Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen
[00:00:56]
Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast, everyone. My name is Arlen Robinson, and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest Alexsandra Korczynska who is the CMO @ GetResponse which is a Powerful and simplified tool to send emails, create pages, and automate your marketing. Alexsandra is a Data-driven marketer with vast experience in the Tech industry and has mostly been focused on SaaS & ecommerce companies. Welcome to the podcast, Alexandra.

Aleksandra
[00:01:28]
Hey, it’s great to be here with you today.

Arlen
[00:01:31]
Yes. Thank you for joining me. And I’m super excited to talk to you today because our topic of the day is going to be how to really increase the ROI of your marketing campaigns without actually increasing the budget. And so this is gonna be through marketing automation, which I know is your bread and butter, and it’s really a hot topic because everyone wants to improve that ROI, but you know, it’s a fine line between improving the ROI without actually increasing the budget. So I know you’re gonna lightness on that, but before you do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today?

Aleksandra
[00:02:08]
Yeah, sure. So actually I’ve been like generally like the tech, the industry for the last like 12 years or so. So always like super interested in like the tech specifically the startup industry. That’s why actually my first like personal experience was with startups actually and with some kickstart campaigns, IOT products there. So, so I actually also became CMO this, you know, startup producing smart slip mask, and we are like running pretty much successful kickstart campaign. So it was all about like rough and marketing from the ver beginning. Also, like when it comes to my background, I, I had, you know, education much more in the data science and you know, it project management. So I was always like much into data. And then it kind of like turned out that I can connect my creativity with data in marketing specifically, you know, like in a tech industry.

Aleksandra
[00:03:00]
So then from startups, I like, you know, went from, you know, start or we were like seeking funds, investment, like delivering products to the bakers. And it was a really great time. Actually. I learned a lot during that time, but obviously once you were working the startup, you were usually like short in budgets. So I went to Uber where I was basically one of the first hire for Uber eats in Europe. So, so my job was basically to scale Uber eats like in Europe and specifically in the central Eastern Europe, but also like hiring people like across all the Europe and like, you know, experimenting with pricing. And there was really fun, fun time. And Uber is, Uber still was, you know, Uber eats still was kind of like a start of an Uber. So there’s all about the go to market strategy, repeating it, like scaling framework, testing, various tactics.

Aleksandra
[00:03:45]
And the word is like super close to like eCommerce it’s a marketplace, but it’s, but you know, like, all we do is about frequency. Like new customers acquisition is also, and it’s about making sure that value goes up, making sure that the retention is there. So that’s really great actually time. And I was also like responsible for the automation workflow, making sure that increase, that we gonna increase the frequency, we gonna increase retention of our users. And yeah, through that, actually I was always like super interested in the market in general, right. In marketing automation software and what what’s better for a marketer than just actually like, you know, like to build a software for, for yourself. And this actually brought me to get a response that is offering and building marketing automation platform for SME. And yeah, here I am actually right now managing the whole like global marketing and growth for get response. That’s what also excites me a lot is being super close to the product and it’s building a product for like marketers as I am.

Arlen
[00:04:41]
Okay. That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s, that’s quite a story you have. You’ve been definitely involved with a lot of, you know, kind of key players here, you know, E of course Uber eats Europe. That’s huge kind of in deep with their marketing efforts there. And I know that was probably really exciting to be kind of at the ground floor of, you know, taking that to Europe. I’m sure. And I’m, I’m sure Ubers at this point is like huge. I could imagine.

Aleksandra
[00:05:05]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And is that this were like kinda like different time, like times, right? Like once Uber still like wasn’t on the public company, right. It was like five ago or something like this. So that’s, that was also great. Cuz you know, Uber basically had the strategy just to like first let’s launch it, let’s scale it and then bit buffer about some legal stuff and about market restrictions. So, and Europe is heavily regulated, right? So that’s, and you know, every single country differ a lot from each other. So, but that is really great actually like, you know, like you have this learn and also live this pure growth mentality and that’s something that I’m also trying to, to push right now, like at, at good response, like it’s very strong ownership and you know, this growth mentality right. That I also get from Uber.

