November 11, 2024 • 39 mins
In this episode, Andrew Grill sits down with Carol Howley, Chief Marketing Officer at Exclaimer, a leading email signature management company. Carol shares her extensive experience in B2B marketing, from her early days at Skyscanner to her current role at Exclaimer, where she has been instrumental in scaling the company's marketing efforts. They discuss a wide range of topics, including:
- Carol's Marketing Journey: From her start at Best Western Hotels to building the B2B arm at Skyscanner and her move into the tech-heavy world of Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu), Carol’s career path is full of insights for aspiring marketers.
- The Role of Exclaimer: Learn how Exclaimer helps organisations manage their email signatures centrally, ensuring compliance and branding consistency while also turning email signatures into valuable marketing real estate.
- Innovative Use Cases for Email Signatures: Discover how companies are leveraging email signatures for account-based marketing, customer feedback collection, and more.
- Challenges in Scaling Marketing Programs: Carol discusses the challenges she faced in scaling Exclaimer’s marketing efforts, particularly around change management and balancing short-term lead generation with long-term brand building.
- The Evolution of Buyer Behaviour: With buyers now doing up to 80% of their research before engaging with sales teams, Carol explains how Exclaimer is adapting to this shift by focusing on personalisation and delivering value at every touchpoint.
- B2B Influencer Marketing: Carol shares her thoughts on the growing role of influencers in B2B marketing, both formal and informal, and how they can help build credibility and trust in a crowded marketplace.
- The Power of Integrated Marketing Campaigns: Why integrating multiple marketing channels leads to higher success rates and how Exclaimer wraps potential customers in consistent messaging across various touchpoints.
- AI in Marketing: Carol highlights how AI is transforming marketing operations at Exclaimer, from automating routine tasks to analysing customer reviews for insights that drive product development.
Join us as we explore the strategies behind successful B2B marketing campaigns and gain actionable insights from one of the industry’s leading voices.
Key Takeaways:
- Email Signatures as a Marketing Tool: Email signatures can be more than just contact information; they are valuable real estate for promoting content, scheduling meetings, and driving engagement.
- Scaling Challenges: Change management is crucial when scaling a business. Building new channels and operational foundations requires buy-in from all stakeholders.
- Adapting to Buyer Behaviour: Modern buyers are more independent, often completing most of their research before contacting sales. Marketers need to focus on building trust early in the buyer journey.
- AI’s Role in Marketing: AI is not replacing marketers but enhancing their ability to scale operations and make data-driven decisions faster than ever befo
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Episode Transcript
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Voiceover (00:00):
Welcome to Digitally Curious, a podcast to help you
navigate the future of AI andbeyond.
Your host is world-renownedfuturist and author of Digitally
Curious, Andrew Grill.
Every episode is filled withactionable advice about
technology that will helpenhance you and your business.
Andrew Grilll (00:23):
Today I'm excited to welcome a marketing leader
with an impressive track record,carol Howley, cmo of email
signature management companyExclaimer.
Carol spent seven years atSkyscanner, where she played a
key role in building the B2B arm, then spent time at Canonical,
the company behind Ubuntu, theleading Linux operating system.
She is a passionate advocatefor product marketing, branding
(00:44):
and demand generation.
Welcome, carol.
Carol Howley (00:46):
Hi, welcome.
Thank you so much for having meon the show Now.
You've had a fantasticmarketing career.
Andrew Grilll (00:51):
Perhaps you could outline your journey to
Exclaimer.
Carol Howley (00:53):
I'm currently the CMO at Exclaimer, so I feel like
I've had a real privilegenavigating the evolving
landscape of technology and SaaSfor really over the last 15,
probably 20 years actually.
So I've been an exclaimer fortwo years.
So prior to that, I guessinitially my first job was
actually at a company calledBest Western Hotels.
So I worked in theinternational arm of Best
Western and that really ignitedmy love of, I guess, data.
(01:15):
I worked on kind of the B2Bside but also on kind of a lot
of the email activity.
So we built a huge amount ofdata-inspired email variations
and things.
And from there I moved verybriefly onto a B2C side which
was my only kind of dabblereally on the B2C side and
realized I was very definitelymade to B2B marketing and so I
worked for a Visit Scotland armwhere I did a lot of promotion
(01:36):
for the festivals in Edinburgh.
So I did a huge amount ofinward investment for the city
and within that I ended upcoming across Skyscanner and
pitched a route for Qatar.
Actually that was being pitchedfor with Skyscanner and really
loved the brand, the sort ofactivity and also the CEO who I
met on the route kind of pitch.
So I applied to Skyscanner andfinally got a job after trying
(01:57):
really hard and initiallystarted looking after their
front page.
So I looked after all,advertising, cross-sell, all the
activity of effectivelynavigating people around the
webpage and within that Irealized that actually we didn't
really kind of commercialize ormonetize some of our
relationships and there was ahuge amount of activity we were
starting to do, such as buildingan API, building white labels
(02:18):
that people like you know, theNew York Times and Rough Guides
were using, also data when youthink we had.
You know, by the time I think Ileft, we had about 100 million
people on our website everysingle month.
So all those people aresearching for, like future
flights and differentdestinations and things.
So we realized actually, youknow, with all that data, we
could start to kind of predictwhere people wanted to travel in
the future.
So we started kind of buildinga lot of predictions.
(02:40):
So I kind of effectively had abit of a moment and wrote down
all my ideas to the CEO, sort ofsaying actually, if we monetize
this and we professionallymanage our brand, our
relationships, our businessactivity, we can start to charge
more to the airlines, but alsowe can start to have a
professional managedrelationship and retail all
these activities.
So they very much were like OK,we'll give you a chance and see
(03:01):
where we end up.
So they gave me a couple ofinterns to start my team with
and I built that out to sort ofabout 10, 15 people and took
what we called a tribe lead role.
Within that I was leading sortof a team of product engineers
alongside kind of the productlead and also the tech lead and
we just looked after the wholeB2B arm of the business.
We did amazing things likebuilding Alexa skill Facebook
(03:22):
chatbot, running developermarketing, amazing things like
building Alexa skill Facebookchatbot, running developer
marketing and very sort oftechie side, which explains why
I didn't do any of the fun stuffat Skyscanner.
I did all the kind of under thehood and the icebergs of
underneath the surface of thecompany and that was why for me
it was more of a naturalprogression to going somewhere
like Canonical where it is verydeep sort of tech, amazing
products.
You know huge amount ofadvisory services globally for
(03:44):
the, the products that they run.
But you know for that sort ofarea obviously you know you
wouldn't normally step fromSkyscanner into kind of the the
sort of dark depths of SaaS andIT um, but I absolutely loved
working there.
It was an amazing role, reallyheavy kind of demand gen
globally um.
And from there I was approachedabout the role with, with um,
with Exclaimer, and moved acrossthere.
So I interviewed with theinvestors and their sort of
(04:06):
challenge to me was can you comeon board, can you
professionalize?
This company had been aroundfor 20 years.
They didn't do demand gen.
They didn't do kind of reallyanything.
We had a great website, amazingpaid activity, and that was all
.
We hadn't invested in a lot ofthose owned and earned and
organic channels.
So their challenge to me waslike can you professionalize the
team and really build up a sortof full modern demand gen
activity?
(04:26):
So that was the challenge I hadand that's what I've been doing
.
Andrew Grilll (04:29):
Really, the last few years.
Exclaimer is a brand that Ihadn't heard of until recently.
Maybe you could tell us a bitmore about what Exclaimer does
and the problems that you solve.
Carol Howley (04:38):
Exclaimer.
As I said in around actuallyover 20 years, it was launched
as an IT tool so we very muchthought all of our history have
been selling into the ITaudience as an opportunity to
really centralize yourmanagement of your email
signatures to make sure you haveeffective, compliant,
standardized email signatureswith the right brand, the right
information.
There's no sales team promotingthe Christmas activity in the
(05:01):
middle of July because no onecan be bothered to update their
signatures.
