Marketing Automation for Ecommerce – with Rory J Knighton from Runäway Collective | DMR #252

Full transcript:

David Bain
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 252: marketing automation for e commerce,

Bot
Digital Marketing Radio with David Bain.

David Bain
I’m David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio, the podcast and YouTube channel for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who want to stay on top but that it is tools, tactics and trends, as shared on this very show by today’s modern marketing masters. How efficient and effective is your ecommerce marketing automation? are you delivering email? What are the right moments and how effective is your messaging? Those are just three of the questions that I’m going to be asking my guests on Digital Marketing Radio Episode 252. He is the founder of runaway collective, our marketing subscription service focused on marketing automation and film production. helping small and medium sized businesses play with the biggest and best without the cost. Welcome to DMR. Rory J. Knighton.

Rory J. Knighton
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m a big fan.

David Bain
Well, that’s an incredible way to start off, you get five stars yourself without reply. May I just say that you can find Rory over at runaway dot worlds? And that’s the first thing that jumped out at me actually Rory, your domain name? What is it like having adult world domain name?

Rory J. Knighton
Well, so so those are called general top level domain names if we want to get a bit technical here. And I think a couple of years ago, I think six years ago now when I first was there, I thought they were going to be everywhere and massive. But they’ve not really taken off as much as I would have hoped or thought they would. So you can get them for anything these days. You can get them got shoes, dope business, pretty much any any words you think of is probably being registered now. And you can have it don’t film anything you’d like. And I thought they were going to be everywhere. But people tend to still like the classics of.com.co. uk. So but I enjoy worlds because it’s sort of all encompassing, we do lots of different things here at runway. So I think I think it’s a it’s a subdomain that that works. Well, I like it.

David Bain
I remember years ago, running a website with a dot biz domain name. And I thought that was gonna become popular as a hobby that really, I hadn’t seen a doctor’s name for a whole long,

Rory J. Knighton
long now it’s all fallen back into the annals of time along with dotnet, and things like that, but not not so cool. Not so trendy.

David Bain
One thing that I thought I found it more difficult to do was actually rank adopt this domain in search engine results. So do you find it more difficult to actually deliver email using adult world domain? Or do you not use that domain to deliver email?

Rory J. Knighton
No, it makes it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever for our email campaigns. We have a slightly different domain for send outs for email campaigns, but it still ends in dot world. So it’s runaway marketing dot world. And we do that for a couple of different reasons, but primarily just in case anything happens to it or gets blacklisted or spammed or whatever. It’s still separate from the main site. But it’s still a dot world extension.

David Bain
So obviously, we’re focusing primarily on marketing automation today. So how would you summarise the way that marketing automation has changed over the last few years?

Rory J. Knighton
It’s it is it has evolved and grown at such a ridiculously rapid pace, that I think many people don’t even realise what’s possible. Now I myself am a huge nerd. When it comes to automating things, I try and automate pretty much everything in my life to a ridiculous extent. I’ve posted YouTube videos about how I try and automate my life with things like I won’t say her name, but a certain smart device that you can talk to. I try and put it in everything in my life. And you can, you can automate pretty much anything you like. So I can say a certain phrase or certain words to my smart device, and it will add something to my to do list and then I’ll get a reminder about it. Now I’m terribly forgetful. So for me, it’s been an absolute lifesaver, having automation, whether it’s marketing automation, or personal automation, it’s been a lifesaver and smart devices have really pushed the envelope with how that works. I can pull my phone out my pocket, I can say a few words. And like magic, things start appearing on digital dashboards they have and it really is a game changer. And I think many people don’t even realise what’s possible. Now you have things like If This Then That, which is like a recipe builder and you can connect lots of different apps to to each other. So you can have XL connected to Shopify and automatically import things. It’s, it’s really phenomenal. And I encourage many people to go and explore and have a play because you can really have some pretty life changing experiences with with automations and save yourself hundreds of hours every single year.