Arlen
[00:05:49]
Gotcha. That sounds great. Well, you know, of course with get response and being a marketing automation platform, what you’re doing there is really gonna definitely bring value to what we’re gonna be talking about today. As I mentioned, you know, leveraging, trying to pull out the majority of return on investment for different marketing campaigns. And I know that’s kind of the key thing you’re working on. So really what I wanna start off with with is these days, why is marketing automation, you know, essential for the growth of a, of an eCommerce business?

Aleksandra
[00:06:19]
Yeah. So like usually once they’re talking with many like eCommerce owners and marketing managers there, they, all of the marketers are talking about user acquisition, right? So we are talking about campaign like ads, spending, spending money on that. And usually the first thing that comes to the founder or CEOs might is just to, okay, let’s like, you know, launch some ads like on Facebook and social and paid search depending actually what is their industry or LinkedIn. And then actually let’s, let’s acquire, let’s say, you know, start acquiring some users and marketing automation is actually kind of fighting like of that in some sense. Cause all marketing automation is all about like increasing your revenue. I increasing your numbers, but actually through increasing the conversion. So it means that, you know, you can have the same number of, you know, users visiting your website or like, you know, the same number of customers starting the checkout process.

Aleksandra
[00:07:11]
But basically then you can just improve it like by 1% and then get like incremental revenue. Right? So that’s I think like fewer efficiency and that’s something that every single like CEO, funder marketing manager should take care of the most of is like the bottom of the funnel. Right? So what is happening like the bottom of the funnel? How is the frequency looking? Like how is the retention looking like how is the whoever users are abandoning, the carts are not. And what do we know when it comes to, let’s say e-commerce is that about 60% of users? They leave the cart generally. And then once we have, then have to look on the mobile, it’s like 86% of users actually left the carts mobile last year, according to the bay in the United States. So it means that you are losing actually majority of people who have acquired and you, you are usually noting so much about it, right? So marketing is automation is all about like recovering discards, like making the users to come back, reminding them about like your existence in a smart way, in a very personalized, personalized way at that eventually bring you just incremental revenue, incre sales without spending more. So that’s what I would say about marketing automation and

Arlen
[00:08:21]
Yeah. Makes sense. And it’s, it’s really key what you mentioned because a lot of businesses, the focus is always really to drive more people, drive more traffic, potential customers to the site. But with marketing automation, like you said, you’re dealing with the pool of customers that you already have the pool of visitors that you’re already getting. You’re automating your efforts with them, whether it’s, you know, abandoned cart campaigns, whether it’s newsletter campaigns and putting people in certain funnels. So you kind of already have this pool of people, these pool of potential customers that are visiting your sites, you know, on a monthly basis. And it’s just taking advantage of that pool. So, you know, when you’re doing that, it’s like you have, the pie is already there for you, for you to eat. You just gotta, you know, you gotta take advantage of it and dive in.

Aleksandra
[00:09:08]
Yeah. But even actually, if you don’t have any traffic like for now, right. If you, if you are just starting out, you don’t have any customers. I would still say that you, you need to make sure that your actually funnel doesn’t have any calls before you’re gonna start acquiring some users and boosting traffic to your website. Right? Yeah. Because if you actually like, won’t take care of that. If you won’t actually have configured the marketing campaigns, then actually doesn’t make sense to start the prospecting campaigns because that will be just, you know, a huge inefficient inefficiency for you. So that cost per user acquisition let’s say will be like, like twice as high as it could be. Right. So even that that’s something I would definitely recommend to all of your like listeners, even if they’re like, you know, starting out, like still let’s make sure that you have like, you know, some basic like full setup such as, you know, or marketing such some cards, automations cetera. So that, you know, once you can get the traffic, they, they won’t actually leak for the files.