It also means you have all thatcompany standard information
you have to have for a compliantindustry such as legal and
healthcare.
So it gives you that amazingkind of situation to effectively
manage and represent yourbusiness.
But also what we realize andwhat our investors realize that
actually this is a hugeopportunity for marketers to use
that email signature.
When you think how much we relyon email in marketing, marketers
(05:22):
to use that email signature.
When you think how much we relyon email in marketing and to
actually use that emailsignature as an opportunity to
promote your content, promoteyour people.
Also put in plugins andintegrations that you could book
your meetings so you know ifyou're sending a sales message.
Why not give the person theopportunity to just
automatically book in with youto share the latest content,
(05:42):
share your webinars.
All the details that you coulddo is all within your kind of
your email signatures, so it's away to kind of brand and
navigate that, and we're alsoable to kind of run campaigns to
people and make sure forcustomer success, for example,
or even the HR.
You can just send that reallyrelevant information.
So we have now over, I think,60,000 organization in 150
companies using Exclaimer, andgrowing really fast actually.
(06:06):
So it's a really really good,simple tool that leverages a
channel that you own in yourbusiness that you don't actually
really think about, but itgives you that always on
promotional opportunity.
Andrew Grilll (06:15):
You're absolutely right.
This email signature is somereally valuable real estate.
It's something we look at allthe time.
I know that mine's promoting myspeaking my latest book.
It's something that'spersistent there.
What are the really interestinguse cases?
You've seen where people haveused the email signature and
actually use it to leverage thatand really make use of that
really rich real estate that'sat the bottom of every email.
Carol Howley (06:36):
So one thing that we saw was people actually
starting to embed.
For a B2B business, it's greatto get reviews of your product
and to get feedback so that youknow you can continuously be
improving, because for us, verymuch the customers at the heart
of our growth.
So we started using, like MPSsurveys and also links to kind
of survey platforms where peoplecan review independently within
our email.
So that's massively boosted ourability to get reviews but also
(06:58):
helped us kind of communicateand show that we're really
listening to our customers.
So you know a lot of companiesare in within that are using us.
They're doing this and also wesaw it as an opportunity.
And I guess the second areathat's been really good is
actually when you think for alot of companies, you know we're
having this wonderful challengeof having to do more with less
and you know make things workand stretch our budgets further.
So we realized we were doing ahuge amount of account-based
(07:20):
marketing or you know more kindof targeted marketing to people
we thought were more likely tobuy and we were doing all this
advertising.
And then you know big massemail follow up.
You know doing sales follow up,but actually the sales team,
you know, if you don't thenbrand their emails with the
exact same kind of message, itdoesn't give that nice
consistent flow and also missedopportunity to kind of make sure
that that salesperson issending something relevant.
(07:40):
So what we did was start to use, from that advertising, that
messaging, follow that journeyall the way through and then you
can start to send thatmessaging all the way through.
So as you start to build thatrelationship, you're doing
contracting and demos.
You've always got that reallynice kind of thread going
through and an opportunity tosort of change up the content
and target people in that way.
So for us to bring it into anaccount-based marketing play is
(08:02):
actually a really, really greatidea too.
Andrew Grilll (08:04):
I bet you every marketer that's listening to
this is going ah, I hadn'tthought about the email
signature, because in the pastchanging that has been a hassle
and you've got to haveconsistency.
And I bet if you said toeveryone you've got to change
your email signature, they'reall going to say, oh, it's just
a pain and the formatting iswrong.
So tell me how Exclaimer makesthat really simple and allows
(08:26):
that consistency and also allowsthat ability to respond and be
dynamic with marketing campaigns.
Carol Howley (08:29):
It's all centrally managed.
So obviously you log into yourplatform.
You can then pull differentactivities, you can pull
different areas.
So whatever you want to do, wehave someone who manages it
within my team.
So it's very easy.
You kind of almost drag anddrop.
You can kind of create yoursignature and then, depending on
who you're sending to, forexample with the sales team, you
can connect up with your salesforce and then you can sort of
(08:50):
segment by lists and variousthings or have different
signatures on options, so theemployee can just sort of click
into their email and then alsoselect a signature or have one
by default.
So you know, it kind of givesyou that really good opportunity
and I completely understand onthe kind of like the change.
It is one of those like realpain points and my one of my
first jobs at sky scan x doeslooking after the corporate
brand when I just started the bbwork was to change that
(09:13):
signature just on our rebrand.
We're literally rolling it outacross 31 companies.
We did it in a 24-hour periodovernight, which was insane,
wouldn't necessarily recommendit, but it's very good for
consistency, um, but goingaround every single member of
staff and sending those emailsand saying please update your
signature, please update yoursignature.
It just I think it took us likesix months to get everything
updated, whereas if you have thecentral thing, you flick a
(09:35):
switch and it's very easy, it'sall done, and because it
connects to your ActiveDirectory or whatever kind of
place that you store yourinformation, then you can
actually have everythingautomatically correct, with the
right pronouns, the rightinformation, the right phone
numbers that people can reachyou.
So you know, it's just that,really, really easy thing, and I
genuinely wish, when I wasdoing it, that I had the tool,
because it was an absolutenightmare.
Andrew Grilll (09:57):
Now you mentioned that Sclam has been around for
20 years and you've been theretwo years.
What are some of the biggestchallenges you've faced in
scaling Exclaimers, marketingprograms, from where they've
been to where they are now?
Carol Howley (10:08):
The biggest thing for me when I first started was
that element of changemanagement.
So you know, obviously I wasbriefed when I took the role
that it was going to be a hugeamount of change that I needed
to bring into the team and tothe company.
And I think you alwaysunderestimate how difficult
change management is as amarketer or as anyone really.
So you know, big thing was kindof coming in speaking to people
(10:28):
, getting obviously the lay ofthe land and then building out
that plan, getting buy-in fromour investors and sort of really
getting going with that plan.
But actually you know, withinthat for me and that
professionalization involved ahuge amount of kind of getting
new people on board.
We launched about nine newchannels in the first year I was
there.
People on board we launchedabout nine new channels in the
first year I was there.
So you know, building out allthat capability, you know
(10:49):
shoring up our foundations as ateam operationally was a massive
amount of work and such a hugechallenge.
And bringing people on boardwith that is hard because people
don't love change, let's behonest.
So you know it's kind of likeexplaining getting them on board
.
You know there was a lot ofchange in people and process and
a lot of learning.
So you do have to get peoplewho really want to kind of buy
into that journey, because Ithink scaling a SaaS business is
(11:10):
fun if you like that kind ofwork and if you don't, it's
probably the worst place in theworld to work.
So you know, thankfully for me,it's definitely something I
absolutely love.
So our initial problem reallywas that kind of change
management, just like runninglaunching so much fun but an
awful lot of difficulty.
And then I think the other sortof areas is around our balance
between brand and leadgeneration.
(11:31):
So our biggest challenge, Ifind, is you know, everyone sits
there batman's just released asurvey, actually at their last
conference, where it's showingthat the percentage that
companies are investing inmarketing spend is declining.
So it it was around 13, 14%pre-COVID on average and it's
now declined to about 8% ascompanies saw profits.
So when you have that, yourautomatic default is like I have
(11:53):
to go on the instant.
You get pressure as well fromyour CEO and CFO, who maybe
don't understand the alignmentbetween the long-term strategic
element of building your brand,bringing people into market,
raising awareness as opposed tothe instant.
Let's get the MQLs through thedoor Because eventually, even if
you go with paid it plateausand unless you have something
behind it to help you bring morepeople into market, a trusted
(12:14):
brand that people see you online, they're like, oh, I will buy
from them because I trust them,because I know they're
established or they're workingor I like their marketing and I
like the way they behave andthey do things.
So we have this continuous askfor an inflow of high quality
leads to drive revenue and thenthe balance between strategic
brand marketing, demandgeneration of actually raising
awareness, greasing the wheelsof the sales process, I suppose
(12:36):
and opening the door before youcan actually then just go buy
our product.
