← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
MARKETING MEDICINE SERIES 👩🏼⚕️| Removing Roadblocks Between Marketing, Engineering, and Ops with Ellen Rockdale, Lifecycle Marketing at HoneyBook | Episode 4
00:32:29
Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:08]
Daniel Murray
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind Marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the we're back with another episode of Marketing Medicine. Today we're tackling a bottleneck that's slowing down market teams everywhere over reliance on engineering and operations to get campaigns off the ground. From audience segmentation to email templates, it could feel like every move requires technical support, and that's a recipe for frustration and a lot of delays. But don't worry, we've got the perfect doctor in the house. Ellen Rockdale, who runs Lifecycle Marketing at Honeybook. She is here to diagnose the problem and prescribe some solutions. With her expertise, we'll dive into why these bottlenecks happen, how to launch campaigns faster, and how to make life easier for both marketers and engineers. Let's get into it. Okay, marketing bestie, I'm going to say something crazy. You don't need more customer data. You have the info. You just don't have the time or tools to actually use it to drive revenue or nurture customers. If that sounds like you, you need to visit Iterable. Iterable is an AI powered platform for marketers that takes first party data and delivers ultra personalized messages for every marketing channel. Without the engineering lift, Iterable's AI features help build personalized campaign campaigns fast, predict what your customers need and fine tune every message for your engagement. Cutting busy work so you can focus on being creative. It doesn't matter whether you're using email, text in app, web, OTT or all the above, it all works together seamlessly. Most importantly, Iterable is super simple. No coding skills needed. No wonder brands like Redfin, Priceline, Calm and Morning Brew all use it to put their data to use. If you to make your data work for you instead of the other way around, head to iterable.com TMM TMM for the marketing Millennials for helpful resources and sign up for a demo. That's iterable.com TMM okay, I'm coming to Dr. Allen with the issue of the day and the issue we're going to talk about today is why marketing teams lean too heavily on engineering and operations to get the campaign in the door. So why do you see this issue of why marketing teams rely on these two parts of the business to get out a single marketing campaign?
- [03:15]
Ellen Rockdale
Usually, yeah, I think the issue here comes from. As a marketer, we always hear that the most impactful campaigns are about sending the right message to the right person at the right time. And so when you're really trying to optimize for all three of those components and you're also hearing about how important personalization is and, you know, getting the urgency right and the timing right, I think we, you know, create this ideal campaign in our head that's really reliant on custom events and specific data that's at the user level. And so we really think that we can't launch a campaign or must we have really specific engineering requirements, really specific data requirements. And so we end up creating a request that just gets stuck in the backlog of, you know, multiple teams. And ultimately we just get slowed down. Nothing goes out because we're chasing that, you know, ideal instead of, you know, optimizing for action and figuring out the mvp and what can we do quickest to get these initial results?
- [04:18]
Daniel Murray
And usually the, the symptoms that for this problem that people have. There's a couple of things, because I used to run marketing ops as well, so a couple of things that I had issues with when dealing with bigger marketing ops platforms or having a data warehouse that you didn't really have much accesses is pulling audiences, having to build custom templates, having to build web pages. These are things that sometimes take a long time. So how do you get over those symptoms in marketing and what are some of the symptoms you see as you when you had to rely on engineering and operations to do your job?
- [05:03]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah, I would say one of the big things is having, you know, silos between the teams where as marketers you're only trusted to, you know, write the content or pick out the design or come up with the messaging and all of the other pieces of the campaign are out of your hands. I think a lot of teams are getting a lot smarter about this by, you know, creating CVPs that are actionable for marketers, you know, having technical marketers who can understand API calls and, you know, get into the weeds a little bit more. And so what I where I think the real problems end up happening is when marketers or are sort of, you know, handcuffed and they can only control a very, very narrow piece of that campaign. And so to get anything, any more personalization, any more targeting, any more additional criteria, they just have to go beg their engineering partners instead of being able to self serve. So I think finding the right balance of using tools that give marketers access to data, access to those engineering tools without you know, creating any vulnerabilities. I think that's where the real magic can happen. Both, both in, like speeding up the process between the teams and also, you know, creating those more impactful campaigns.