David Bain
I’m actually receiving many emails at the moment many outreach emails at the moment that are obviously automated, but don’t read that well. And I always feel that a personal email that something that demonstrates that they’ve actually maybe listened to So someone’s reaching out to me asking, for instance, to be a guest on Digital Marketing Radio, then I want them to actually demonstrate that they’ve listened to a previous episode, or I want them to engage with me personally, did you think that automation can any, in any way really, completely replace the personal touch? No,

Rory J. Knighton
I think in general, the automations that I use, and that I tell my clients or businesses that I work with to use are ones that are pretty menial ones that you spend hours doing. So for instance, basic data entry that you might do a few times a week that take you a couple of hours, you want to replace that with automation, what you don’t want to remove is the personal touch, human to human contact. So I have this funny dichotomy in my life, because I am, I’m quite sort of naturalistic, and I like sort of barefoot running and that kind of stuff. And then I also am massively invested in tech. And so it’s, it’s tough to try and merge those two worlds together. And when you try and automate everything, that’s when things start to go wrong. So you do still want to keep that that element. But then I would also sort of as a caveat to that, say, if you’re getting automated emails that you’re not convinced by, they’re just not very good automated emails. So So we, for instance, give you a quick example of runaway we send to our clients anniversary emails, and the anniversary emails, don’t just say, Happy Anniversary for your one year anniversary, they will specify the project that we worked on together, how many days specifically has been since we work together, what they’ve used and what their name is, and we will use an image that’s related to them. So if for instance, we have a client that’s really interested in golf, we’ll always make sure that we’ll use a animated golf image that that’s all automated, the whole thing is automated, but it feels really personal and unique. So the automation, really, to get the most out of automation, you’ve got to put the effort in, you can’t just sort of set it and forget it. And I think a lot of brands get confused about that and think I was automated, I can just leave it a little bit like with a Tesla car, people think that it drives itself doesn’t quite drive itself, it still doesn’t need a driver in there to steer it.

David Bain
So when you talk about anniversary meals, are you talking about anniversaries since that you’ve done business with them, or their birthdays,

Rory J. Knighton
it could be a range of things. So we do birthday celebrations, where we give them a discount off their plan, if they’re on a subscription with us. Or we might just send them a gift, it really depends on who they are and what their relationship even past clients, we still try and keep some level of contact with them. But we’ll also do anniversary emails for clients that still work with us. So a three month or six month or a nine month or 12 month anniversary, and we’ll pick out sort of highlights of what’s happened. Now, this isn’t my idea. I didn’t really come up with this. I was inspired by EasyJet, they had a fantastic email marketing campaign where they were sending to their customers or the destinations that they’d been and how many miles they travelled. I mean, not great for climate change, and reminder, the damage you’re doing to the planet if you’ve flown to a lot of destinations, but it was incredibly personalised. And they did that all through using automated data. So the destinations people have been and also destinations that people like them had been to with suggestions of So, so hyper hyper personalised, and it’s just fantastically engaging.

David Bain
So what percentage of ecommerce brands would you say are actively using anniversary emails at the moment and I are many missing out on the opportunity to moment

Rory J. Knighton
massively. And a big one for me isn’t isn’t just the anniversary emails. A big one for me is the welcome emails. So many brands just just they completely waste the opportunity. They just they just they fail with with the first hurdle. So you’re well, you’re welcome. Email is going to have the biggest open rate, you’re going to see at least 50% open rates, which is which is huge, absolutely huge. And many brands, including really big brands like Louis Vuitton, or Ralph Lauren, they will just send an email that says thanks for signing up shop. Now, they won’t do any kind of engagement, they won’t do a sort of a reason to believe in the brand. They won’t do a walkthrough of products. Someone that does that really well as a source. I actually covered this on a recent YouTube video and I sort of reviewed different types of emails like this. And they do it fantastically well. They talk about reasons to believe in their brand and why to shop with them. But but many brands do the automations. But they don’t do them. Well. I suppose it’s a bit like Like you said, you get these automated emails that you can tell they’re automated. So the goal with email automation is is to get away from it looking or feeling like it’s automated.