So it's a huge balance for usto play the long game while
constantly being pressured toplay the short game which has,
you know, it's kind of likelimited returns in the long term
.
So I think that's the one thing, and then that leads you to, I
guess, sell the marketingalignment, which is always a
massive challenge and I thinkit's always the famous cat and
(12:57):
dog sort of war pictures.
But you know, we have to workreally, really hard to align
with the sales team, to get themon board and vice versa.
You have to work really, reallyhard to align with the sales
team, to get them on board andvice versa.
You know it's not enough thesedays to just pass leads over to
sales that the customer doesn'tcare.
If you know, it's no longer ourproblem and unfortunately in
marketing it's always yourproblem.
So you know we want to kind ofpass things over.
We want to make sure that wework together.
We have in our team, like jointplanning, shared KPIs, we're
(13:20):
integrating all our systems sowe've got the same access to
data and dashboards and reallyfocused on what's the best
customer experience and the bestway to make revenue.
That may mean some of us haveto do a bit more than we think
we should do or we have to worktogether and it's really kind of
trying to get that wheelworking together.
So they've been probably mybiggest challenges the past few
years.
Andrew Grilll (13:40):
So buyer behavior has certainly changed and I'm
wondering how, since your timeat Skyscanner, you've seen a
change and how are you, as anorganization, adapting to that?
Carol Howley (13:49):
also competing with everything that a person
could spend their budget on.
So it's not like you're kind ofcompeting just against the
people right next to you.
So the vibe has changed, butalso, I think, because of that
(14:10):
activity and you know as leaningon things like lead generation
and form fills and capturingdata and using data to sort of
chase people down and call themand stalk them and turn up at
the house in the sort of salesprocess that we've all modeled
in B2B businesses and, strangelyenough, people don't like
handing over their email addressand then being stalked by
salespeople and marketers andemailed every five minutes.
(14:31):
So I think, as a result of that, what we've seen is a huge
amount of buyers kind ofstepping back, going incognito,
doing their own research, notgiving up their email address
for anything, because they knowexactly what will happen.
So we've seen buyer behavioractually see, you know, get them
going through to like 70, 80%of the way through their buying
journey before they eveninteract with the sales team.
(14:52):
So it's actually people aredoing their research on third
party sites.
On second party sites, you knowinformation anywhere they can
find that involves them doingthe research.
I know I'm probably one of theworst people because obviously I
work in marketing and I knowexactly what will happen.
But I do my research by goinginto an amazing slack group or
whatsapp chat that I have withother cmos and then I always
(15:13):
just sort of ask you know, I'mthinking of this tooling, who's
using what?
What do you think's best,what's great for your market?
Then I get a good view fromthem.
I'll go on to g2, capterra,trust, trustradius, whichever
sort of platform at that timethat I can see the best results,
read some of the reviews, seethat that company is responding
to those reviews and then I'llgo and buy.
I'll literally reach out and belike hi, I'm interested in you.
(15:34):
I'm comparing you between X andY maybe, and pretty much the
first company that responds,with a salesperson that actually
listens to me and understandsmy problems, then I'll probably
buy it.
And we've seen actually thatover 80, 90% of sales.
If you can get there withinfive minutes and you actually
have listened to what theperson's telling you, you've got
an amazing chance to make like400% more likely to make a sale.
(15:57):
So you know people are comingwith.
I want this, I'm ready, speakto me now, understand me and
listen.
And unless, unless you do that,that expectation is so high and
the next person will do.
You know what you're not doing,so you know it's amazing to to
sort of see that huge changeinto like personalization
experiences and a greater focus.
Really, then they're like youknow, how will you make my
(16:17):
business better?
So they really want to focus onROI and, you know, scrutinize
the deals.
We've seen lots more in abuying committee, even though
we're quite a cheap tool, to behonest, like we're very cheap to
purchase, but you know, incomparison to some huge
enterprise tools.
But actually you know we'rehaving like up to 10 people on
the buying committee and the itpeople, the marketing people,
then there's like finance andall kinds of other people
(16:38):
bringing in, and so you've gotto be able to understand how to
talk to all these differentbuyers and explain the ROI and
the effect of your solution aswell.
So I think it's definitely amore complicated environment for
sellers and marketers in thenext.
Andrew Grilll (16:51):
So we know that B2B is a very different beast to
B2C, but you talked about aninteresting thing there in your
own buying journey, you actuallyused influencers without
knowing it.
These are your other CMOs, yourfellows that actually
influenced the decision.
They're not paid influencers orInstagram influencers.
But I'm wondering how you seethe B2B influencer thought
leadership space change.
It's kind of a loaded questionbecause I've started doing more
(17:12):
and more of that People wouldhave seen.
I've done some things withIntel, with Vodafone, with Dell.
These are brands that aretrusting me to give advice and
opinion on their products andservices and obviously I have
reach and I have some level ofthought leadership, I suppose.
But talk to me about howtraditional influence marketing
and also your own informalinfluencer group actually is
(17:34):
something you're using in yourown marketing or your colleagues
are using their marketing inthe B2B space.
Carol Howley (17:39):
If you join community groups and things that
you can start to kind ofstrategically engage directly
with some decision makers andalso with other organizations.
So I think, because it's morecareful consideration of the
journey, you know peopleactually look at those multiple
stakeholders.
They want to broaden theinformation sources that they
have and so, leveraging yourinfluences, you can really
enhance your credibility, reachthis wider network and also
(18:02):
influence them about perceptionsand activities.
So the channels in b2b aretypically centered around kind
of thought leaders rather thanthose additional influencers.
I think in b2c you know it'svery celebrity.
People know who they are, youknow it's easy to kind of spot,
whereas the influencers in b2bare very much kind of you know
they're educated, they knowthey've got experience, they've
got a track record.
So people will be very kind ofcritical if you don't have that
(18:25):
level of experience or expertisesuch as yourself that you can
actually bring to that adviceand that conversation.
So you know it's very different.
It's not always sort of a paidfor thing and it's often kind of
very related to other companiesand brands and kind of links
really nicely into kind of thearea of partnership, marketing
and having a bit of a near-boundstrategy.
We call it.
That means you kind of leverageand reach within that industry
(18:46):
and within trusted andrecommended areas.
That enables you to kind ofleverage that opportunity.
So I think for us that's thebiggest area that we would use
it and also how it kind ofreally works into our mix.
Andrew Grilll (18:57):
There are so many marketing channels out there
now it's almost confusing, andI'm sure it's confusing for a
marketer.
So is there one particularmarketing channel that works
best for you?
Carol Howley (19:04):
So we do have some like higher performing
marketing channels.
Sometimes marketing gets a badreputation because it is hard to
explain the kind of like themathematical channels, the
elements of like trust andreputation and relationship, and
how all of that kind of playsin together to kind of, I guess,
optimize your business kind ofreputation, your opportunity for
sales, and each channel playskind of a different role.
(19:27):
A really good statistic I thinkit was Gartner again that
quoted I think it's 300% higherresults if you integrate your
marketing campaigns, which meansacross multiple channels.
So more than four channelsgives you that opportunity to
drive much higher resultsbecause you're reaching people
not only multiple times butyou're also kind of reaching
people in different areas andthe places where they'd go.
So our kind of idea is that wewrap people in the same
(19:50):
messaging so that they seethings you know over and over
again.
And part of the reason for thatis that it takes over kind of a
thousand touch points for acompany to find a person, to
find out about company, toactually end up buying, you know
, on average.
So some people go instantly andthen other people will take all
these kind of multiplecircuitous routes and they'll
see you at an event and they'llsee an ad, or they'll receive an
(20:11):
email, or someone will say, oh,I've just bought this, did you
know it's actually quite good.
Or they'll see you on a podcastand you know, hear you talking.
And so diversifying yourmarketing efforts means that you
reach people in different areas, whether it's like search
engine, social media, email, theoutreach.