- [06:17]
Daniel Murray
I think you said two things that are really important I think to dive into is one is the evolution of basically the marketer. I remember starting marketing ops. Marketing ops just meant you dealt with doing technology. That was the only thing Marketing Alps did. Now it's kind of evolved as you have to like learn how to pull data, you have to learn how to do insides, you have to learn how to do process. So what are some things you've seen that you've had to like, leveled up or like, what are marketers who are coming into roles where they have to manage CDPs and manage data warehouses? What are, what are some skills that you have to start learning to counteract, not having to rely on engineering and operations?
- [07:06]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah, I think at the most basic level you really want to understand your data and where it comes from and how it gets into your marketing automation tool. Is it a daily job? Is it, you know, is there a piece sitting between your marketing tool and the data platforms? So I think that's a really important part of understanding because there are some parts of the data that are really accessible as long as you're willing to, you know, maybe run it on a job that runs hourly instead of instantly. And so I think getting into the details about where exactly your events are coming from. Are they coming from the product, are they coming from a third party tool like Mixpanel, or are they coming directly from your app? So I think just understanding, once you get into a new role, working with your data team and really understanding where is everything coming from and how is it connected and how can I optimize those connections? I think that's a really important piece and you can be as technical as you want there. But I think understanding is the first path that every marketer on the team should get to because then you really have a shared language between your partners as well. And you can kind of, you can write clear requests to them and they can really understand what your needs are and how you'll use that data once you get it. I think another piece that's really important is also understanding what tools you have access to. I think a lot of marketers think they're blocked by data and engineering, but they don't know that there are tools like cdps, like High Touch for Iterable, which is our marketing automation platform, has something called Smart Ingest. And once you do a one time setup with your data team, you can like switch out what outputs are coming into your system. And I. So I think reading the document documentation of your platform and getting familiar with what options are available to you is another critical piece of unblocking yourself here.
- [09:05]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, I think that piece of being able to control the data ingestion is so important because that a lot of, a lot of the time is the bottleneck is you have to go change the data ingestion or you have to go ask someone and then it's not a priority for them. So it will take a week or two or three weeks to get that single thing changed for yourself. Another bottleneck of having to rely on other teams to do things are when you have a campaign that goes out faster. So how do you deal with campaigns that have a really quick turnaround, say 24, 48 hours, we need to get this campaign out. The marketers are telling, say head of demand gen or whoever is coming to you and saying we need to get this campaign not fast.
- [09:59]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah, I think in each company it's different and understanding where your bottleneck is coming from is it, are you missing the targeting piece? Are you missing a specific event firing so that you can identify these users? So I think figuring out exactly what pieces slow you down is really important. And then working through that. I think most campaigns, while not ideal, can be turned around in that timeframe if marketers are set up for success and they have access to the right tools. So if you're in a marketing automation platform where you have enough targeting criteria, for instance, where you can create really intelligent, highly segmented audiences, then that should get you about 90% of the way there. And then maybe if you can exclude people with certain events, I think building out that foundational piece of having robust data in your tool that you can always have access to will allow you to move faster. And I think it's a solid argument if you need to go to other teams or you need to go ask for more budget. Because if you can say I can turn around things, you know, 10 times faster or I can turn things around in two days instead of seven days, that's what really will convince these people to give you more access, give you more, you know, empower you to do your job faster and better. And so I think that's a critical piece, is just taking a hard look at your tech stack, what you have access to as a marketer and what you're blocked by and figuring out how you can get unblocked and what's a compromise between you and your data teams and your engineering team where you have enough to do your job, but you're also not, you know, risking anything crazy.
- [11:44]
Daniel Murray
Yeah. And what is your advice to build relationships with those teams? Because I think part of the role is making sure that they trust you and you trust them to do each other's job. And more trust you have, the more leeway and asks you can ask them to do things for you.