David Bain
So you touched upon a welcome sequence rather than just a welcome email. What’s best practice in terms of number of emails to send initially to someone what’s most effective?

Rory J. Knighton
Well, I think it does depend on what your product and services it does depend on what you’re doing what you’re selling, whether you’re a software as a service business, or whether you’re a product based business. But as a general rule of thumb, I think you can get away with an onboarding series, that’s 123 emails, and I would say three years is probably the limit that you want to send and also the timings really important of those. You don’t want to send three emails immediately or within an hour of each other over a set. number of days is quite good, could be every other day or one to three days in a row. But I would say three years is pretty much the limit for an onboarding sequence.

David Bain
And after they become a customer, is it generally accepted, practice reasonable? Or is it against the law to carry on emailing people after that, and perhaps even opposite people into an email newsletter of yours,

Rory J. Knighton
you should, you should absolutely do that, certainly not against the law. And you should absolutely bring your customers on board with you bring them on the journey with you, and nurture them. And what many brands and businesses they tend to do is they tend to focus on capturing customers, just more customers, more customers, more subscribers, and they forget about their current subscribers, and they don’t nurture them, they don’t look after them, they don’t reward them. And when I tend to work with clients, I tend to recommend the strategy of finding them and nurturing them and rewarding, you’ve got to try and look after your current subscribers, because if you don’t do that, you’re either going to annoy them, or they’ll disappear and lose interest. And then what’s the point in trying to get more subscribers if you’ve got a terrible retention rate,

David Bain
so what’s a good reason to keep on emailing people on a regular basis and what kind of frequencies acceptable,

Rory J. Knighton
acceptable i that is a funny one. Again, it really depends on what you’re doing. Some brands do this quite well, some brands do it terribly. So my go to example of brands that don’t do so well, would be brands like my protein, or any kind of protein based online shopping brands, they can tend to be a little bit too spammy. Now for them, it doesn’t doesn’t matter so much, because they have such a huge database of subscribers, such a huge number of of new subscribers, they’re not so fussed about that. But for certain brands that want to retain really good quality customers, and they want to keep them engaged on board. You don’t want to be spamming your audiences, you don’t want to be sending them emails. And again, that’s where automation comes into and looking at activity levels. So one of the things that you can look at is is something what I call it, hot coffee, it’s not quite called hot coffee is called bring back campaigns, where you have inactive customers that haven’t been for a while, and then they pop on your site, after a couple of months of inactivity, offer them some form of reward. Whether it’s a discount or or other sort of incentive, those can work really, really well. But I think it’s a really delicate balance in terms of how much you you email your subscribers. And I think a healthy balances is no more than once a week, I personally find more than once a week, a little bit too much. And some brands do that. Okay, they’ll they’ll they’ll do like a digest email at the beginning of the week. And then they’ll do a summary email at the end of the week, like medium, for instance. And that can work. Okay. But I think it’s a very delicate balance in terms of frequency.

David Bain
And is it all about email? No, or do in app messages, social relations, social messages, MMS, SMS messages actually play a big part of it? No, an increasingly bigger part of it.

Rory J. Knighton
Absolutely. It’s, it’s been fluctuating. So so I was one of the first to get really excited about chatbots, a couple of years ago when they came out. And many, many brands and businesses and consumers alike poopoo them because they said they weren’t interested in chatbots. But but having a chatbot. For instance, on your on your website. I don’t even like calling them a chatbot. It sounds horrible. It sounds a pejorative term, it’s offensive to the chatbots. Having a helper app on your on your website is is fantastically beneficial. Because as just a basic example, offering delivery information through your chat bot is so much more efficient than your consumer or your customer having to go through your website, find delivery info, find the information they want. Whereas if you have it pre programmed into your chat bot, you can list all the delivery information. And all they have to do is type the key word delivery. And you’ll get the full list of all the different delivery information that you’re after. And that makes it a much, much faster interaction. And consumers enjoy that they want that they they’re happy to do that. It only becomes a problem when you try and automate everything with the chat bot and the the end user the consumer becomes frustrated and they want to talk to a real person. So again, it’s all about balance. It’s finding that balance of automation, how much to automate and when to automate