So we try and kind of retain anelement of consistent messaging
, reinforcing our brand, andkind of really encounter people
(20:32):
multiple times so that it bringsthem through in the journey to
invest in a really good contentengine.
You have to do paid advertising, but you have to scale beyond
paid search across differentareas such as display, social,
all of these side of things, andalso start to leverage
opportunities from other areas,as we were just discussing
around review sites, influencers, community, the news, pr,
(20:56):
podcasts.
So really starting to do thosetable stakes elements and then
leverage everything else thatyou could do to sort of start to
, I guess, hit people inmultiple ways and also tell your
story in different formats.
Andrew Grilll (21:07):
So we can't do a podcast in 2024 without
mentioning the A word AI.
I'd love to know how AI isbeing adopted within your
marketing team and processes.
Carol Howley (21:16):
It's funny, in the last year, you know, ai, from
what it was over a year ago tonow, has just been this
explosion, I think there's, likenow, thousands of tools being
launched every single day.
They were saying in terms oflike having AI, or claiming to
have AI, as some of the tools do.
So for us, very much, adoptingAI into our process has been
hugely important for that kindof sustainable growth.
(21:37):
And but what I can?
What I initially said to myteam when you know know, we had
a bit of, I guess, pushback bypeople like, what if it takes my
job?
What if I'm replaced by allthis kind of thing?
And I was actually yes, youwill be, but you won't be
replaced by AI.
You'll be replaced by someonewho's understood how to use it,
how to leverage it, how to useit in an intelligent way that
enables us to scale faster.
(21:58):
So we're investing in AI toolswherever possible to scale our
operations, to automate tasks,to do routine things, to
personalize at scale, to analyzedata as well.
So one thing that we did in thelast week was pull out all of
our reviews, obviouslycompletely anonymize them and
make sure there was nothingthere that would relate to us.
Run them through AI, pull outthe key trends like what's
(22:18):
happening, what should we do,what are some great product
ideas so you can do.
If we did that, we'd spend awhole week doing that analysis
normally and it's taken us about20 minutes to kind of do that
whole thing.
So for us, the massiveopportunity with AI is to like
absolutely speed everything up.
Another thing we've got is youknow, if campaigns aren't
running well enough, then weautomatically switch budget and
(22:38):
we switch money into kind of thenew ones, whereas before that
would be someone monitoring,working out percentages and it
just gives you it in thedashboard.
So that's a great opportunity.
And also using tools for writing.
So obviously you can use chat,gpt.
We've actually got jasper um,which is an amazing tool for us.
There's other otheropportunities, but we are using
jasper um and it helps us createthese really amazing tailored
(23:00):
content and experiences that wecan then use in our marketing to
scale.
And we've actually taught ourtone of voice for our brands.
They really really scarilytaught my tone of voice, so
every now and then they werelike this is in your tone of
voice and I'm like really, itactually is a little bit like me
, it's a bit horrible.
So it's really good to help uswith that content creation at
speed, because sometimes you'resapping like I know I want to
(23:25):
write about this but I've got noidea how to start, and it's
that amazing thing, just sort ofsay you know, here's what I'm
trying to say and it just givesyou such great inspiration.
So you know, it's a reallymassive transformative shift in
how we develop our products andalso how we can connect with
customers at scale and make itkind of personalizing quick as
well.
So for us it's just beenamazing and super exciting.
Andrew Grilll (23:42):
Now you mentioned Jasper.
That's a tool that I've alsorecommended to people in my book
for marketers.
That seems to lend itself wellto the marketing discipline.
But are there any other tipsthat you've seen that you can
give our listeners about how tobest use AI, the sort of key?
Carol Howley (23:55):
ones that I've said is around kind of content
creation, which obviously,jasper, we've also used Wr in
the past, both fantastic tools.
Um, you know, we've we'vemainly used a lot of things for
writing.
So we actually dabble in sort ofthings like claude and chap gpt
as well.
We have license for those.
Microsoft co-pilot is reallybrilliant as well, for you know
writing your emails and alsokind of it comes in and tells
(24:17):
you know how your tone is and ifit's kind of appropriate or if
you want to ask questions of howyou should write and introduce
that tonality into your emails.
We've used it within our salesprocess, which is really helpful
.
So we've taught a sort ofchatbot to understand our
company, our data, and also tokind of understand some problems
(24:38):
that people might beencountering from a customer
perspective problems with thetool or questions they may ask
so that we can very quickly,even if someone's not online in
the middle of the night, answerquestions that people may have
on the other side of the world,without necessarily employing
people to be available just incase someone needs help.
So you know, having that kindof ability to have sort of very
easily easy to find, becauseoften you sat there in an FAQ
(25:00):
trying to work out the rightthing, whereas if you can kind
of have someone sort of, I guess, curate that search, it's
fantastic.
And we've also used sort of AIto train some of our sales
people so you can do someamazing sales training where it
actually gives some feedback on.
You missed this point, or youshould have said this, and you
know actually, if you're sellingthe company.
You weren't quite right in thisdescription, because you can
teach, obviously, ai all of theelements, so having a sort of
(25:23):
ability to use it to train oursalespeople is really good.
And also we've beenexperimenting with Midjourney,
which is amazing for creatingimages, and it's incredible the
images you can create and wedon't use as much as we possibly
should.
And we've also beeninvestigating, like video
creation too.
So we do a lot of onsite videosthat we usually shoot, but
looking how we can actuallyscale that a bit faster if we
(25:43):
did use AI to help us as well.
Andrew Grilll (25:45):
It's fascinating how things have changed.
I'm just thinking about yourdiscussion about the chatbot.
Probably three or four yearsago, when I was looking at
playing with chatbots, you hadto give it a tree and a
structure, and only if thishappened then this would happen
Now, as you say, you can teachit its tone of voice.
You can tell it what to say andnot say.
I think this will revolutionizethings For marketers.
Listening to this.
They need to play with it.
Maybe they're not ready todeploy the chatbot yet, but they
(26:05):
should actually beexperimenting, see what it can
and can't do.
I think a lot of people, myselfincluded, have had that aha
moment.
It's like you mean it can dothis.
Have you had an aha moment withthese new technologies and
tools?
Carol Howley (26:17):
Yeah, definitely, I think, for me.
I was listening to an amazingpodcast a while ago.
It's by the CMO of HubSpot andhe was talking about actually
and I was finding I was doingsome prompting and learning
myself and teaching myself.
But he was like, actually AI isas good as what you tell it
because obviously it's a learnedmodel.
So he was kind of very muchtalking about you know, it's
(26:39):
only as good as your prompts,which made me kind of.
I went on a course run by ourinvestors, insight Partners, and
they ran a course on Gen AIthat they kind of effectively
walked you through the qualityof the prompts SaaS company and
this is our key audiences andyou can feed in some of your
audience data and then it givesAI that picture because you
(27:09):
can't expect it to automatically, I guess, read your mind and
know that you want to talk to amarketing audience in a
professional voice about thisand your product does X, y and Z
and all of this information.
So if you remember to kind offeed it in or, you know,
obviously teach it through amodel that you paid money for,
then you've got that ability toactually, you know, use it in
the best possible way.
So I think because the wholeelement of AI is it's as good as
(27:32):
what you tell it and it's asgood as you are in using it.
So I think that's the biggestlearning sort of aha moment for
me was how much better, how muchbetter content I could create
and activities I could do when Iactually learned how to explain
myself properly.
Andrew Grilll (27:47):
I suppose you mentioned that AI is not reading
our mind.
I think we're not far off,because if it knows everything
about us, it can infer maybebetter than our spouse can as to
what we're thinking.
So wouldn't it be amazing if,as a marketer, you could know
what your customer was thinking,or vice versa?
Carol Howley (28:05):
Yeah, definitely, and I think you know some of the
things.
I was at a conference thiscouple of weeks ago actually,
where they did a demo of, youknow, a trained AI model who
would be almost like yoursolutions engineer on a call.
