Speaker 0: Alright. Good morning, everybody. Uh, welcome to my MarDreamin’ session beyond clicks and opens, email marketing insights for the next generation. My name is Stacy Schuler, and I’m from Sercante. And I’m excited to moderate today’s session with Brandon Walton. So before we get started, I do have a few housekeeping items to cover. Uh, first is, yes, these sessions are recorded and will be available on demand after the event, and we will also follow-up, um, via email as well. If you have a question, please post that into the q and a tab above. And lastly, please feel free to use the chat. Um, we’ve got emojis and gifs and more, and we’d love to be able to hear from you. And so now we’re gonna go ahead and get started. Um, I’d like to introduce you to our speaker today, Brandon Walton, as you see Cypress Learning Solutions president and founder. So take it away. Thanks, Brandon.

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Speaker 1: Sorry, everyone. I am on stage now. Alright. So, um, welcome to my session Beyond Clicks and Opens, Email Marketing Insights for the Next Generation. Um, I am Brandon Walton. We’ll jump into it. Sorry, everyone, about that. Uh, did not hit the go on stage button, so I was talking to myself backstage.

Uh, thank you to our incredible sponsors. Strongly encourage you to check out these sponsors. Um, in my ten years plus of doing this, I think these have been great resources, specifically, um, the spot first, uh, the spot by Circante. Great content just to know all things marketing and what’s going on in the space.

So today’s agenda, and I’m happy that you can hear me, we’re gonna start out talking about the state of current marketing analytics. Um, these are things that you’re probably going to be familiar with already if you’re in the email marketing space. We’re going to be we’re going to cover, uh, current technical challenges that we’re hearing from email marketers, some things that you’ll probably relate to. And then we’re gonna talk about things that you could be doing today to give you more impactful reporting, actionable, uh, engagement, uh, with the stack that you have. We’ll also share some of the things that we’ve been doing, and then we’ll make some, uh, we’ll make some suggestions, tools for email marketers. Again, this could be knowledge. Um, there is a tool that I’ve created that I’ll be sharing with you today. And then if we have time at the end of it, we’ll have some time for q and a. Alright. So let’s jump into it. Getting beyond clicks and opens for email marketers.

So for email marketers today, this is probably something that you’re very familiar with. You’re using a marketing automation, um, platform, Pardot, a HubSpot, a marketing cloud, or something like that. So the way that it currently works is you have some mechanism adding those leads into your marketing automation platform. You’re doing some kind of segmentation based off of data that exists inside of that marketing automation platform. You’re doing email. If you’ve added some additional features, you might be doing other types of messaging, SMS. But I think most of the people who I talk to in this space are following some kind of a flow like this where whether it’s a form or an import or a sync with the CRM, you’re getting leads into your marketing automation platform. You’re segmenting off of data that exists inside of that marketing automation platform. You’re sending an email, and then based off of what they’re doing, we’re making an action or an automation. And, typically, that means clicks and open. So the idea is you build yourself a list of, um, the thousand people that sales added to Salesforce last week. You segment that based off of everyone who lives in Washington state or everyone who is interested in a particular product. You send them an email, and you sit back, and you hope for the clicks in the opens, and then you’re giving them a score or a grade or, um, alerting a salesperson, something along those lines.

Now there are some challenges with that. One, more competition, more noise, more filters. This is something that we’re probably all aware of already. So marketing automation technology has become something that’s been more accessible for people over the last decade. And so now it’s not just a couple of individuals or a couple of companies that are really taking advantage of marketing, automation, email marketing. More and more companies are in there. And as more and more companies are in there, that noise gets louder and louder and louder. And this is something that we see across all all segments, all industries. There’s more competition, more emails going out, more noise, and there’s more filters. So one of the things that we’re all battling as well is Gmail’s moving things into folders for us, automatically marking things as a promotional email. We’re not getting to the inbox anymore. Um, that’s another challenge that we’re all dealing with.

More bot clicks and opens are impacting our reporting. So you go and send your email out. You get really excited because as soon as you hit that email send button, as soon as those emails go out, wow, I got a thousand opens and a thousand clicks. And, yep, we know that those are bot clicks. That’s a nice gift there. Uh, and so we’re seeing more and more of that. This is something, you know, five, ten years ago, there were a few companies that had the resources and the IT departments to filter and do those kinds of automations. But these tools have become more accessible, and now we’re seeing it just built into different platforms. If someone’s using Apple Mail, they’re gonna open it and check and spam filter. And even though there are claims that the tools we use are filtering out those bot clicks, we still see a lot of them, um, creep into our reporting and worse creep into our automation. So that’s also impacting us. So we’re we’re thinking as marketers, we’re doing a great job, and our email is driving these wonderful engagements. And then we send Stacy’s information over to sales, and sales like Stacy has no idea who we are. She is not a qualified lead. So that’s another challenge, uh, that we’re working with, uh, as as marketers.