David Bain
and SMS that seems to be increasing in popularity now. Certainly in the States. I’m seeing many more people. Yeah, yeah, button to SMS updates. Is that something that you’re seeing as an increasing trend here as well?

Rory J. Knighton
Yeah, I mean, I mean, Shopify, for instances, example, offers SMS updates right at the checkout page. And you can sign up to that. And there’s various different apps and plugins that you can get to help support that from a marketing perspective. People like it, because it’s, it’s pretty direct, and it’s to the point. So you’ll get one line saying 50% off shop. Now, here’s the link, or here’s the code. It’s pretty clean and direct. It’s not inside another app. It’s just a simple text that you get a little pop up notification on that. And that can work really, really well when you’re not able to offer someone to download an app and you can you can’t send push notifications. SMS has worked really, really well. People are much more likely to open an SMS or text than they are an email immediately. So so definitely a big rise in that. But again, it’s a balance of how frequently you do that. And what is the value that you’re adding? Are they going to be interested in what you’re, you’re selling to them? So again, it’s always looking at that balance. And does it make sense for you right this minute to send an SMS? Is it an important enough message,

David Bain
I should say to my us listener 35% of people that listen to Digital Marketing Radio are actually from the States. So when I say, over here as well, I was immediately thinking, Okay, I’m isolating an individual, I keep on thinking about individual listeners when I’m saying things and regret saying that, so apologies about that. But anyway, um, what about time of day? What? Just to send a message is that important? Or can you send an email at any time,

Rory J. Knighton
time of day, and not just time of day, but geolocation, where they’re based, what their opening habits are, are so so important and to sort of deep dive into that you need to be capturing data. If you’re not capturing your data with any kind of marketing activity, you are pretty much wasting your time because you are just doing a big blunder bust, you know, shotgun message instead of doing a sniper was using a bit too many gunner analogies here, instead of doing pinpoint accuracy, you’re just sort of shooting all over the place. So, if you are capturing the right amount of data on your customers, and you are segmenting that you can be hyper personalised with your emails, and you’ll find that many, many of your customers or subscribers, they will open up specific days and specific times of day. So, for instance, MailChimp, the email marketing platform offers the opportunity to do localised send out so you can send it out to the customers timezone. So you can set a timezone and it’ll send it out to all your database at that specific timezone. And that is fantastically beneficial. But, but automating it isn’t just enough to do the time, you also want to employ other elements of automation that’s related to it. So making it context sensitive. So if you are sending an email out in the evening, use an image that in your head, or that is, you know, relevant to an evening. So it could be a sunset shot, it could be a nice night scene of a city, whatever it is, make the whole email feel contextually relevant. So it’s silly to talk about morning and breakfast and things like that, and send an email at nighttime. So it’s just making those decisions in your automation setups. That all makes sense, and are all tied together.

David Bain
And what about the messaging itself? writing an email writing a message is a skill in itself. Should you be thinking psychologically, it should be be thinking, just just from a very informal storytelling perspective, what are some of the most effective ways to think about when you’re actually writing your copy?