So the AI joined.
I think they were calledOneMind and the AI joined and
was there like knew all thetechnical data, all of the
information, everything you know, and it was interacting with
(28:26):
people and it's definitelycreepy, but I do think that will
.
You know.
Obviously, if you spend time,it'll increasingly understand
what you want and what you needand how you do it and you know
it is fascinating to sort of seehow that kind of I guess, ai
has sort of synthesize peopleand talent.
Andrew Grilll (28:42):
It's amazing.
Well, it leads me to my nextquestion synthesize talent,
audio and video cloning.
I have an audio clone.
I have a video clone with acompany called Veed that have
done a video clone for me so Ican now appear in multiple
places and actually I played myvideo clone on stage 15 to 20
minutes into me being in frontof an audience and they've gone.
Oh, my goodness, that is acarbon copy of you.
(29:04):
This is really scary scary ornot?
Where do you see audio videocloning working and marketing
programs going forward and howimportant you think it is to
label ai generated content?
Carol Howley (29:15):
in terms of on the marketing and using it.
I think it's amazing for like,especially for us, for different
languages.
We operate in multiplecountries, so being able to have
you know that kind of clone,being able to instantly sort of
translate or, you know, do whatyou need in that language, is
fantastic.
Have dialect, differentdialects and also kind of adapt
to demographic profiles and youknow there's no need for kind of
multiple people to be broughtinto things.
(29:36):
You actually you can justliterally replicate things or
clone yourself to a degree.
And I think it also reduces thecosts with content production.
I know that we've savedthousands and thousands of
pounds in translation inproduction.
You know all those costsassociated with the traditional
content element and hiring,talent and logistics and you
know it's just speeded upeverything we can do and
(29:56):
decreased our costs enormously.
So it's really interesting.
And then in terms of likelabeling and sort of I guess
saying whether or not it'sreally interesting, and then in
terms of like labeling and andsort of I guess saying whether
or not it's ai and and we'vecertainly come up against that
discussion in in our kind ofbusiness and we're like you know
, effectively it's anything thatyou produce that's through ai
is kind of copied or taken orreplicated the information
(30:17):
somewhere.
But then I guess thatinformation, by putting it out
there, you're making it publiclyavailable.
So I so I guess what's your.
One of the interesting thingsand I'm sure we'll see more and
more cases is like what isproprietary ownership of thought
leadership?
If you are publishing it andmaking it available, you know
someone's, you publish thingslike you know, I'm reading a
book at the minute and I'mprobably taking ideas on board
that I'll, you know, reiterateto other people.
(30:39):
And you know, in a sense AI isdoing that, but with a lot more
kind of capability forremembering than myself, for
example.
I think it's more you know,more accurate remembering and
also synthesizing at speed.
So I don't know at what pointand I certainly don't want to be
the person making the decision,but you know there is an
element of like copywriting andsort of rights and you know, do
(31:00):
you distribute other people?
But then if you are putting iton the, what right do you have
per se?
So yeah, I don't necessarilyhave the answer, but I think
it's a fascinating debate thatwe need to be having as well.
Andrew Grilll (31:12):
So what should marketers be focusing on
preparing for in the age of AI?
Carol Howley (31:16):
So I think the biggest thing AI is going to do
is when you think about whatwe've just been talking about,
with that huge proliferation ofcontent, that ability to create
content.
There's already more thanenough bad content out there,
let's be honest.
It's hard enough to findsomething on the internet.
So I think for sort of searchand awareness building, ai is
going to be a massivecomplication for people as it
becomes harder and harder tofind the right information and
(31:38):
also people will then start, Iguess, using ai to curate the
information available to them.
So you'll be living in more ofa bubble, so it'll be harder and
harder as well to reach newpeople across mediums.
So for us, what we've kind ofstarted to do with that more
channel element is kind of startto have more and more chances
to to speak to people acrossdifferent mediums, different
formats.
(31:58):
Because if, for example, ai iscurating your search and only
serving things it thinks youwant to hear, we may not be
within that kind of bubble ofwhat people are sort of being
told they want to hear.
We're also competing againsthundreds of millions other
brands creating really fast,quick content.
So I think for you know, thatkind of awareness driving, it's
going to be massivelycomplicated and it's already
having massive impacts in termsof search, what google will be
(32:20):
doing, how their age is evolvingin terms of how they display
results and also in terms of,like you know, do they trust the
, the actual website of thebrand people aren't necessarily
within their buyer journey,going there until the end or do
they trust other sources?
So then you need to think abouthow do you kind of be present
on all the other sites that youcould be to make sure that you
reach people.
So I think the biggest area inthat sort of top of funnel
(32:42):
search is going to be where wesee huge disruption and
complication.
We've also got that coupled withkind of cookie-less advertising
and sort of Web3 coming in.
So I think for marketers it'sgoing to be a lot of fun over
the next sort of few years tonavigate that process.
I think AI will have a hugeimpact, as we've discussed, in
terms of that conversion element.
So at the point that they comeinto your ecosystem, being able
(33:04):
to serve personalized, relevantweb pages based on where they're
coming from, being able to ofadapt your emails very, very
quickly without humanintervention, to kind of speak
to people in the right tone ofvoice and the right relevant
information.
You know change campaigns andactivities and, you know, make
all of that happen reallyseamlessly.
So the the opportunity forconversion and really investing
(33:24):
in that conversion is isincredible because of the
personalization and the speedyou can work.
So I think you know they're thekind of two areas that will
have the biggest impact and beable to kind of have the biggest
challenge on one side, andimprovement on the other side.
Andrew Grilll (33:38):
So you mentioned cookie-less advertising.
So how does that change the wayyou market your product and how
important does first-party databecome for you and your clients
?
Carol Howley (33:47):
I think it's a real shift in how we approach
targeting and data collection,like we won't be able to use
that third party data as much asbefore, so we have to kind of
rely on the first party, whichis the information you can
collect directly from thecustomer, so them actually
saying, yes, you can definitelymarket to me, versus being able
to kind of market to themwithout necessarily all the
permissions based on theirbehaviors or things.
(34:08):
So in order to navigate that, Ithink you have to develop those
direct relationships.
You have to, you know, reallyoptimize your channels so that
you can reach people and makesure they're performing really
well, such as your website, youknow, being present in search
results, being, you know, leakedto by other companies, other
companies, other media, you know, doing more and more and kind
of diverse by the mediums ofyour marketing.
(34:28):
You can do a lot more throughsort of email marketing, but to
your own base.
I think you need to reallyexpand across those other areas.
That you know means that youcan ask for people to opt into
your ecosystem a lot more andalso sort of be more present in
other areas.
And also you're going to haveto encourage people to share
their information and have areally good updated preferences.
(34:49):
Sites offer great experiences,discounts, content, things that
will actually make people wantto engage with you, retain that
relationship and sort of keepyou in their books as such.
Andrew Grilll (35:00):
So leading question how can an email
signature help in this regard?
Carol Howley (35:04):
I think email signatures do become
increasingly valuable becauseit's the emails that you send as
a person or as your business,to people that you have already
interacted with.
So it's all the contacts or allthe people that you're directly
reaching out with.
So you're not necessarily inthat kind of situation where,
with mass promotional emails,you have to very much be mindful
of things like GDPR andspamming people.
(35:25):
You know it's past that point,someone's already there.
So you have 100% deliverabilityof the messaging that you're
sending because it's in thatsignature.
It's not like an add-on or, youknow, sending an image or an
attachment that say it's part ofyour email.
And I know that I send like toomany emails probably about 50 a
day and I receive probablyabout 500.
And you know if they're notkind of properly branded and
they're not standing out andpeople do generate a lot of
(35:49):
trust from that kind ofrelationship, so you can
dynamically update them.
You can make sure that it'sreally, really relevant to that
sort of recipient.
You can promote your marketing,as we said, present your brand
very professionally.
You can also personalize it bythe person who's receiving it.
