A (2:19)

And that Excel spreadsheet that finance love is completely separate.

B (2:23)

Exactly. Okay? And you've got some data. Even if you take a small organization, you've got an email list in Mailchimp, you've got some customers in WordPress, you've maybe got a CRM system, customer relationship management, with some other data in it, and none of it's talking to anything else, and it just becomes a headache or worse.

A (2:39)

You don't even have a CRM system, but you're using your email marketing platform to kind of be a bit like.

B (2:44)

That'S what an awful lot of people are doing. And you end up with just some problems. So the basic one and the normal one that's very, very often is you will have a email service provider, so a Mailchimp or a dot mailer or a Pure360 or any of those kind of those systems. And you also have a CRM customer relationship management system where you store your customer data. Could even be a spreadsheet, to be honest. But you've got those two different things and your data is not joined up. And the risk is you take your data from your CRM, you plunk it down into your email service provider, you send out some emails, and some people will unsubscribe, but then that data is not updated into your CRM. Someone sends an email from your CRM directly and you've just emailed someone that's opted out, and you've just broken all the rules in terms of, you know, still sending emails to people that have opted out. So you want at a basic level, your ESP and your CRM to be integrated. There's a lot of three letter acronyms in here.

A (3:43)

So ESP is your email service provider and your CRM is your customer relationship management. That's it.

B (3:49)

Okay, so at a basic level, that's what most people are struggling with. And it's perfectly doable. Most systems will integrate in with each other. So for example, mailchimp has an API, so you can do that. And. But it's not always easy. It's a bit of an IT project. Now there are websites like Zapier, Z-A P I E R.com that basically help you connect your web apps and your various apps. So you can connect Mailchimp to Salesforce, or you could connect your, your WordPress and so on as well. So there are some tools that will kind of help you connect and automate the process. So I put an email in here, you copy it across there and all those kind of things. That's a good starting point. A basic level of plugging things together. There are other ways of doing it as well. And I mean the kind of one of the gold standards with this is Salesforce themselves. I mean, what Salesforce have really identified very smart is they had a kind of CRM system and then people are trying to integrate that with other systems. So actually, rather than doing that, Salesforce have gone out and started buying all the other systems as well. So they bought Exact Target, which was one of the biggest email service providers. They have got Pardot, which is market automation platform. They have got social media monitoring, all those kind of things. They say, well, actually if you want single customer view, just come to us. If you get our CRM and our marketing cloud, everything's going to work out of the box and we'll make it nice and easy. Still a bit of setup and all that kind of thing. Don't get me wrong, but Salesforce isn't right for everyone. It's not cheap and you know, for small organizations that might not work, but it is, I should say it's a brilliant system. Okay. So if you do get to use it, it's also overkill in some situations. It does a lot of stuff and you might not need half of that. So that's. That's one end of it.

A (5:20)

Just a caveat in here. Going to digress slightly, but. Well, I used as a Salesforce for years when I was working for a nonprofit. So if you. I know we have quite a few nonprofits that listen to this. The Salesforce foundation still give free licenses for Salesforce to nonprofits. And I wholeheartedly recommend investigating it. If you don't have a good CRM system, if you're looking to update it, there's very little it couldn't do that I wanted to do when I was running my marketing team and department. And it's very, very good. So, yeah. And it's free if you're a nonprofit, potentially. So apply for those licenses. I think they give a fixed percentage of all the actual licenses they sell away to nonprofits as part of the Salesforce Foundation. So hat tip to Salesforce and if you're a nonprofit, check them out.

B (6:10)

Just one other thing as well. If you ever get the opportunity to go to Salesforce tower, they have their own tower in London. It's quite impressive. Okay. And I'm not encouraging you to just go into their reception but if you were to be invited, they have the biggest fish tank I've ever seen in my life in their reception. Yeah, it is quite an amazing thing to see.

A (6:26)

Expect to see a Bond villain kind.

B (6:28)

Of swimming about in there. Exactly, yeah, it's quite amazing. So anyway, so great company, smart people take a look at it. So that's at one end of things. But you might find you're a small organization and you've got WordPress and then you've got some data in there and then you've got Mailchimp and you can plug Mailchimp into WordPress using Zapier or something like that as well. There is an API for WordPress to plug the two things together, but the reality is it's still not gonna do everything you want. So you go, actually I don't want that. I'm gonna use something like HubSpot. And HubSpot have a brilliant CRM actually. There's a free version, there's a low cost version and then you go, I'd really like to be able to do this, this, this and this. Oh, they can, but it starts getting quite expensive so quickly. Depends on the scale of the organization. I'd really recommend HubSpot as well. I love it. It's a, it's a really great tool. Now the other way of doing this is kind of turning your WordPress blog or your content management system into your CRM. And there are loads of plugins for WordPress to do this and free ones and so on as well. The key thing is working if it does what you want it to do. And everyone's setup is different with their content management system with WordPress. So you need to have a look at what's out there.