Rory J. Knighton
Well, yeah, absolutely. Copy is is a speciality. And I would, I would implore us, in fact, I tell every business that I work with, try and get a copywriter. Because writing is a skill, it rarely is a skill. And there is so much that goes into good copywriting that it’s so so important to get it right because it can make or break your emails, your your your tagline your your your subject line is so so important to get people to open it and then your your your your initial messaging, you know how you address your subscriber you saying their name? What are you what are you trying to address them with? It’s so so important. So those types of automations it’s important to get them right and it’s important to split test them. So you should be doing some sort of split testing with your marketing automation campaigns and seeing what works best. But absolutely get a get a copywriter on board rather than trying to write all your emails yourself. And it can go horribly wrong. If you’re trying to fully automate emails or body copy, I would totally advise against that you can absolutely automate sort of the intro line, the subject line totally with their name, but I wouldn’t take it much further than that. In terms of body copy.

David Bain
I’ve tested out a tool called conversion.ai. Jarvis recently about a tool to actually write copy, sales copy web copy, how close to is AI at being able to write decent, decent English and other languages

Rory J. Knighton
are probably another decade away. It’s really not quite there yet. It can it can fool you into thinking on that sounds quite legit. Where you have like these these Twitter bot machines that sometimes can string a sort of a good sentence together. I think someone created a phoney Deepak Chopra bot that would spit out philosophical nonsense and jargon. And you couldn’t really tell the difference between Deepak Chopra and his bots. But it doesn’t tend to work on a on a very generic broad basis is the same thing with with general artificial intelligence is a very long way away, we can create artificial intelligence is very good at specific tasks. But when you try and make it more broad stroke, such as general writing for any application, then you’re going to run into problems and you’re going to end up with with with pretty poor copy and jibberish.

David Bain
Well, let’s segue to part two of our discussions. There’s no time for Rory his thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET SOFTWARE so Rory share a lesser-known martech tool is bringing you a lot of value at the moment and why that tools important You

Rory J. Knighton
won’t want this this, this might be a shock to some people. I am. I’ve been a big fan of Trello for about seven years a huge fan, in fact, but they’ve made so many changes as of late. I am now transitioning away from Trello. And I found this fantastic app called my master task. And it’s very similar to Trello. But it seems to do all the things that I wanted to do. So at the moment, it’s a slow process, I’m weaning myself off Trello. As I said, I’ve been using it for nearly a decade. So I’m fully ingrained in the software. I’m trying to move away from it and move to a much simpler, more transparent platform and meistertask is one, I definitely recommend people checking out.

David Bain
Okay, good to know. I’ve used Trello quite a bit in the past as well. But I’m probably in the process of considering other options at the moment myself, to be honest with you, because you go in there and you feel maybe wrongly that it hasn’t evolved that much.

Rory J. Knighton
No, it hasn’t evolved. It’s sort of devolved. I would say, in fact, I had a tweet from the founder or co founder of Trello, because I posted a video recently bashing Trello. And he wasn’t too impressed. And I don’t think it’s evolved in the right direction. And there are many other competitors that are going to definitely supersede it in the next couple of years. Like monday.com, for instance, is a very good alternative.

David Bain
The app that I’ve been told by a couple of people to use, and I’ve tried it and it looks great. It’s called click up. I’m not sure if yes, I bet at all. Yes,

Rory J. Knighton
absolutely. I have tried to click up it is very, very good. But that suffers from the opposite problem of Trello. And I think they’ve put a little bit too much in one, one, plan one app, I think it’s a little bit crowded in there, but it’s certainly superior to Trello

David Bain
superb, okay, well, moving on from something that you currently use to something that you’re going to use that then is NEXT ON THE LIST. So what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to test soon,

Rory J. Knighton
there’s a cool one called send Fox. It’s, it’s, it’s a little bit similar to MailChimp, but it seems a little bit more sophisticated, and it seems a little bit cleaner. I’m also trying to wean myself off MailChimp, I’ve used that for a very, very long time, I think well over a decade. And it’s just not quite cutting the mustard. They’ve made some huge improvements recently, but it’s just not quite right for me. So sandboxes are very similar all in one marketing email platform. I’m a big fan of email marketing, if anybody hadn’t noticed it, it seems to tick a lot of the boxes for me. So sand boxes is one that I’m seriously considering looking at