So it does give you thatability to actually get the
message across.
When you think about the numberof people you'll actually see
(36:10):
you're advertising and you'repaying for that opportunity.
So the ROI on actually using anemail signature we do have an
ROI calculator on our website sopeople can actually put in.
You know what, if I did onadvertising what they do, what
my reach be, and we usually seebetween six and eight percent
click through on our signatures,so people are actually clicking
.
You can obviously see all thatanalytics within your dashboards
(36:31):
as well, so you know which ofthose people are doing what.
So you can actually start tobuild a really good picture
through those signatures to seeand just make sure your messages
are received.
Andrew Grilll (36:40):
I think so we're almost out of time, but we're up
to my favorite part of the showthe quickfire round, where we
learn more about our guests.
Iphone or Android iPhone round,where we learn more about our
guests iPhone or Android iPhone,window or aisle?
Carol Howley (36:50):
Definitely the window.
I love looking out the windowIn the room or in the metaverse.
I spend a lot of time in bothof those places, so for me I'd
love to say outside, because thesecond that I'm not at work,
I'm out the door.
Your biggest hope for this yearand next.
We've been investing loads inmy marketing team and I'd love
us to get to the point wherewe're really able to invest in
everyone's careers and give thema great opportunity to start
(37:10):
learning.
I wish that AI could do all ofmy Dishes, I think.
Andrew Grilll (37:13):
The app you use most on your phone.
Carol Howley (37:15):
I think it probably is LinkedIn at the
minute, the best advice you'veever received.
You can choose to feelfrustrated, you can choose to
feel angry or you can choose tosay that can you solve it?
Yes or no.
And if you can't, do you worryabout it because it's not going
to change?
And if you can, let's go and dosomething about it.
What are you reading at themoment?
I'm reading two books, becauseI can never manage to focus on
just one thing.
I'm reading Mind the InclusionGap and also the Courage to Be
(37:37):
Disliked.
Final quick fire question howdo you?
Andrew Grilll (37:39):
want to be remembered.
Carol Howley (37:40):
I think, for sticking to my values.
I think it's really importantto do so.
You know, I care a lot aboutpeople.
I care a lot about how peopleshould be treated and how the
best way to behave and all ofthat side of things.
Andrew Grilll (37:55):
And do your best to be a really nice, genuine
authentic person, and so I thinkI'd like to be remanded for
that.
So my view is that our emailsignature is a unique piece of
marketing real estate.
So what three things shouldbrands be doing to capitalize on
this?
Carol Howley (38:04):
So I mean, obviously, invest in a managed
email signature tool is it's areally good, so you know, making
sure that you do that and thenbringing in things like we've
seen having photos in youremails massive impact for people
because it's like that's a realperson, you know they're
genuine person, they exist, andso actually having photos in
your email signatures and thecorrect information means that
they can contact you and thenutilizing you know it to promote
(38:27):
something relevant.
I think when you can speak topeople in a way that's timely,
relevant and provides reallygood, valuable information is
the best way to kind of like notonly to market to them but
actually kind of build arelationship.
So what we're really about isbuilding our brand is all about
building connections, buildingtrust and enabling that other
business or that person todevelop or to grow those
(38:48):
relationships, know thoserelationships and that trust by
the sort of method ofcommunication.
Andrew Grilll (38:52):
Carol, a fascinating discussion.
How can we find out more aboutyou and your product?
Carol Howley (38:57):
www.
exclaimer.
com and also on LinkedIn.
You know my name is CarolHowley, our company's Exclaimer,
so the company page and mineare on LinkedIn, so very active
on there as well, carol, thankyou so much for your time today.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Voiceover (39:09):
Thank you for listening to Digitally Curious.
Andrew's new book DigitallyCurious is available to order at
digitallycuriousai.
You can find out more aboutAndrew and how he helps
corporates become more digitallycurious with keynote speeches
and C-suite workshops atdigitallycuriousai.
(39:30):
Until next time, we invite youto stay digitally curious.
Welcome to Digitally Curious, a podcast to help you
navigate the future of AI andbeyond.
Your host is world-renownedfuturist and author of Digitally
Curious, Andrew Grill.
Every episode is filled withactionable advice about
technology that will helpenhance you and your business.
Andrew Grilll (00:23):
Today I'm excited to welcome a marketing leader
with an impressive track record,carol Howley, cmo of email
signature management companyExclaimer.
Carol spent seven years atSkyscanner, where she played a
key role in building the B2B arm, then spent time at Canonical,
the company behind Ubuntu, theleading Linux operating system.
She is a passionate advocatefor product marketing, branding
(00:44):
and demand generation.
Welcome, carol.
Carol Howley (00:46):
Hi, welcome.
Thank you so much for having meon the show Now.
You've had a fantasticmarketing career.
Andrew Grilll (00:51):
Perhaps you could outline your journey to
Exclaimer.
Carol Howley (00:53):
I'm currently the CMO at Exclaimer, so I feel like
I've had a real privilegenavigating the evolving
landscape of technology and SaaSfor really over the last 15,
probably 20 years actually.
So I've been an exclaimer fortwo years.
So prior to that, I guessinitially my first job was
actually at a company calledBest Western Hotels.
So I worked in theinternational arm of Best
Western and that really ignitedmy love of, I guess, data.
(01:15):
I worked on kind of the B2Bside but also on kind of a lot
of the email activity.
So we built a huge amount ofdata-inspired email variations
and things.
And from there I moved verybriefly onto a B2C side which
was my only kind of dabblereally on the B2C side and
realized I was very definitelymade to B2B marketing and so I
worked for a Visit Scotland armwhere I did a lot of promotion
(01:36):
for the festivals in Edinburgh.
So I did a huge amount ofinward investment for the city
and within that I ended upcoming across Skyscanner and
pitched a route for Qatar.
Actually that was being pitchedfor with Skyscanner and really
loved the brand, the sort ofactivity and also the CEO who I
met on the route kind of pitch.
So I applied to Skyscanner andfinally got a job after trying
(01:57):
really hard and initiallystarted looking after their
front page.
So I looked after all,advertising, cross-sell, all the
activity of effectivelynavigating people around the
webpage and within that Irealized that actually we didn't
really kind of commercialize ormonetize some of our
relationships and there was ahuge amount of activity we were
starting to do, such as buildingan API, building white labels
(02:18):
that people like you know, theNew York Times and Rough Guides
were using, also data when youthink we had.
You know, by the time I think Ileft, we had about 100 million
people on our website everysingle month.
So all those people aresearching for, like future
flights and differentdestinations and things.
So we realized actually, youknow, with all that data, we
could start to kind of predictwhere people wanted to travel in
the future.
So we started kind of buildinga lot of predictions.
(02:40):
So I kind of effectively had abit of a moment and wrote down
all my ideas to the CEO, sort ofsaying actually, if we monetize
this and we professionallymanage our brand, our
relationships, our businessactivity, we can start to charge
more to the airlines, but alsowe can start to have a
professional managedrelationship and retail all
these activities.
So they very much were like OK,we'll give you a chance and see
(03:01):
where we end up.
So they gave me a couple ofinterns to start my team with
and I built that out to sort ofabout 10, 15 people and took
what we called a tribe lead role.
Within that I was leading sortof a team of product engineers
alongside kind of the productlead and also the tech lead and
we just looked after the wholeB2B arm of the business.
We did amazing things likebuilding Alexa skill Facebook
(03:22):
chatbot, running developermarketing, amazing things like
building Alexa skill Facebookchatbot, running developer
marketing and very sort oftechie side, which explains why
I didn't do any of the fun stuffat Skyscanner.
I did all the kind of under thehood and the icebergs of
underneath the surface of thecompany and that was why for me
it was more of a naturalprogression to going somewhere
like Canonical where it is verydeep sort of tech, amazing
products.
You know huge amount ofadvisory services globally for
(03:44):
the, the products that they run.