Arlen
[01:10:01]
Yeah. Very, very true. Very true. You mentioned, you know, we kind of tossed around a few different tactics of course, of, of increasing the ROI abandoned card is a huge one. What are some other tactics that can help a business increase their ROI without really, you know, spending marketing dollars on driving more people to the site?

Aleksandra
[01:10:19]
Yeah. So yeah, recovering cards is like one very generic actually like kinda word. And like you basically like what it means, right? So you should be like thinking about recovering abandon cards, even if they’re like on the website. So still like the, all the good, like, you know, exit, internet popups, actually they’re working pretty well like this also the way to generate the subscriber to generate actually delete, even if they’re actually not, not buying anything, then you know, like a way to recover abandon cards, power marketing ads. So what would also here, we now is that basically for display ads. And once we are talking about like display ads, let’s say on social, but not only then usually the clickthrough rate for display ads for a marketing ads is like, you know, 10 times higher than, you know, for a standard just standard prospecting ads you’re launching and notice like the, the first thing for just for the recover, you know, recovering the balance cards is an automated triggered email series.

Aleksandra
[01:11:14]
So you’re actually, you should be thinking about like leveraging email marketing and email marketing still is like a super effective channel to retain new users, to reactivate them, to warm them up. And here actually, like once you’re thinking about marketing automation, you should be thinking about mixing various channels together. Right? So you can mix, you know, some of our marketing ads, you can mix it, them with emails just to get the cool consistency of the messaging that you are trying to tell. And obviously then with, you know, like, well, the messaging, I also mean whether you’re using some discount counts or not just to make sure that you are targeting the right segment in the right time through the right channel. And that marketing automation basically allows you to get that efficiency. So allows you like, you know, to set up a flow that is mixing values far as channels emails like ads and popups, let’s say.

Aleksandra
[01:12:00]
Yeah. So that’s, you know, one of the tactics related with, with abandon cards, for example, but there are so many more like, you know, making sure that you are first educating your customers and then selling them, pitching them to them. Right. Kind of nurturing that also like, you know, doing things such as, you know, working with loyal customers with some ation programs, basically it’s like five times easier still actually to sell the new product to an old customer rather than like, you know, build a trust within a new customer. Right? Yeah. So, so you should be like, you know, celebrating customers birthday and celebrating like the milestones and also like retargeting the scale customer segmentation. So I would say eventually like the segmentation and customer segmentation then messaging personalization is also the key. And obviously why talking about like segmentation here, I would also like recommend not just, you know, like the attributes based segmentation, but the event based segmentation so that you are actually like, you know, segmenting your customers, your users on the website based on their behavior and then like offering specific discounts, F communications channels on the basis of the segment.

Aleksandra
[01:13:08]
So yeah. Yeah. Those are just, you know, couple of the like marketing automation basics that are really just making a difference.

Arlen
[01:13:14]
True. Yeah. One of the key things that I think you, you even mentioned that kind of resonates without, I think timing is the main thing that I think you is really important across, no matter what you do, cuz across all of those things, timing is, is key from the yeah. Exit intent. When people leave the site, what’s the proper timing on, when do you reach out to them, the band in cart? How soon do you send them? How often do you follow up those types of things? If people yeah. Engage in any of your, let’s say any aspects of your newsletter or information, it’s really key that you, you get the right timing to pull the people back to your site and get them more engaged with what you’re

Aleksandra
[01:13:54]
Doing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that’s something that should be also experimenting with, right? Yeah. So it should be also experimenting with timing, with the frequency yeah. With various like customer segments just to learn, but then like obviously like you need to learn what is working for your business, but for most cases, like there are the standard benchmarks that are working. Right. So also like you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just actually like should implement some basic templates that are available in every single marketing automation platform and software. Right. And just, you know, implement them to your business and I’m like promising you they’re gonna work. Right. Yeah. So yeah,