David Bain
superbe. Okay, so when I’ve used a few few mail tools as well, I started off with AWeber. And I ended up getting one of the original plans that essentially I’m still paying for it because it was such a good deal. And I moved away to email octopus for a while. And email octopus was really good value, because you can connect it to AWS as well. And AWS did the did the sending of your emails on your behalf. But I’ve just found it slightly restrictive. And actually, I’ve moved back to AWeber. Because I’ve got relatively simple needs. But I guess it depends on how how much automation you want to do. I used to hear a lot of recommendations for Active Campaign is that what you’ve tried as well,

Rory J. Knighton
I’ve tried Active Campaign wasn’t a fan at all. Again, it also is related to your own, you know, personal preferences and your learning style. So for instance, I’m dyslexic. And when things look a very sort of linear structured way, like a big excel sheet, it’s not for me, I’m a very visual person. I like things to be big and obvious where they are. I’ve worked in design a long time. So I like things that are very aesthetically pleasing. If apps look like Microsoft Excel, I tend to run a mile.

David Bain
Yeah, absolutely. And AWeber hasn’t moved on. Enough. I think they’ve improved a little bit recently. I also used auto pilots, auto pilot HQ. There are no code but and that was back maybe four or five years ago when I started using them and visually that there were such a wonderful experience. And when I saw for tools fun to use, and you use it more, I guess you educate yourself more than what you can do with it.

Rory J. Knighton
Absolutely. When when a tool becomes visceral, and you can click and drag things and move things around. And this that sort of kinetic vibe, they’re absolutely so much more rewarding than than a flat linear out

David Bain
or let’s move on to the this or that right. So this is the quick response round 10 quick questions, Just 2 rules here. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to see the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready? Yes. Tick Tock or Twitter. Tick tock, Facebook or LinkedIn, LinkedIn, YouTube or podcast or both traffic or leads. Traffic, paid search or SEO, SEO, ads or influencers, ads, Google ads or Facebook ads Facebook ads, email marketing or chat marketing, email marketing, more tech stack or all in one platform all in one platform, one to one or scale one to one. You got through it with just using the one booth. I was surprised actually by the the one to one instead of scale because you’re a man that specialises in autumn marketing automation, what do you say one to one there?

Rory J. Knighton
Because you can’t be one to one. I think it is unbeatable. I love to do things at scale and to see how you can grow things and expand things. But you. As I said earlier, I’ve got that dichotomy between sort of the tech world and sort of the human connected face to face world. And I think you can’t be one to one. And you use your both for YouTube or podcasts.

David Bain
Why is that?

Rory J. Knighton
I adore podcasts I’ve been I like to say I was one of the one of the people of podcast because I’ve been listening to podcasts before anybody knew what they were when when they were called net casts sometimes.

David Bain
That’s why we’re talking about early 2000s.

Rory J. Knighton
Yes, yeah. Yeah, I’m a huge fan. And I used to tell everybody about them all the time. And people used to tell me I was crazy. So So now I still don’t like the fact Yeah, they do. They do. I don’t like the fact on much that everybody talks about it every two minutes. It’s a bit like when I used to enjoy Apple computers, when they would grey boxes, and nobody knew what they were. And they will call things like power Pc 8500 before they were these sort of sexy things. And now everybody has one or everybody likes it, I like it less. So it’s Yeah, it’s one of those funny things and and YouTube, I adore YouTube apart from sort of the the the draconian censorship that they’re going through at the moment, as are many other platforms. I do love it as a platform for learning. It’s just fantastic. The same with podcasts. They’re both wonderful tools, if used in the right way for learning.

David Bain
I’m obviously recording this on video and publishing the end video, the editors video on YouTube, and then using the audio for a podcast as well. And there’s always a bit of a challenge between creating content for two different mediums. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think it’s possible to be just as effective in creating content for due to different mediums?