- [12:04]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah. And I actually think a lot of this comes down to what I mentioned before, is just really get understanding your data, how it works, because it's so much more impactful if you approach your partners and you know exactly how the data is coming into your tool, how you're using it. I feel like a lot of our engineering and data partners have this sense that marketers aren't technical at all and they just come to them with crazy requests, not understanding what kind of ask this is and what kind of work is involved to get a new piece of data or to get a new event. And so I think doing your homework of understanding how your tool works and what, while you may may not know all the details, getting an understanding of how complex an ask might be and figuring out what a reasonable timeline is will get you much more respect from your partner teens. I also think speaking a common language and getting them up to speed on your tools as well is really helpful because I found sometimes when I request certain things to a certain specification, my engineers think I'm adding complexity that isn't really needed. And so if I tell them, oh, my marketing automation tool only accepts data in this specific format or I actually can't start QA this campaign until you send test data to the platform, because the platform doesn't actually let me set anything up until the data exists. Going into those details and providing context around your request, why you're asking it, and showing that you did your homework, I think is a surefire way to build that respect. And also just leading with impact and saying, if this campaign goes this way, we have data to suggest that it would move this business metric by xyz. I think that's always compelling to get people to buy in.
- [13:48]
Daniel Murray
And you've, I mean, from your point of view also, I think how do you, how do you want marketer like marketing leaders to come to like, operate marketing operations or you as a person to say how would you want to be approached? Because a lot of the times you as your team have a lot of prioritizations and how would you want to be approached.
- [14:15]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah. So I think one really important part part here is increasing visibility of all the work your team does, everything that's on your plate. If there's a way to show like an automated slack message of all the priorities on the team's queue or you know, create a defined process with timelines for each type of campaign, I think that will take away a lot of the last minute requests if you make sure that all of your partners are aware of how you operate and why you operate. I also think that if there are, you know, things that seem like you're adding process for the sake of process, really explaining why that rule is in place. For instance, at a previous company I worked in a tool where once we submitted an email we had to wait three days and not change a single string because the translation service was working in the back end. And that caused problems with marketing leaders sometimes because they would come back with last minute feedback and want to change things. But once I explained, oh, actually this won't go translated at all if we change this, you know, one word, even though it seems like a really small change. So socializing these rules and making sure people understand why you have your processes I think is really important. But outside of that, I want marketing leaders to come to me with realistic requests, know what's possible from my team, know our, our existing priorities, and understand if they're asking me for additional that should fall above the line of what we're working on currently because we're all on the same team, we're all looking to make impact. So that's what I really look for if someone's coming to my team and adding additional work to our plate.
- [15:58]
Daniel Murray
We all know you should personalize customer experiences, but actually doing it across every channel. Good luck. Thankfully, there's Iterable. Iterable uses all of your first party data to talk to your customers across email, sms, in, app, web, ott, everywhere, all your channels, one place seamlessly. Oh, and it has AI insights and features that make you feel like you have a super smart marketing partner that hustles to get things done, personalization done, cross channel engagement. Duh. Go to edible.comtmm for additional resources and sign up for a demo that's TMM for the marketing millennials. I want to also go into a little bit of like the treatment of these symptoms we've been talking about. There's all these bottlenecks that tend to happen, but some of it is communication that we said, some of it the tool. Some of it is where data is Kept some of them talent. But how can marketing teams reduce their reliance on, let's say engineering or marketing operations? Like what are some things ops can do to reduce the reliance on marketers having to talk to marking ops all the time? And then what are the other side of what marketers do on their side to level up to make sure that there isn't that over reliance on that?