But you know for that sort ofarea obviously you know you
wouldn't normally step fromSkyscanner into kind of the the
sort of dark depths of SaaS andIT um, but I absolutely loved
working there.
It was an amazing role, reallyheavy kind of demand gen
globally um.
And from there I was approachedabout the role with, with um,
with Exclaimer, and moved acrossthere.
So I interviewed with theinvestors and their sort of
(04:06):
challenge to me was can you comeon board, can you
professionalize?
This company had been aroundfor 20 years.
They didn't do demand gen.
They didn't do kind of reallyanything.
We had a great website, amazingpaid activity, and that was all
.
We hadn't invested in a lot ofthose owned and earned and
organic channels.
So their challenge to me waslike can you professionalize the
team and really build up a sortof full modern demand gen
activity?
(04:26):
So that was the challenge I hadand that's what I've been doing
.
Andrew Grilll (04:29):
Really, the last few years.
Exclaimer is a brand that Ihadn't heard of until recently.
Maybe you could tell us a bitmore about what Exclaimer does
and the problems that you solve.
Carol Howley (04:38):
Exclaimer.
As I said in around actuallyover 20 years, it was launched
as an IT tool so we very muchthought all of our history have
been selling into the ITaudience as an opportunity to
really centralize yourmanagement of your email
signatures to make sure you haveeffective, compliant,
standardized email signatureswith the right brand, the right
information.
There's no sales team promotingthe Christmas activity in the
(05:01):
middle of July because no onecan be bothered to update their
signatures.
It also means you have all thatcompany standard information
you have to have for a compliantindustry such as legal and
healthcare.
So it gives you that amazingkind of situation to effectively
manage and represent yourbusiness.
But also what we realize andwhat our investors realize that
actually this is a hugeopportunity for marketers to use
that email signature.
When you think how much we relyon email in marketing, marketers
(05:22):
to use that email signature.
When you think how much we relyon email in marketing and to
actually use that emailsignature as an opportunity to
promote your content, promoteyour people.
Also put in plugins andintegrations that you could book
your meetings so you know ifyou're sending a sales message.
Why not give the person theopportunity to just
automatically book in with youto share the latest content,
(05:42):
share your webinars.
All the details that you coulddo is all within your kind of
your email signatures, so it's away to kind of brand and
navigate that, and we're alsoable to kind of run campaigns to
people and make sure forcustomer success, for example,
or even the HR.
You can just send that reallyrelevant information.
So we have now over, I think,60,000 organization in 150
companies using Exclaimer, andgrowing really fast actually.
(06:06):
So it's a really really good,simple tool that leverages a
channel that you own in yourbusiness that you don't actually
really think about, but itgives you that always on
promotional opportunity.
Andrew Grilll (06:15):
You're absolutely right.
This email signature is somereally valuable real estate.
It's something we look at allthe time.
I know that mine's promoting myspeaking my latest book.
It's something that'spersistent there.
What are the really interestinguse cases?
You've seen where people haveused the email signature and
actually use it to leverage thatand really make use of that
really rich real estate that'sat the bottom of every email.
Carol Howley (06:36):
So one thing that we saw was people actually
starting to embed.
For a B2B business, it's greatto get reviews of your product
and to get feedback so that youknow you can continuously be
improving, because for us, verymuch the customers at the heart
of our growth.
So we started using, like MPSsurveys and also links to kind
of survey platforms where peoplecan review independently within
our email.
So that's massively boosted ourability to get reviews but also
(06:58):
helped us kind of communicateand show that we're really
listening to our customers.
So you know a lot of companiesare in within that are using us.
They're doing this and also wesaw it as an opportunity.
And I guess the second areathat's been really good is
actually when you think for alot of companies, you know we're
having this wonderful challengeof having to do more with less
and you know make things workand stretch our budgets further.
So we realized we were doing ahuge amount of account-based
(07:20):
marketing or you know more kindof targeted marketing to people
we thought were more likely tobuy and we were doing all this
advertising.
And then you know big massemail follow up.
You know doing sales follow up,but actually the sales team,
you know, if you don't thenbrand their emails with the
exact same kind of message, itdoesn't give that nice
consistent flow and also missedopportunity to kind of make sure
that that salesperson issending something relevant.
(07:40):
So what we did was start to use, from that advertising, that
messaging, follow that journeyall the way through and then you
can start to send thatmessaging all the way through.
So as you start to build thatrelationship, you're doing
contracting and demos.
You've always got that reallynice kind of thread going
through and an opportunity tosort of change up the content
and target people in that way.
So for us to bring it into anaccount-based marketing play is
(08:02):
actually a really, really greatidea too.
Andrew Grilll (08:04):
I bet you every marketer that's listening to
this is going ah, I hadn'tthought about the email
signature, because in the pastchanging that has been a hassle
and you've got to haveconsistency.
And I bet if you said toeveryone you've got to change
your email signature, they'reall going to say, oh, it's just
a pain and the formatting iswrong.
So tell me how Exclaimer makesthat really simple and allows
(08:26):
that consistency and also allowsthat ability to respond and be
dynamic with marketing campaigns.
Carol Howley (08:29):
It's all centrally managed.
So obviously you log into yourplatform.
You can then pull differentactivities, you can pull
different areas.
So whatever you want to do, wehave someone who manages it
within my team.
So it's very easy.
You kind of almost drag anddrop.
You can kind of create yoursignature and then, depending on
who you're sending to, forexample with the sales team, you
can connect up with your salesforce and then you can sort of
(08:50):
segment by lists and variousthings or have different
signatures on options, so theemployee can just sort of click
into their email and then alsoselect a signature or have one
by default.
So you know, it kind of givesyou that really good opportunity
and I completely understand onthe kind of like the change.
It is one of those like realpain points and my one of my
first jobs at sky scan x doeslooking after the corporate
brand when I just started the bbwork was to change that
(09:13):
signature just on our rebrand.
We're literally rolling it outacross 31 companies.
We did it in a 24-hour periodovernight, which was insane,
wouldn't necessarily recommendit, but it's very good for
consistency, um, but goingaround every single member of
staff and sending those emailsand saying please update your
signature, please update yoursignature.
It just I think it took us likesix months to get everything
updated, whereas if you have thecentral thing, you flick a
(09:35):
switch and it's very easy, it'sall done, and because it
connects to your ActiveDirectory or whatever kind of
place that you store yourinformation, then you can
actually have everythingautomatically correct, with the
right pronouns, the rightinformation, the right phone
numbers that people can reachyou.
So you know, it's just that,really, really easy thing, and I
genuinely wish, when I wasdoing it, that I had the tool,
because it was an absolutenightmare.
Andrew Grilll (09:57):
Now you mentioned that Sclam has been around for
20 years and you've been theretwo years.
What are some of the biggestchallenges you've faced in
scaling Exclaimers, marketingprograms, from where they've
been to where they are now?
Carol Howley (10:08):
The biggest thing for me when I first started was
that element of changemanagement.
So you know, obviously I wasbriefed when I took the role
that it was going to be a hugeamount of change that I needed
to bring into the team and tothe company.
And I think you alwaysunderestimate how difficult
change management is as amarketer or as anyone really.
So you know, big thing was kindof coming in speaking to people
(10:28):
, getting obviously the lay ofthe land and then building out
that plan, getting buy-in fromour investors and sort of really
getting going with that plan.
But actually you know, withinthat for me and that
professionalization involved ahuge amount of kind of getting
new people on board.
We launched about nine newchannels in the first year I was
there.
People on board we launchedabout nine new channels in the
first year I was there.
So you know, building out allthat capability, you know
(10:49):
shoring up our foundations as ateam operationally was a massive
amount of work and such a hugechallenge.
And bringing people on boardwith that is hard because people
don't love change, let's behonest.
So you know it's kind of likeexplaining getting them on board
.
You know there was a lot ofchange in people and process and
a lot of learning.
So you do have to get peoplewho really want to kind of buy
into that journey, because Ithink scaling a SaaS business is
(11:10):
fun if you like that kind ofwork and if you don't, it's
probably the worst place in theworld to work.