And so because of that, there is a better a bigger weight on our shoulders to prove that we’re doing our jobs, to prove that we’re showing the ROI. Alright? I need to send sales good leads. I need to have, um, good reports, accurate reports that show my engagement, that follow a story, that are showing that the activities that I’m doing are actually pushing someone along a buyer’s journey. And those bot clicks and bot opens aren’t really doing it for us. Um, and and adding into that problem or feeding into that problem is increased security brow increased security in browsers, um, and also in email clients. So less less is getting through.

And then we all know the big scare. Are there are we gonna have cookies? Are we not going to have cookies? Um, the way that, um, it’s it’s likely gonna move forward as cookies are going to stay, but consent is going to be very, very important. So, um, you know, in the early days of of Pardot, you just install that tracking code on your site. And any one of your prospects that went to that site, you could track them. There’s a lot more that we have to do around consent there. And then compounding that challenge is we have to get that consent across multiple devices. So it’s more than just someone having a single phone and a laptop anymore, but, um, um, people might have a work phone, a personal phone, maybe these days two or three different laptops. So you have more devices per user as well, and we need to get that consent across all of those different devices. So these are all challenges that are ticking away from us being able to do our jobs as effective email marketers, where, you know, five, six, seven years ago, just having Pardot gave you such an advantage over the competition because you can see what they’re engaging with on your website.

So how do we get through this? Um, as there is more noise, as there is more competition, consent and relevance are important. Um, I use an example. I’ve got a son, and he plays Roblox. And I think Roblox, as someone who’s been doing this for a long time, has a terrible way to, like, sign up for things. Nothing’s automated. Nothing’s really saved. You’re sign but you know what ultimately gets us in there? Is he wants to do it really bad. So we bypass all of the poor, um, what I would say in my experience, poor tools for making it easy for us to submit our information because we want it really bad. So it becomes important for us as marketers to really illustrate the compelling reason why someone would want to go through our process, want to learn more from us, want to get in touch with us more. And that can offset, you know, having a super streamlined, even a cookie form that has all of my information saved, or all I have to do is one click it. So if I really, really want something, I will fill out that form, and I will request that information, and I will engage with your brand.

Then when I’m engaging with your brand, what the customer is expecting, what the market is expecting is deeper personalization and targeting. And we’re seeing this angle with the push of data cloud. So the premise of data cloud is you’re gonna be able to have more information about your buyers from all of your different systems and create deeper personalization. So segment better. So they’re seeing content just based off of their interest alone. So if you’re Roblox, maybe that’s specific events or specific challenges that those, um, gamers are playing rather than just general, uh, general Roblox information. And there’s a greater expectation for the right message at the right time. So we see that, um, Dreamforce just got wrapped up, um, about a a month or so ago. After my dreaming, I’m sure there’s gonna be great content that we’re all going to receive. What our expectation is going to be is that we’re receiving messages that are relevant to the agendas that we, um, visited, the the stuff that’s important to us.

There’s also, um, an increased requirement for improving those inbound experiences as well. So we talked about forms a little bit. So if you’ve really got what someone wants, then you can get away with, you know, making them complete the form every single time. But how do we create inbound experiences that really show that customer what they’re looking for, help them find the answer more quickly? Um, we’ve gone through the phase of chatbots to help out with things, and there’s other tools that, um, serve dynamic information based off of who that customer is. So improving inbound experiences, helping that buyer qualify themselves, or less popular, but I would say equally important, unqualified themselves are also very important.

And in doing those things, establishing trust, value, and consent. So it’s beyond, uh, we’re past the time of being able to just install a cookie on someone’s site, know every page that Brandon is clicking on, and then send that information to a salesperson so that salesperson can start pitching Brandon products. We have to get Brandon engaged. We have to understand what Brandon is interested in. And then once we understand that, we’ve established trust. Now we can move them ahead to that buyer’s journey. Um, and then in doing this, driving more insights and buying signals for sales or stakeholders depending on your environment. We’re seeing that companies are having to do more with less. That’s a theme that’s been, you know, ongoing for the last at least five, six years. Uh, there’s, uh, sales teams aren’t as big anymore. Um, folks aren’t hiring BDRs as quickly anymore. So as marketers, that that requirement lays on us to really make sure that we’re sending over good leads just because, um, there’s a there’s a higher heightened scrutiny on the work that we’re doing.