A (7:32)

Yeah, a lot of them don't necessarily integrate with your shopping cart system.

B (7:36)

Yeah. The more plugins you're using, the more unlikely it's all going to work together is the key thing. And when we try and we get plugin bloat all the time, so we start using different plugins and they go, wait a minute, we've got so many, we need to get rid of some of these. And we try and keep it as minimal because then when you upgrade WordPress it makes it a bit easier. The way we build our, a lot of our functionality is custom plugins. So a lot of our elearning kind of content is managed through doing custom plugins. You can do anything with WordPress. It's incredible. So. But you've still got to then probably integrate that into your email service provider. So again, these plugins, do they integrate in with these things and so on as well. So that's one kind of mix of solutions.

A (8:13)

Quite a good solution we looked at for a few clients when I was working at the agency is a thing called Agile CRM. And Agile's main premise is market like a Fortune 500 company but for small to medium sized size businesses. And I think a lot of what they do is very, very good. It certainly mirrors a lot of the much more expensive functionality you have in things like HubSpot where you're actually able to trigger different marketing activities based on activities your customers are performing actually on your site. So definitely one to check out. And it does integrate quite nicely with WooCommerce, I believe for those of you using that. So yeah, take a look.

B (8:53)

So you've got this kind of mix of plugins to plug things in. I mean the ideal thing is you want your CRM customer relationship management, speaking to your email service provider and in turn speaking to your content management system that looks after the kind of website. The basic setup for that would be WordPress, speaking to Mailchimp, fairly easy to do. And then plugging that in the whole way with actually kind of controlling your content. So putting an extra bit of mailchimp code onto your website so you can trigger emails at the right time and so on. So there's a number of different ways of doing it. The next stage is kind of marketing automation and this is when it starts to get into a real headache. So now I've got my esp, speaking to my CRM, speaking to my CMS and then I want to start doing this whole lead scoring marketing automation. That's another piece of kit on top as well. Now most marketing automation platforms will come to you and say, oh, we can set this up in a couple of months. Won't take long at all unless you have achieved single customer view and you've got your data really joined up. Unless you've mapped your sales process, unless you've mapped out your Personas and your user journeys, then marketing automation will take you a lot longer. I've never really seen a full blown marketing automation project for a large company take less than about 18 months. Because the idea of market automation is that I'm just getting you between coming to the website and buying my product, which might be a really long two year, three year, five year cycle. I'm trying to minimize that and I'm trying to maximize you moving on to the next steps. Really great stuff you can do with tools like Marketo and Eloqua Par. And things like that. But it's an, it's the next stage on. So I would just say just try and walk before you can run a little bit.

A (10:23)

I think that's great advice. My other piece of advice, having done this for a few organizations is keep it simple to begin with. It's so easy to.

B (10:31)

Oh, we've done this.

A (10:32)

Yeah, it's so easy to create rules and routines that run over pages and pages and it's just overkill. Keep it simple. You're far better off achieving a couple of simple automations and making sure that they work well and then building out more. Okay, we've done this, now let's, let's do this. So learn to crawl before you start walking, certainly before you start running. There's a stage process to this particularly for small to medium sized organization. Because the other big danger with marketing automation is it's extremely powerful. Right. And the danger there is it can be extremely disruptive and extremely destructive if applied in the wrong way. And we've all heard those nightmare stories of the wrong email list being used and sent out and once it's out there and gone or it's sending the wrong email at the wrong stage or even awful story I heard somebody was telling me where they'd actually used the marketing Persona name instead of the customer's name, which I think is particularly embarrassing. So yeah, keep it simple and build it a step at a time. And the other thing I think is kind of really document everything that the automation is doing and review it.