Rory J. Knighton
I think it really depends on what you want to do and what your goals are. There is that saying spread yourself thin. That does come to mind. I think if you want to do a platform really, really well, you have to be dedicated to that platform. And all the other platforms are just going to be add ons or tag ons. So for instance, for me personally, YouTube is my go to platform. And then other platforms like LinkedIn, or Instagram or sort of tag ons where I try and create slightly different content. But I don’t focus as much time on those platforms. I think it’s very difficult to do all platforms. Well.

David Bain
So do you try and drive traffic from LinkedIn to YouTube?

Rory J. Knighton
Yes. Much to Lincoln’s dismay, and upset. So whenever you mentioned things like YouTube in a post, or you post a link in a post that’s to an outside website, they’ll pretty much shadow ban it. They won’t admit to this, but but I’ve done multiple tests now on LinkedIn, where if I don’t mention the specific platform, the post does much better than when if I do mention the specific platform, so things like that, that really do annoy me.

David Bain
Absolutely, I mean, I’m experimenting with things like that as well, and taking maybe sections of a podcast or recording a little bit after afterwards. And then I’m taking the clip and uploading it as a native video to LinkedIn with with subtitles on it, and I’m finding that that tends to perform a lot better certainly than YouTube video.

Rory J. Knighton
Yeah. 100%. It’s the same with Facebook as well. If you post a link to YouTube on Facebook, it won’t do as well as a native video on Facebook. And that’s been the case for a couple of years now.

David Bain
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it kind of encourages you to build a brand or which is a good thing. So when I can see things like look at this content here on LinkedIn, you know, to share this great, some snapshots of the discussion, but still provide value and then say at the end of the short video, check out the full episode and Digital Marketing Radio. And then hopefully, people will search for that brand on their favourite podcast app or YouTube platform.

Rory J. Knighton
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s the best way to attack something like that, rather than trying to do the same content on all platforms. And just being lazy with it. If you do put a bit of effort in and create segments or excerpts of your show, and I do that with my YouTube videos, I because some of them are far too long. I do 30 minute YouTube videos and walkthroughs, which nobody’s going to watch on LinkedIn. So I spliced those down into either 32nd or two minute videos. Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, let’s move on to the $10,000 question.

David Bain
If I were to give you $10,000 and you had to spend it over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend it on? And how would you measure success?

Rory J. Knighton
It’s a really tough one, that one because there’s a few things that I’d be very tempted to dip my toe into with 10 grand because I’m presuming it’s no strings attached.

David Bain
I’ve just got that it’s no strings attached, but it’s theoretical rather than defence. In terms of the the hard money hitting your bank account,

Rory J. Knighton
I think it would have to be podcasts. I think ads on podcasts seem to be doing phenomenally well at the moment. Because you can be super specific with with which podcast you go after and which you target. And you can create a really tailored specific ad and especially if it’s someone like one of my favourite podcasts is this week in tech with Leo Laporte. When he does the ad, he does it. It’s just a beautiful segue. It doesn’t sound like this is an ad. It sounds really genuine when he talks about it. And that, to me is so much more convincing than just running a voice ad or a video ad, when you have an influencer or a podcast host talk about a product and they do it in a caring, sort of energetic way, for me is just fantastic value for money.

David Bain
So is it possible to drive a podcast listener to a bespoke link to measure the success of the podcast ad? Or is it just something that will result in increased brand searches, brand uplift, and you can perhaps ask people where they heard of you after they actually make a purchase.

