Bertha's Blog: What Channels Does Marketing Automation Work With? – Cracking The Code Of Marketing Automation

We’ve talked about drip campaigns, email deliverability, and some other things related to marketing automation. Now it’s the time to discuss how well does it integrate with other online marketing channels. Does it compete with them? Do they reinforce each other? You’re about to find out.

Before you jump into the video recording, perhaps you’ll want to refresh your memory and take a look at our previous episodes. Should you have missed any of them or just want to make sure you’re all familiar with the concepts, check out these links below.

Part 1: What is marketing automation?

Part 2: Who is marketing automation for?

Part 3: What are marketing automation workflows?

Part 4: Why is email deliverability important?

Now that you’re ready, here’s the video recording of the discussion in which Lon answers a few questions about marketing automation and its relation to other online marketing channels. You’ll also learn that Santa Claus was born in the Netherlands on the Santa Claus day. And If you prefer to read the transcript instead, you’ll find it later down this post.

Let us know what you think about it. If you’d like to ask Lon or Michal a question, or simply share your thoughts on the topic, just go to the comments section and join the discussion. We’d appreciate your feedback!

Michael Leszczynski: Now since we have been talking about Facebook and social media in general. What sort of channels do you believe marketing automation works with? Is it just email? Or what do you believe it should work with?

Lon Safko: Well, you know, pretty much any kind of digital marketing whatsoever. I rely on two platforms, I rely on email marketing because I like email the best, it’s the most effective, I have four times as many people in my email list as I have friends on Facebook.

ML: Yeah, and you have quite a few friends on Facebook I imagine.

LS: Yeah, I do, with the Social Media Bible I had accumulated quite a few friends and Twitter, and all the networks. But I really focus on email list building because that really has the best conversion. So, email marketing automation, absolutely, gotta do it. Then on the other side of it, you know, you use something like HootSuite. Hoot like an owl, suite like a hotel, you know it’s awesome you can either use the free version of it or you can get the upgraded 9.95 US dollars a month, which is really, it’s like three Starbucks coffees, so not a lot.

ML: So many of us can relate.

LS: Platforms can work through HootSuite, because it’ll work with every one of them. It works with Facebook and Twitter, multiple pages on Facebook by the way, so if you have all different pages and groups you can do that. Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ (Google+), so the cool thing is I can create one post but if I’m traveling and I want to send a live post, operate one post, I use HootSuite and bam, goes out to every one of my platforms. On my automated posts what I’ll do is, I have an excel spreadsheet that has a 150, I have multiple sheets that have about a 150 in each, so I can take those 150 and they automatically schedule themselves every two hours during the course of the day. I hit the button, I’m done for three months, I don’t have to do a thing on any of my platforms for three months other than live updates. Could you imagine how much work that saves me? So I like HootSuite.

ML: Yeah I can imagine all the places I’d visit myself during that time, 3 months off. Well OK, but you do have to reply to people.

LS: You have to pay attention, you’ve got to watch comments, you’ve got to participate in the conversation, so if one of these posts go out and someone comments on it you need to respond. But, see, that’s the thing, I don’t have to worry about pushing the content out originally. I now can focus on what’s really the most important thing and that’s actually connecting with my customers on a one-to-one basis, because not only does that customer feel special because I answered a comment that they wrote, but other people are watching this conversation and they know that if I’ve taken the time, I’m sincere person, which I am.

ML: If they didn’t know that already. That’s true, and you know, these days with automation you can plug in your ecommerce site, your messages, your social media posts, and you know much more than that. You know that all of the messages are going to be valuable to your audience. You can talk to them about the products that they watch, the messages that they’ve opened, the products they want to buy, or if you want them to review them, perhaps suggest something else that you know the audience might like. So you have plenty of opportunities. Even text messages, you can plug them together so they will follow up afterwards. It’s just amazing how much the media has changed over the years and how much digital marketers have to learn about, these days.

LS: Absolutely, and by the way, also use an image, use a 72 DPI small image when you do use HootSuite to post anything, because you know as well as I do, when you’re going down the Facebook list of all the people that have posted, you never stop at anybody who just does text, you only stop on images and photos, so that’s really important.

ML: Right, yeah, images speak more than words, right?

LS: Confucius says, a picture’s worth a thousand words so video’s worth 10,000.

ML: I’m sure our video manager is happy about it. Yet another year of the video, right?

LS: Yeah, video’s really important, video is the most effective form of communication, beyond anything, beyond anything at all. We’re human, we look at each other’s facial expressions, we look at how you move your eyebrows, your facial gestures. Because we can tell whether somebody is sincere, whether they’re telling the truth, whether they’re lying, so that when someone is sincere, video is really the only way that you can convey all of that. Tonal quality is how your voice goes up and down, those are all signs of whether or not you can trust somebody.

ML: That’s absolutely right.

LS: And never put a video in an email. Use a link.

ML: That’s true, perhaps a little image that looks like a video player but not the actual video. I can imagine many people are still struggling. I know quite a few people have been asking us about it, like “how do you do it?”, “but I still want it” so even if we tell them – don’t, because it’s not supported by many email clients, they still want it.

LS: I know. Well, plus the other thing is, if you send out an email, let’s say to your list and let’s say that there’s a hundred people that work at a large corporation or uses a GoDaddy email server when that server sees your email coming in and it sees a 100, 200, 300 copies of that video, it is so huge! Remember, it’s not just the one email that goes out it’s all the emails that hit that server about the same time. When it sees it sees it, look I’m not eating up my hard drive space, because this is obviously too large and it’ll block everything just because the email is too large but a link has really effectively no content whatsoever.

ML: That’s true, and you know, people can watch it at their own convenience, in their favorite browser, media player, so yeah you know, it’s it’s a nice way of making their life easier, right?

LS: Yeah, it is. And I like to post everything up on YouTube anyway, even videos that I’m putting in my email. Why not? If somebody is in YouTube and puts in the right keywords and comes across that video, well that’s somebody that I never would have in my email list anyway and that viewer can convert into a customer. And I actually had that happen! There was a woman in the Netherlands who saw one of my videos that I just put up there, wasn’t even a marketing video and she says “I like the way you speak, would you mind coming to the Netherlands? We’ll fly you first-class, put you up in hotels and have you speak to all the Universities in the Netherlands, and pay you!” I was like Okay!

ML: I imagine the answer was yes?

LS: The answer definitely was yes.

ML: I can imagine it was beautiful, right?

LS: Oh it really was wonderful and I got to be in the town where Santa Claus was born on Santa Claus day.