Arlen
[01:14:24]
For sure. For sure. Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned platform, cuz that was kind of where I’m going next. We’re in a, kind of a different world here. I, I talked about when I kind of got started in business, which was way back for year 2000. And this was before all of these SAS companies were out there that provided all of these email marketing solutions, these marketing automations, when I started things up, none of that existed, if you needed some type of automated functionality via marketing, you had to have it customized by some web developers. You know, there may have been a few up and coming tools out there that you could pay for, maybe get ’em installed on a server, but the SAS was really kind of non-existent at that time today, it’s a different story. There are a ton of marketing automation solutions. And so when somebody is looking to kind of dive deep and really go all in with marketing automations, what are some specific tools that you could recommend for people that have success and what are the key features?

Aleksandra
[01:15:22]
It depends a lot on the industry. Right? Cause like every single platform is that good response also like specialize in specific like industry. But obviously like I would like recommend, you know, starting with like get response specifically if you require some, you know, like support, if you’d require some educational and materials, if you like to get some templates and it’s easy to use platform marketing automation platform, like then get responses a really good, good choice. Right. Cause there are also some, you know, like super heavily enterprise driven softwares and that’s basically like allowed to do like everything, but like they don’t give you any huge, huge support. So, or like, you know, they’re not localized and their response. We, we do know that specifically from people from all the, the world from Spain, Italy, etcetera, it’s really important that they do only have the platform itself.

Aleksandra
[01:16:08]
Cause the platforms are like similar, right? They do have like email marketing, they have popups, they have marketing automation, product recommendations, events, et cetera. But then like where, where is like distinguishing it are, you know, some integrations so that this is like the first thing, whether you are B2B, whether you are like, you know, eCommerce and to make sure that this product has it, for example, get a response where heavily focused on eCommerce is making sure that this integration, Shopify and other e-commerce stores really seamless, but there are also some, you know, like marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, that basically is more of a CRM. So if you’re a B2B company and I would rather actually go, you know, to HubSpot specifically, if you need CRM. Right. Cause, but if you’re like e-commerce or if you like, you know, like B2C or like B2B without this like huge, huge, and you have like another e-commerce and sorry, other CR and hubs, but then definitely get response would be a good choice just to like yeah.

Aleksandra
[01:17:00]
Highlight few things here. So then like, yeah, the key aspects are like how much support do you need? And this is a huge differentiator, right? So, you know, at get response, for example, we do offer like the support in like eight different languages, 24 hours per like every single per day, every single day in the week. And that’s something that I know like that the customers are pushing a lot specifically, if you are running your eCommerce store, like, you know, with a just five people they’re hired and you, you basically don’t have like enough time just to really spend, you know, tons of times on building something, you can just leverage, you know, the support and some templates and have it all running. So that’s something that people are definitely are leveraging there. One more thing that I would say, cause, you know, within the marketing automation software, you do have this email marketing automation like landing pages, AB testings, segmentation, product recommendations, popups, et cetera.

Aleksandra
[01:17:50]
But what is crucial also is to make sure that you get your store configured and website configured that way, that you are able to run some behavior analysis so that you are measuring some events and here can obviously can just have the JavaScript like your website, but once you are a bigger company, bigger, like, you know, eCommerce company then definitely leveraging such through such a segment or, you know, at least Google tag manager is crucial if you have like tons of events and if you just, you know, want to connect them to various software. So this events management right now, and it’s really crucial for every single software that, that you are using as marketing became much more behavioral basically. Right? Yeah. And tracking fight some, you know, like actions to introduce the cookie last world tracking like still is big thing. And it’s gonna be like a big thing the real time personalization.

Arlen
[01:18:45]
Yeah. Really, for sure. Yeah. One thing that kind of some key things that I see just being co-founder for size company, one of the big things that we were consistently seeing kind of as demands from our CU from customers is, is integrations. It’s really huge these days because we have all of these other solutions that really have to really talk together nicely because if not, then yeah. It can be really a pain for the customers to try to get data let’s say from one tool to the next and to be able to effectively manage that. And so I, I’m starting to see that being some of the first questions that we are getting on. I’m sure you’re saying the same thing is, is what are the integrations that you have? Yeah. You guys work well with Shopify, you work well with this solution, these other solutions. Yeah. Tech manager, all of that is really, is really important.