So let’s go down our process, and let’s talk about things that we can do beyond what’s available to us today. So lead generation. Current lead generation with your marketing automation platform typically looks like this. You have a form, and you have some Google Ads or social media ads or something like that. So the idea is people are coming to your page, completing a form, and they’re opting in. And that’s how we generate our first marketing lead. And then through our marketing automation platform, we’re doing some qualification. If you’re using Pardot, you’ve got landing pages. So typically forms are inside of landing pages. When I say landing pages here separately, I mean a landing page going to a own specific separate offer that are bringing people in on a specific offer. There’s also imports, and I know that no one breaks these rules, and we’ve never seen anybody do these clients or otherwise. But all these data enrichment platforms where people can go out and get a list of people even though we’re not supposed to do it, Folks are doing that. So you see these imports coming in. Let’s call it import from sales, we might call those, um, and then user generation. So, um, Brandon is on sales. I’m creating leads. You know, I just got back from our dreaming. I met a bunch of great people. I’m adding leads into the CRM, sharing them with marketing, and then that’s how we’re getting leads. But what if we can convert those inbound opportunities to more leads as well? What if Beyond forms, landing pages, imports, and user generated, um, actions? When a customer requests information, we can add that without having to then send that customer to a form and have them complete that information. Um, how can we make that lead generation process easier, not only for us, but for the customer who’s raised their hand and showed interest? And there’s something at the end here that will that we’ll share with you. So we’re just raising the question right now.

Reporting. Right now on your reporting, you’ve got open rates, clicks, page views, and form submissions. And we know that there’s a problem with open rates and clicks. But what if we had more things that we can hook into to attribute to our to our marketing campaigns? Again, this is one of those things that I think Salesforce is trying to, um, get us to with data cloud. So the idea is we can hook into more of these different, uh, web activities or engagement activities and use that inside of our, not only, um, reporting, but segmentation as well. So we want we need to think about other sources that we can pull in, and that’s where data cloud is, and that’s where probably some of you folks are coming up with creative ways to hook into other systems.

And then automation. So right now, we’ve got our automation again based off of those activities that happen inside of our platform, those form bills. But what if we can build automations off of more? Again, going back to that data cloud question, what if we can have our systems connected to other systems so that we can grab that data, um, without, um, without having to pin on a form or a landing page?

Um, so I’d like to share with you next, um, a tool that we’ve been, uh, working on and created at Cypress Learning, uh, called Reply Intelligence for email marketers. What it does is it allows you to connect to your inbox, connect your inbox directly to your CRM, and, um, do some special categorization. I’ll show you a brief demo here with the time that we have. But the idea is you can create new leads from an email. So someone emails you directly. I email, um, stacy at circante or probably sales at circante, sales at cypress learning. I say I’m interested in a product. Rather than having a route through to somebody, we can automatically use that to create a a lead from that email information. We’re also able to do on the flip side of that when someone leaves a company, opt them out, um, because they’re no longer at that company. If someone’s out of office, put them on an out of office suppression list for a week so we’re really driving personalization off of the, um, connection to the inbox. And then we can attribute engagement to email replies. Because if someone replies to an email that we sent out, um, what we have found in doing this for the past, um, little over a year now is that that’s a hot that’s a hot lead. Um, we send an email to Brandon. Brandon responds, yes. I’m interested. Tell me more about this. We have found a lot of email marketers, um, end up missing those opportunities because that’s not a click. That’s not an open.