B (11:48)

Well, that's the other thing you need. So you need to put in these review processes that the automation system is spitting out. This is a lead. And then was it, is it really a lead? How did it score it? And then going back and iterating through the process. So getting market automation in place is part of the journey, but actually you need to then keep iterating and improve it and it can be fantastic. So take a step back, think about the user journey, Think about you can improve the user journey and a lot of systems are overkill from that point of view. So just think about what you really actually need and, and simple things like the API, the programming interface for mailchimp allows you to do all sorts of clever stuff. So I can move you around between different lists very easily based on what you have and haven't done on my website, preferences, behaviors and then just trigger emails to certain lists based on they've done those certain behaviors. So that's the kind of stuff that will start to make a big difference. If you're thinking this all sounds like an IT headache, it is. It's because you're dealing with disparate systems. Now, the thing I wanted to lead that onto is GDPR. So May 2018, the GDPR regulations come in, the general Data Protection Regulations in the eu. If you're outside the eu, this is not something you want to worry about directly, but it is best practice and it does take quite a solid approach and there's a whole load of rules around it and we've done an interview about it before. But what you don't want, this kind of stuff that will get you into trouble is having your data in loads of disparate places that you don't really know about. So that salesperson's got a spreadsheet on their computer with a load of stuff in it and they keep sending emails to it, so that's not connected to your central system. So actually, single customer view can really protect you from a lot of the faults that people are going to have with gdpr. You know, just using data badly, not actually telling people where they've got the data from, how they're using it, how they can delete it and all those kind of things.

A (13:27)

Even at a very basic level, you know, under GDPR rules, the customer will be entitled to request what data you have on them. Now, if you've got data all over the shop, that's hard, that's going to be hard. And you've got a time limit to deliver on this, so you need to.

B (13:43)

Map that process, by the way, as well. One of the key things with GDPR is mapping processes and what you're actually going to do. That also means if you've got a call center or customer service agents that have been making notes about customers and they include rude comments about the customers that they think the customer will never see, it's very possible they are going to see them now. So I would go through and audit your data and just make sure you're aware what's there and just get rid of stuff that you're not sure if it should be there in terms of, you know, if you've got a spreadsheet sitting somewhere, just rather think, oh, no, I need to hold onto those email addresses, get them to opt in again.

A (14:11)

Then you made a point to me that, you know, the more data you've got sat around, the more liability. Yeah, absolutely, effectively. And actually, if you're not using it, you know, don't just sit on it and accumulate it like Some sort of demented dragon gathering gold talents.

B (14:26)

Wow, that went off at a sudden tangent. Yeah, sorry, demented dragon. Okay, fine, yes, I know demented dragoning and don't hoard your data. Right. So this, this single customer view thing, now once you achieve it, I can start to be smarter because I can trigger the right emails, the right social posts, I can change the content on my website, I can do all sorts of clever things.

A (14:45)

Do you know what I'm really excited about, Daniel? You could just gonna do things that I love for me. In this instance, I am the customer. To make that clear.

B (14:52)

I understand. Yeah. And I think that's it. I think that, I mean I just completely thrown by that little comment there.

A (14:58)

That got a bit awkward.

B (14:58)

Yeah, it was, wasn't it? But anyway, that's fine, we'll move on. So the whole thing of actually rather than bombarding, I'm just being relevant at the right time and you can start to be smarter. So one of the things we always talk about in digital transformation is that one of your capabilities is integrating your data. Kieran is now sitting across me, kind of smirking at me in a really kind of worrying way. So if I'm slightly sounding distracted, that's.

A (15:19)

Why there are so many things I want to say and I'm not going to be inappropriate.

B (15:22)

Yeah. Okay. So you can then start to be a lot more relevant, do smarter kind of stuff. And actually digital transformation is one of the things you need to fix because if you don't getting smarter as things move faster and faster in the future is going to get harder and harder. So you're gearing yourself up to future proof yourself a little bit and it is a big project in its own right. But it's very much worthwhile doing.

A (15:45)

What I love about it is it takes control back and it makes it fun again. Actually, you know, going through all these various different data silos and the, you know, the never ending computer says no obstacle that as marketers we hit all of the time. You really can slash and burn a blazing trail through a lot of that and just get yourself to a better, better place. But it's, it's hard work. Well worth it, but hard work, Yeah.

B (16:08)

I mean you can get to the point where you go, I turn this handle, I see what happens, I do a bit more of that. Does that work? And because it's joined up, you can quite see it makes test and learn a lot more realistic. Whereas at the moment if it's all separate data sources and things, it's not easy to do. So good luck. I'd love to hear your stories in this, by the way. Horror stories are very welcome as well. I mean, everywhere I go you say CRM, and it nearly brings people to tears in many cases. So tell us your stories. Tell us your stories. Target Internet.com podcast and you'll find all the show notes, all the links we've spoken about, and we'd like to hear back from you. So we'll speak to you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.

A (16:45)

Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free Benchmark Skills Test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide. To help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date. Just visit targetinternet.com forward/benchmark.