Aleksandra
[01:19:35]
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Cause right now all the like market solution and market SA solutions are like much more specialized. So it means that you need to actually specialize into being like they know really good with when it comes to integration of Shopify or shop newcomers, let’s say, right. So you’re kind of choosing your niche and then, or like with CRMs or like with, you know, segment, et cetera, and this is the only way for it to grow and like, yeah, I agree. This is one of the first questions that the customers ask and that’s why we’re so heavily focused on, on integration integrations in general.

Arlen
[02:20:07]
Yeah, sure. For sure. Yeah. I, I can definitely see that across the board. Well, as we get ready to wrap things up, I wanted to see if you could maybe highlight some examples of some businesses that you’ve either worked with or you’re just familiar with in general that have successfully increased their ROI of their marketing campaigns. And then what specifically did they do to, to achieve that?

Aleksandra
[02:20:26]
Yeah, sure. So there’s actually, one of my favorites. Examples is like from one year ago basically, and this is like one of our customers and really like interesting one. So their name is land cafe and basically like they are an online star that, you know, that created out the love of travel and coffee basically. They’re like for offering some very high end quality like coffee piece. Right. So rather like a small like store, like family, like business here, but growing pretty, pretty, pretty fast and specialized in like, you know, delivering coffee bin that I think specifically during the coffee time became a big thing. Right. Because everyone started ordering and getting some subscriptions for coffee and like that became like much, much better thing. And basically what they did, they increased the, the sales by of 54% thanks to an educational campaign. So basically what they did, like they obviously were, they were actually acquiring like some leads for the website, but instead of like pushing all of the customers, present their products, introduce their products, they basically created this like marketing automation email series that was like made up with about like six or like eight educational emails that basically showed where Thelan cafe like comes, coffee comes from why you should choose their coffee.

Aleksandra
[02:21:40]
Where are the characteristics? What is story behind them? And there were like six or eight different emails. And basically the goal of this was to kind of like sell you the story. Yeah. And showcase that they are really actually into this topic. Right. So showcase them as an experts built brand authority. And then, you know, after like being really engaged into like, you know, the whole comps, they actually closed the whole series with just a standard, you know, like no discount, just a standard actually like product presentation. And there was actually actually success for them specifically. I think the fact that they didn’t need to, they didn’t actually use a discount. They actually, and the products were pricey. So they kind of use this education just to get much better ROI of their campaigns and much better margins. Yeah. Cause like businesses are all about the margins and like, you know, the net revenue rather than just, you know, the total revenue. And that’s something that this is also very often forget about with adding, you know, Walmart extra discount, right. That’s basically giving discount for Ecommerces. It means like losing the margins that you probably could have.

Arlen
[02:22:41]
I like that. Yeah. That’s, that’s a great strategy because I’ve had countless people on the podcast that have reiterated the same thing, which is stories sell. It’s not the facts, the figures about your product. It’s the company’s story. A lot of times that’s the first thing people wanna see is what’s the story behind the product? Why are you unique from the next product? And if it sounds like they did a great job of kind of curating that story over a series of emails, so people can kind of see where they are today and how do they get to that end product that comes as the, the coffee beans and the, and like the high quality product there.

Aleksandra
[02:23:16]
So makes a lot of, yeah. And then basically you can specifically, this is like heavily for the product you build. You like, you know, you build the trust among customers, you build like author. So you know that you are not, that you are knowledgeable that not just, you know, some kind of a random product. Yeah. You can also like, you know, get much better, you know, like orders dollars, right. So you can get much better margins and you know, like you can also charge extra cuz you know, that’s kinda building people’s expectations pay. It’s also like really important right now I think.