So we’ll jump over to a little demo of reply intelligence, and I’ve got something exciting to share with everyone today. So if you click on oh, let me go back to it. If you click on this, uh, or or take a picture, that’ll take you to our website. I’ll also share it in the chat, um, and that’ll take you to this platform. And we are in beta. So a year ago, we, um, presented an earlier version of Reply Intelligence at, um, Marjreamon. And what we’ve been doing over this last year is finding ways to make it more cost effective and move it to the cloud so you don’t have to host it on your own. So, um, um, we’re looking for testers right now. Um, so you can go to beta.replyintelligence.com, sign up for a testing account. And what it does is it allows you to connect to your inbox. So we can connect to multiple inboxes. So I’m right now, I’m just connected in this beta account to our pardot at cypress learning, uh, inbox. It reads and categorizes these inboxes. So right one of the things we’re doing right now in beta is actually training our AI to get better at categorizing these. So it sorts them by these different email types. Our default email types are a a human reply, out of office, an unsubscribe request no longer with company, marketing message, and a system notification, Set up an integration either back to Salesforce or Pardot. We’re working on HubSpot and Marketo soon. Create a destination. So with those platforms, um, we can send it to a Pardot form handler to unsubscribe someone, um, create a lead inside of Salesforce, or if someone’s out of office, send them to a suppression list. And then we use rules to determine what’s going to happen. So when an interested human replies, we wanna create a new lead inside of the system if they don’t exist already. If someone says opt me out, I can’t stand you, I don’t like you, or whatever, they’re just not qualified, we can also opt them out so we’re not wasting those, um, contact blocks. If someone is out of office, we can send them to a suppression list. So Brandon’s doing Marjoriemin this week, and, um, I’ve been in Dreamforce the previous week rather than receiving two weeks of marketing messages. We can put Brandon on pause. And then another cool thing that you can do is when Brandon gets back is say, hey. I hope your I hope your event went well. Happy to engage with you again. So drive that personalization. And if they’re no longer with the company, this is something that we see a lot of, unfortunately, with the market, um, being so crazy. If someone’s no longer with the company, this is a great way to keep your data clean. So, um, if I’m no longer with the company, you can keep emailing Brandon @SalesforceBrandonatSalesforceBrandonatSalesforce, but we know that’s not going anywhere. And for those of us who are in the world where we’re paying for those prospects, we wanna be able to keep those clean, and the system will opt those out for us. Um, and then the way that, uh, we have so you can see right here, um, some of the stuff that we’ve been doing with it in the past, um, is we have these external act activities, which I don’t think are as hot now as they were a year ago. So we’re working on moving these into data cloud. And you can see kind of in a, um, a messy way. Um, this is just, again, my test account. All of those comments are are going to the comment section here. What’s cool, the way that we have it working and, again, if you’re interested in this, connect with me on LinkedIn, um, get going with your beta, and I’d happy to do a personal walk through with you on this to show you kinda how we set it up. But these form handlers work great for us. So what we’ve actually done is we have all of this going back to a form handler. So you can see we’ve got a ton of out of offices. We get we actually do generate leads from this, which has been awesome. Um, and then we are managing unsubscribes, and it’s all automatic for us.

Now the third part of this that we’re working on right now, um, just because AI is so cool, is actually AI chatbots. So one of the things that we’re seeing of improving the customer journey is having AI help with, um, um, with facilitating that inbound experience. Now these are separate from your agent cloud agents. They’re much lower cost because one of the things that we’ve realized is for an inbound like SDR like this, we don’t need to actually connect these agents to the rest of our CRM data. We do have these agents trained on a specific landing page, and you see we actually have two different experiences that we’re working on here. So, again, one of the things that I would love for you all to go and, um, I’ll share this URL with you here as well. Click in through it, experience with it, give me your feedback because this is something that’s that’s that’s really new. Um, and what we’re experiencing with is in addition to just the idea of being able to click here and engage with the chatbot, This chatbot is integrated with our Pardot account. So if I select a button, it’s gonna update my CRM record. This is actually using AI to build this out. So I didn’t have to go in and build a bunch of complex rules to get this working. I just told the bot what I needed to do, what I don’t need it to do. This knows who I am. This knows who my record owner is. So it’s saying for in-depth information, get in touch with your lead owner. It’s it’s all connected right in there. And then the other thing that we’ve been getting really positive feedback on is rather than having the the chatbot here, we have it presented as a sales, uh, as a help desk, basically. So someone goes to our landing page and they’re just interested on something, they can go here and click that exact same thing and start engaging with the conversation with an AI directly from the page here. And it says, hello, Kardashian. You know, we add a little bit of fun there. So with the idea behind here is when we’re getting people to our pages, we’re able to serve up a nice engaging experience that’s going to serve information relative to them. We give them the option to interact with it, and we’re able to capture those buying insights, um, directly from the page. And then most importantly, what’s been working the best is have those call to actions right here. So we’re able to take this page from something that has one call of action in a form and augment it with an AI bot. And that’s all I’ll demo today. I mean, I could go on for another hour, but, um, we don’t have that time, unfortunately.

