you know.
Omer (22:34.330)
Right, right, yeah.
Cool.
So, yeah, thanks for doing this and you know, it's been a pleasure.
Guest (22:40.330)
Absolutely.
It was my pleasure coming on.
Thanks for having me.