Rory J. Knighton
I mean, there’s a couple of ways to do it. The standard way to do it is to give the podcast a unique code that they give to their subscribers. And then they enter that unique code when they go on. You can also do the the sort of the google it or the search. So if you have a very unique phrase or product, you can just get people to simply enter enter search results, and they’ll get straight to your product or service, the tracking of it is relatively good. If you’re using a coupon or a code, it’s relatively decent, if you use that specific unique code for this one, podcast only or for whatever set of podcasts, it’s pretty trackable, it’s pretty good. It’s not quite as good as say doing in terms of tracking, it’s not quite as good as running an ad with a link. And you can track the whole journey through that. But I think the actual effectiveness of the podcast that is worth it, not having the super granular data on tracking,

David Bain
or voucher sites, not a bit of a an issue for that approach nowadays, because sometimes when I’ve made a big purchase, I’ve searched for a voucher code to see if it exists, and then use that code. And I guess that if you were to offer a podcast a certain deal, then that voucher code might end up on some vertical website as well.

Rory J. Knighton
That you’re the one of the best ways to combat that. So I’ve worked with some really big food and drink brands that have had issues like that. One of the best ways to combat that is to partner with the voucher code company, and to give them a specific code for their customers to use. And that’s a way to combat that is actually partnering with them or partnering with a Chrome extension like honey for instance, where they go and search codes for you. If you partner with them. You can you can broker unique deals for them that will protect your your tracking and won’t mess up your your analytics.

David Bain
Great advice. Okay, well, let’s finish off by turning the focus to someone else who deserves it. So that is a MAGICAL MARKETER. So who’s nothing coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to? What can we learn from them? And where can we find them?

Rory J. Knighton
Well, this was a little bit of a sneaky one, because it’s not just one, I’ll say, I’ll say the person, but there’s sort of a team. So I followed them on LinkedIn for the last couple of years. It’s Dan and Lloyd Knowlton from Norton marketing. You might have seen them, but you know, I’m, and I’ve watched them for a long time. And I think they’re absolutely fantastic. Dan’s terrible, terrible, Dennis

David Bain
did not see that.

Rory J. Knighton
For me, very, it’s fantastic to watch them because I’ve watched them grow. When they when I first connected with them a couple years ago, their content was terrible. It wasn’t interesting or engaging whatsoever. And then they really switched it up and started being silly and funny with their content and adding real value at the same time. So the word value tainment comes to mind, I hate that word, but, but they really do bring value tainment and, and for me, it connects really, really well because I trained as an actor, and I used to do funny sketches and make silly videos a long, long time ago, decades ago. But I thought I had to put all that away when I put a suit and tie on and become a professional. And they sort of reminded me that no, you don’t need to do that. You can be silly, you can be funny, and you can still provide value at the same time. So for me, I think they’re absolutely fantastic. I sound like a fan girl because I’m always talking about how great they are. But but they are they’re really really good.

David Bain
Okay, I might make that better clip and and share it online to see what their reaction might be interested to see if Dan’s improved to Table Table Tennis at all. So there we go. That was Episode 252 of Digital Marketing Radio worm, Rory genieten from runaway collective shared some great tips about marketing automation to begin with, including how you should have your own welcome series to begin with of one to three emails have a reward for inactivity to someone hasn’t actually maybe bought from you or opens an email from a while. Give them some kind of personal reward after two months or so to try and reengage them. As well, we talked about chat bots for doing things like delivery details and handling FA cues as well. And localised send outs as well. So if you’re sending emails out, sending them out, try sending them out in a specific time each day and each country to get better open rates and we talked a little bit about AI copy, and that being perhaps a decade away, so you can’t necessarily rely on that for writing your emails at the moments. Your SECRET SOFTWARE I was Meister task. Your NEXT ON THE LIST was at sand Fox and your MAGICAL MARKETER slash ones Dan and Lloyd Knowlton. Everything that Rory mentioned in today’s show and more will be available in the podcast show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com. Rory, what’s the best social platform for someone to follow you and say Hi.

Rory J. Knighton
Come on YouTube. Just my name Rory J. Nitin on YouTube. come say hello,

David Bain
superb stuff. Thanks for coming on. I’ve been your host David Bain. You can also find me producing podcasts for B2B brands over at Casting cred.com until we meet again, stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

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