Arlen
[02:23:46]
Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. That really kind of adds to the whole social proof of a, of a brand by adding all of that authority, then getting customers to understand you’re the real deal. You, you know, what you’re talking about, there was time spent in the creation of the product. So

Aleksandra
[02:24:01]
Yeah. That’s a great, yeah, exactly.

Arlen
[02:24:02]
That’s a great example.

Aleksandra
[02:24:03]
But then also what, what was actually like super important is that like, you know, they were basic like then they were making sure that they are like pushing the products only to the piece, the people who actually were nurtured. So it’s also like a smart move just to make sure. Okay. If you really actually went for the whole series, like you are nurturing, you warm enough, you were ready to buy. Yeah. So it’s not like trying to put the price to everyone, just, you know, get such a big list. They kinda like choose like quality of the list versus quantity. I see. And I think that’s, that’s really like brave, like in many, many, many aspects, that’s something that basically the K work pretty well for em.

Arlen
[02:24:39]
Yeah. That makes sense. Just kind of nurturing those people that have already kind already primed more serious than just kind of blasting out the same campaign to just everyone. So I understand that makes, makes a lot of sense. Alexandra, it’s been awesome talking to you. I’ve definitely learned a lot with regards to increasing ROI and marketing automation. There’s really a ton more we could talk about, but I think what you, what you’ve added is definitely a, a great start for any business. That’s looking to improve their ROI of via marketing automation. But lastly, before we do let you go, I always like to switch gears here as just so our audience can get to know you a little bit better. So if you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think we’d be interested to know.

Aleksandra
[02:25:22]
Oh, that there are like, that’s a tricky question, you know? I think so, but I think I’ve some stories as everyone ask from the university times about, I wanna actually, one of my favorite one is that, you know, as a student basically together with some of my friends, you know, I’d be playing, you know, guitar in one of the college cities, all town in order to, you know, raise some money for a return trying to get so was really, really fun. And one actually, and then like we were so like excited actually with the fact that you where’s, some managers bring us so fun that we even actually had another, like incident later on that we decided like to sing and to like, you know, like play some guitar terrace in a, in a subway. So, so that’s actually capital sitting in PO, so, okay. Yeah. That’s actually quite fine. Like great and exciting time ones you were in with you watch what people are gonna think about you or like yeah, you’re just doing good and you can fun. So

Arlen
[02:26:12]
That’s cool that,

Aleksandra
[02:26:13]
Yeah. So that’s, that’s one of the stories little bit more like related to my music education also about that’s great fun.

Arlen
[02:26:20]
Okay, great. Thank you for sharing that. That’s that’s some good stuff. Yeah. Definitely takes a lot of guts to just go out there to some public area and then just start playing you definitely gotta have a lot of confidence to do that, to just be confident in yourself, to just, you know, get out there and then play your music. So awesome stuff. And thank you for sharing

Aleksandra
[02:26:39]
That. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was great. Great time. And also again, the fact that, you know, people eventually actually started joining us with some songs. Cetera. It was really real fun.

Arlen
[02:26:49]
Okay, cool. That’s some cool stuff. Well, thank you for sharing that Alexandra. And lastly, before we do let you go, if any of our listeners wanna reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about marketing automation or proving their ROI, what is the best way for them to get in contact with

Aleksandra
[02:27:02]
You? I think LinkedIn actually like I’m pretty much active on like super active on LinkedIn. I’m also refined like all the messages, unless they’re like super spa. I’m not like reply to really spa along emails, but if it’s like personalized, let’s say message then will like reach back to you.

Arlen
[02:27]:
Okay, great. That sounds awesome. I definitely encourage for everyone to look you up on LinkedIn and then connect with you that way. Well, thank you Alexandra for joining us. We really appreciate having you on today of the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Aleksandra
[02:27:34]
Cool. That is a great pleasure. Thanks a lot.

Arlen
[02:27:36]
Thank you.

Speaker 1
[02:27:37]
Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast. 

Podcast Guest Info

Alexsandra Korczynska
CMO @ GetResponse