- [17:34]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah, I think one really crucial piece here is testing into something before asking for resources to build something brand new. Because I think a lot of times, I think we've all experienced this as marketers. You have this amazing idea, but it requires some, you know, engineering or data work and eventually you get that work, you get all the extra partnership done with all these different teams and you launch it and the results aren't quite what you expected. And you kind of wonder, oh, was all this swirl across the marketing team and the engineering team worth it? So what I really like to do if my team is asking for resources, whether it's from the data team or the engineering team, is to figure out how we can do a quick MVP test on our own to see the potential impact of this. Maybe you get a one time data spreadsheet from a team or you do a quick SQL query, anything quick and dirty that will get you those directional results. Because a lot of times we run those quick and dirty tests and we're not really seeing the impact. The engagement isn't there or this wasn't really what our users were looking for. And then you have a stronger case when you eventually ask for those resources. If you have amazing results, you can say, hey, look at what we did. This was just a small sample size. But if we get this automated, like imagine what can happen. So I think that's a really crucial piece, the project planning and testing. And then I would also say for marketing ops, how you can help marketing ops teams can stop relying so much. I really like to. I think it's a fun challenge to figure out, is there a way I can do this, a hacky way in my own system without engineering? A lot of martech tools allow a lot more freedom for marketers. If you're technical, can you make your own quick API call within the system yourself? Can you update user profiles in a unique way to tag them so that they get a specific type of communication? I think that's a really fun way to level up a marketing ops team is to almost be a pseudo engineer and figure out all the cool new features that these tools are releasing all the time and figure out how you can do it yourself. So I think that's a really interesting techniques that that's getting more and more possible with all these cool new features coming out.
- [20:00]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, I think you said something really important is one of the biggest bottlenecks is the tool that you pick for marketers, because a lot of it is some of these tools require like heavy SQL knowledge and heavy manual data ingestion. So could you talk a little bit of the importance of choosing the right tool in the first place as a marketer?
- [20:25]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a foundational piece that enables all these other decisions down the line. I think understanding your business, what kind of messages you want to send, what kind of audience you're sending, is a crucial piece of figuring out what tool you're going to choose and also figuring out the team that will be working on this tool. Is it just a small team of three email marketers who will code but don't have access to all of these backend tools, or are you going to have a dedicated data and engineering team whose whole job is making sure that this tool is running smoothly and is connected to all your systems? Because different businesses have different needs. There are some tools that are, you know, drag and drop template editors send to the same list pretty frequently and don't require a lot of bells and whistles. And you can get a much cheaper tool if you're just looking to do that. But if you're looking for super behavioral based evergreen, always on triggers that are, you know, dependent on what people do in the app, what people do on your website, that's a different tool and that's a different team. And so I think it's really important to think about that. And I've seen cases in both directions where people have a tool that's way too simple for their needs and they outgrow it and then they have to do the migration process, which is always a pain. And then I see on the other side where people are really just sending, you know, newsletters and welcome emails and they have this really powerful tool that has all of these additional functionalities that they're not even touching and they're likely overpaying. So I think it's really important to think about what you need now and what you think you'll need in two, three, five years and who will be supporting it when picking a tool.
- [22:18]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, I think another part of it too, which reduces the need for engineering support is having like pre built audiences that you've already built ahead of time and also like pre built Templates so you don't always have to be going, so what are, what are updates? What updates can marketing teams make to like simplify workflows and reduce those dependencies?
- [22:50]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah, so exactly what you said. When it comes to audiences, figure out like who your audiences are that you send to on a regular basis is it, you know, subscribed members, churned members and members in onboarding and even. And these may evolve as you continue. If you find yourself sending to the same audience, you know, two or three times, it's probably worth it to create like that base audience that you can add on segmentation as needed, but that you can just easily pick from your audience list, create a campaign in minutes for. So I think audiences is a really important piece. I also think templates is a really important place. So thanks for mentioning that. And I think templates and designing and building emails is where a lot of teams get stuck spending too much time depending on your needs. You could either use like a template builder, drag and drop, where it's very simple. But sometimes you do miss out on, you know, the beautiful elements of a fully HTML coded template. But even if you go the fully coded template route, you should have a library of modules that you can constantly reference, that you can just bring together at any moment. Ideally it's signed off by creative so you don't have to get everything checked by a designer. So that in that scenario where your marketing leader comes to you and says, hey, I need a brand new campaign sent tomorrow. You say, I have this library of templates, let me know which one looks good to you, drop in the copy. And it's way faster than coding something from scratch or working with a designer to build something brand new. So I think those are both critical elements of speeding things up and avoiding those bottlenecks.
- [24:32]
Daniel Murray
Yeah. I think two more things I want to talk about, I think you mentioned, you did mention one of them, but I think the importance of like streamlining data ingestions and integration with marketing tools so engineers don't have to intervene at all. So how can automation for these things ease the workload both for marketers and engineers? If you have the ability to do this?
