Marketing creative + tech

What does marketing look like today?

I'd say there are about three main categories in marketing: the tech, the creative, and the writer.

This is different from what Pardot and Salesforce say (image right).

What I'm saying is that it's usually a different person that can speak really well, is witty and the life of the party, to the visual designer.

So the modern marketer, in their words is "part scientist", "part artist", and "part linguist".

As to me, I can fulfill the scientist and artist roles, but I'm not a great wordsmith.

My scientific/tech marketing experience

Un-siloed stats

At my last NFP, I constructed a full range of stats on our email & website campaigns.

A spreadsheet covering full statistics for a campaign including deliverability, websites, social media, and end goal statistics
Stats from just one part don't cut it! This shows full end-to-end statistics from email to website to action

The data was pulled from Sendgrid, Facebook, Google Analytics, websites and Postmark.

"Un-siloed" means I could make analysis from the big picture, and, instead of thinking that our Facebook campaign wasn't effective as it had low conversions, I could combine that with email data to show that those who viewed Facebook and email were in fact higher converters.

Shopify coding

I modified the almost-right-but-crucially-fatal email templates on Shopify so the receipts were fully ATO-compliant Tax Invoices.

This involved learning Shopify's "Liquid" language.

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Part of the magic is in this code {% if line.taxable == true %}GST{% elsif line.taxable == false %}GST-FREE{% endif %}

The crux of the loop through the items is to check whether the item has been checked as 'taxable' and if so say 'GST', otherwise, to say 'GST-FREE'

Mailchimp coding

Apart from inserting the core Firstname or Lastname tags, you can actually insert sections so that non-technical people can add or subtract different sections on their email as desired.

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mc:repeatable is the code that you add to an element to make it repeatable
Notice the mc:repeatable on the table element

 

Customising Facebook pictures and titles

I worked closely with our social media guru, fixing up the Facebook titles, content, and images of links shared through og meta tags, and force refreshing of data using the 'Sharing Debugger' tool.

A screen grab of Facebook's sharing debugger tool in action
Analysing how Facebook will view my Peaceful UX post

I could force a particular title or image despite what the CMS defaults wanted, and do this without hardcoding it (which might interfere with other pages).

Being tech support for emails (& everything!), I also have experience with:

  • Troubleshooting deliverability issues, by checking spam scores; reasons for bounces; SPF, DKIM and MX records
  • Integrating email systems, such as with the CRM, or other database (not custom integrations, but utilising tools like Zapier or syncing tools)
  • Embedding social media onto websites so the latest piece(s) are showing

My artistic marketing experience

Email software is notorious for displaying HTML emails badly.

I can't say I know every nuance of every software provider (who would?), but I can test how my email would look in 99% of them with Litmus.

I can create custom HTML email templates, or to cut costs, customise pre-made templates.

This is one that I've designed:

An email template
Responsive email template

I'm familiar with templates that work well with such tools as Mailchimp, where you can tag certain sections to repeat, or be removed. This means you can easily change the look of a campaign, based on only the sections you want.

The toolset

I'm thoroughly familiar with many, many tools such as:

  • Litmus for testing email designs, broken links and so on
  • Marketing Automation tools such as Autopilot & Drip
  • Marketing campaign tools such as Mailchimp & SendGrid, and utilising more than the standard features such as Mailchimp's A/B Split Testing and segmentation
  • Analytical tools such as Google Analytics and those within email sending software such as SendGrid, Postmark
  • Transactional email delivery tools like Postmark
  • Advertising tools such as Google Adwords & Facebook Ads
  • Social media tools like Hootsuite
  • Website live chat tools like tawk.to
  • Web design tools to edit responsive, HTML emails

I am familiar with hundreds of applications, so learning something new isn't a challenge. In fact, I am usually able to help someone in a program they've used for years, but I've never seen before (having worked in small organisations, I'm always the tech support).