As you go to the beta, you can put this code in, um, here, and that’s all make sure you don’t get charged for anything. If you wanna go above the free account and start exploring with a bunch of emails and stuff like that, you can pop this code in there, and that’ll allow you to upgrade your account and explore things in that beta, um, for another twelve months. And that’s all I’ve got to present, and I wanted to get through that quickly so we have about six minutes for q and a. Is the audio still on?

Speaker 0: Let’s see. I think we’re I think audio is still on. I did get a message saying that they lost sound again, but, um, I can still hear.

Speaker 1: Okay. Um, and a couple of questions coming in is is this available worldwide? Yep. So that was a big thing. We wanted to put it in the cloud out there for everyone. Um, and the testing account is free. And then if you wanted to up you know, do more with it, so a testing account will give you a a little bit to go in there and play around with. But that mar dreaming 24, um, will get will allow you to upgrade to the highest level account and connect multiple inboxes and invite your colleagues and stuff like that. Um, and that is mar dreamin twenty four if you’re gonna upgrade your account and test that out.

Speaker 0: We still have time if anyone wants to post any additional questions in the q and a. See here. We’ve got another one, Brandon. It says, does this work with other email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etcetera, or just Outlook?

Speaker 1: So currently, we’ve got our integration on beta working with Gmail. Our older integration, which is one that we would actually host on a dedicated server, set that up with you, that would support Gmail and Office three or Office three sixty five. And that’s for connecting to those inboxes. Now as far as receiving emails, it’ll see receive emails from any platform. But as far as connecting the inbox through that API connection, it supports Gmail in beta. We’re working on, um, Office three sixty five. The older version that we have supports Gmail and Office three sixty five, but it will read emails from from any service provider.

Speaker 0: Putting that in there, that answer. Awesome. We still have a couple of minutes. Any additional questions that we can answer for you? This is a really cool and really useful solution.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And maybe I have a question to kinda prompt it. Um, are the marketers in attendance, maybe we could do a raise of hands or something like that, using AI in your marketing efforts today? I that that’s my question to the group. Um, are there individuals using AI in their marketing efforts today?

Speaker 0: Brandon, I also see a few questions that have come into the chat as opposed to the q and a that I could reach you as well. Sure. So we’ve answered this a little bit, but just clarifying, does this only work for inboxes in Pardot, or can we use also in marketing cloud engagement?

Speaker 1: Um, so I don’t have a connection for marketing cloud engagement. Marketing cloud engagement has a similar, um, reply mail management plat available. We invented this because there was none, uh, for for Pardot users. Um, if you are using Marketing Cloud, formally ExactTarget, um, look up reply mail management. Um, it’s a it’s a similar solution. It doesn’t have all of the AI new stuff that we’ve built into it, but, um, what this does is this connects with your inbox, and then it allows you to send it to whatever destination you want. So if you look back in the the demo here that I have even, um, some of the destinations that I’ve set up is the Pardot form handler, um, the Salesforce API, so you can connect it to a Salesforce API, um, and also Zapier. I was testing some things with Zapier. So, um, as long as we have an endpoint that we can post to, we can we can post it there. And then, again, reach out to me because if there are things that, uh, you want, we can we can add them. We can add additional destinations and simplify things. Um, but, yeah, the idea is it’ll connect to, um, right now on the beta, uh, a Gmail account, and then we can automate actions to that Gmail account. Maybe I’ll show the rules a little bit here. So, like, in this example, um, if we edit a rule, we’re taking a look at the email types. Right? So if it’s a human reply, we’re gonna check for an another condition, and then we just provide the destination here. So the destination is to

Speaker 0: Brandon, just to let you know, we’re at one minute remaining.

Speaker 1: Okay. Yep. So the idea is you’re able to create the rules inside of here. And then once you have the rules, that’s gonna send the automation back into the platform from the Gmail account.

Speaker 0: I think the last item here is just, um, before we close out in the next thirty seconds is security. Are you able to speak to that real fast about sharing data with the organization?

Speaker 1: Yep. So what we’re what we’re recommending you connect with right now so, um, it’s just reading those emails. Typically, companies are connecting us like a sales and marketing inbox, one that typically just gets ignored. And, um, right now, we do not store any of that information on our servers, so it just reads, processes, and moves on, reads, processes, and moves on, reads, processes, and moves on.

Speaker 0: Alright. Looks like we’re out of time. Thanks, everybody, for joining, and we look forward to seeing you at the next session, um, in just another fifteen minutes.

Speaker 1: Thanks for attending.

Speaker 0: Bye.