- [25:01]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah, so I think there's a lot of. And the tools for this are getting better and better, you know, every year, but there's a lot more availability. There's a lot of tools that connect your data warehouses to your marketing automation tools that just weren't possible, you know, five, 10 years ago. And so if you work with your data team to understand how your data is organized the key tables. There are tools where you can just, you know, go directly in your marketing automation platform, find a data piece within your data tables and have it connected to your tool within minutes, no engineering required. So I think that's really important. Also some light SQL never hurt anybody. I think it's really important to be able to do your own simple queries, especially if you're pulling the same audiences frequently. And then you can just, and your data team will respect you more too if you have some working knowledge of how these tables work. And then you can just go in self serve, pull data at the drop of a hat and just really be able to move more quickly.
- [26:06]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, I think we talked about the last two that I was going to bring up but we've talked about it in the conversation. But I think you just mentioned like marketers need to train up on some of these basic technical skills like basic SQL so you don't have to always have that sort of basic changing some HTML and a template. So and then the other part we talked about a lot I think in this conversation is just how to have better collaboration and communication. I think that's like one of the most important things. I think a lot of people, if you operate in a silo, it's so much harder to do this or if you make friends with these teams or have weekly meetings with these teams, it makes it way easier for you to do the.
- [26:55]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah, definitely. And, and one piece on that communication piece. I think, you know, making friends and introducing yourself and across the marketing team or across all your cross functional partners, data engineering. And I think really tailoring your conversation based on what that team is most interested in is how you really sort of break the ice. So for example, if I have a, if I want to introduce my team, what we do, how we'll work together, if I'm going to my, you know, partnerships, marketing team. I may really emphasize how we have benchmarks for all of our campaigns. So we can tell you if a campaign you're running is, you know, average or performing well or maybe performing below average. This is how we can tell, this is how we adjust, this is how we do AB testing and really focus on how we can, you know, improve the impact of the campaigns that they're building and the partnership. However, if I'm going to like my data and engineering team, that's going to be a different conversation and it's going to be around, you know, this is how I'm protecting the deliverability of our programs. This is how, you know, I Use the data that you all enable. These are the type of requests, these are the skills that my team knows. And so if you ever see any issues with our tools, come to us, we can help you fix them. So I think just really tailoring your conversation and understanding what other teams are working on, what they're motivated by, what they're interested in, will really have them allow them to have a closer relationship with you in the long run. So I think that's really, really important in relationship building, especially in marketing.
- [28:40]
Daniel Murray
Lastly, I want you to like, what is your key takeaway? Like, what is that one dose that you want to give to everybody that tune to counteract the problem of over reliance on any team?
- [28:57]
Ellen Rockdale
Yeah, I would honestly just really encourage people again to understand their marketing automation tool, the ins and outs of it, understand exactly where the data is coming from, how you can request new events, what kind of data is really easy to ask for, what's harder? I think beyond just coding the HTML template and making sure it renders correctly and all that, I think really understanding how the sausage is made from the very first entry point of your journey, all the way to how the data renders in your template, where it's coming from, where are the potential areas where something could mess up and how can you prevent that? I think we'll just make us all better marketers. And having that technical knowledge, whether it be of a Martech tool or, you know, of how data systems work, what the best tools are for what kind of teams, I think that really creates this really valuable type of marketer who understands data and analysis and what their customers want, but also the technical piece and everything that's required to enable that campaign.
- [30:12]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, I think that's really important. I think learning where every part of that tool could go wrong, but also understanding what data does your company collect and what are the most important data points and actually knowing those data points totally. And where, where those data points are being collected, obviously, because that's a big issue for a lot of people is they don't know where, hey, I don't know where that data point came from, so.
- [30:42]
Ellen Rockdale
Exactly. Yeah.
- [30:44]
Daniel Murray
Well, thank you so much for giving your treatment to this common marketing problem. I think a lot of marketers have slow campaign launches because of this. It takes weeks for them to actually get a campaign out because engineering's tapped with a lot of things. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge on this.
- [31:09]
Ellen Rockdale
Of course. Thanks for having me.
- [31:11]
Daniel Murray
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our.