So you know, thankfully for me,it's definitely something I
absolutely love.
So our initial problem reallywas that kind of change
management, just like runninglaunching so much fun but an
awful lot of difficulty.
And then I think the other sortof areas is around our balance
between brand and leadgeneration.
(11:31):
So our biggest challenge, Ifind, is you know, everyone sits
there batman's just released asurvey, actually at their last
conference, where it's showingthat the percentage that
companies are investing inmarketing spend is declining.
So it it was around 13, 14%pre-COVID on average and it's
now declined to about 8% ascompanies saw profits.
So when you have that, yourautomatic default is like I have
(11:53):
to go on the instant.
You get pressure as well fromyour CEO and CFO, who maybe
don't understand the alignmentbetween the long-term strategic
element of building your brand,bringing people into market,
raising awareness as opposed tothe instant.
Let's get the MQLs through thedoor Because eventually, even if
you go with paid it plateausand unless you have something
behind it to help you bring morepeople into market, a trusted
(12:14):
brand that people see you online, they're like, oh, I will buy
from them because I trust them,because I know they're
established or they're workingor I like their marketing and I
like the way they behave andthey do things.
So we have this continuous askfor an inflow of high quality
leads to drive revenue and thenthe balance between strategic
brand marketing, demandgeneration of actually raising
awareness, greasing the wheelsof the sales process, I suppose
(12:36):
and opening the door before youcan actually then just go buy
our product.
So it's a huge balance for usto play the long game while
constantly being pressured toplay the short game which has,
you know, it's kind of likelimited returns in the long term
.
So I think that's the one thing, and then that leads you to, I
guess, sell the marketingalignment, which is always a
massive challenge and I thinkit's always the famous cat and
(12:57):
dog sort of war pictures.
But you know, we have to workreally, really hard to align
with the sales team, to get themon board and vice versa.
You have to work really, reallyhard to align with the sales
team, to get them on board andvice versa.
You know it's not enough thesedays to just pass leads over to
sales that the customer doesn'tcare.
If you know, it's no longer ourproblem and unfortunately in
marketing it's always yourproblem.
So you know we want to kind ofpass things over.
We want to make sure that wework together.
We have in our team, like jointplanning, shared KPIs, we're
(13:20):
integrating all our systems sowe've got the same access to
data and dashboards and reallyfocused on what's the best
customer experience and the bestway to make revenue.
That may mean some of us haveto do a bit more than we think
we should do or we have to worktogether and it's really kind of
trying to get that wheelworking together.
So they've been probably mybiggest challenges the past few
years.
Andrew Grilll (13:40):
So buyer behavior has certainly changed and I'm
wondering how, since your timeat Skyscanner, you've seen a
change and how are you, as anorganization, adapting to that?
Carol Howley (13:49):
also competing with everything that a person
could spend their budget on.
So it's not like you're kind ofcompeting just against the
people right next to you.
So the vibe has changed, butalso, I think, because of that
(14:10):
activity and you know as leaningon things like lead generation
and form fills and capturingdata and using data to sort of
chase people down and call themand stalk them and turn up at
the house in the sort of salesprocess that we've all modeled
in B2B businesses and, strangelyenough, people don't like
handing over their email addressand then being stalked by
salespeople and marketers andemailed every five minutes.
(14:31):
So I think, as a result of that, what we've seen is a huge
amount of buyers kind ofstepping back, going incognito,
doing their own research, notgiving up their email address
for anything, because they knowexactly what will happen.
So we've seen buyer behavioractually see, you know, get them
going through to like 70, 80%of the way through their buying
journey before they eveninteract with the sales team.
(14:52):
So it's actually people aredoing their research on third
party sites.
On second party sites, you knowinformation anywhere they can
find that involves them doingthe research.
I know I'm probably one of theworst people because obviously I
work in marketing and I knowexactly what will happen.
But I do my research by goinginto an amazing slack group or
whatsapp chat that I have withother cmos and then I always
(15:13):
just sort of ask you know, I'mthinking of this tooling, who's
using what?
What do you think's best,what's great for your market?
Then I get a good view fromthem.
I'll go on to g2, capterra,trust, trustradius, whichever
sort of platform at that timethat I can see the best results,
read some of the reviews, seethat that company is responding
to those reviews and then I'llgo and buy.
I'll literally reach out and belike hi, I'm interested in you.
(15:34):
I'm comparing you between X andY maybe, and pretty much the
first company that responds,with a salesperson that actually
listens to me and understandsmy problems, then I'll probably
buy it.
And we've seen actually thatover 80, 90% of sales.
If you can get there withinfive minutes and you actually
have listened to what theperson's telling you, you've got
an amazing chance to make like400% more likely to make a sale.
(15:57):
So you know people are comingwith.
I want this, I'm ready, speakto me now, understand me and
listen.
And unless, unless you do that,that expectation is so high and
the next person will do.
You know what you're not doing,so you know it's amazing to to
sort of see that huge changeinto like personalization
experiences and a greater focus.
Really, then they're like youknow, how will you make my
(16:17):
business better?
So they really want to focus onROI and, you know, scrutinize
the deals.
We've seen lots more in abuying committee, even though
we're quite a cheap tool, to behonest, like we're very cheap to
purchase, but you know, incomparison to some huge
enterprise tools.
But actually you know we'rehaving like up to 10 people on
the buying committee and the itpeople, the marketing people,
then there's like finance andall kinds of other people
(16:38):
bringing in, and so you've gotto be able to understand how to
talk to all these differentbuyers and explain the ROI and
the effect of your solution aswell.
So I think it's definitely amore complicated environment for
sellers and marketers in thenext.
Andrew Grilll (16:51):
So we know that B2B is a very different beast to
B2C, but you talked about aninteresting thing there in your
own buying journey, you actuallyused influencers without
knowing it.
These are your other CMOs, yourfellows that actually
influenced the decision.
They're not paid influencers orInstagram influencers.
But I'm wondering how you seethe B2B influencer thought
leadership space change.
It's kind of a loaded questionbecause I've started doing more
(17:12):
and more of that People wouldhave seen.
I've done some things withIntel, with Vodafone, with Dell.
These are brands that aretrusting me to give advice and
opinion on their products andservices and obviously I have
reach and I have some level ofthought leadership, I suppose.
But talk to me about howtraditional influence marketing
and also your own informalinfluencer group actually is
(17:34):
something you're using in yourown marketing or your colleagues
are using their marketing inthe B2B space.
Carol Howley (17:39):
If you join community groups and things that
you can start to kind ofstrategically engage directly
with some decision makers andalso with other organizations.
So I think, because it's morecareful consideration of the
journey, you know peopleactually look at those multiple
stakeholders.
They want to broaden theinformation sources that they
have and so, leveraging yourinfluences, you can really
enhance your credibility, reachthis wider network and also
(18:02):
influence them about perceptionsand activities.
So the channels in b2b aretypically centered around kind
of thought leaders rather thanthose additional influencers.
I think in b2c you know it'svery celebrity.
People know who they are, youknow it's easy to kind of spot,
whereas the influencers in b2bare very much kind of you know
they're educated, they knowthey've got experience, they've
got a track record.
So people will be very kind ofcritical if you don't have that
(18:25):
level of experience or expertisesuch as yourself that you can
actually bring to that adviceand that conversation.
So you know it's very different.
It's not always sort of a paidfor thing and it's often kind of
very related to other companiesand brands and kind of links
really nicely into kind of thearea of partnership, marketing
and having a bit of a near-boundstrategy.
We call it.
That means you kind of leverageand reach within that industry
(18:46):
and within trusted andrecommended areas.
That enables you to kind ofleverage that opportunity.
So I think for us that's thebiggest area that we would use
it and also how it kind ofreally works into our mix.
Andrew Grilll (18:57):
There are so many marketing channels out there
now it's almost confusing, andI'm sure it's confusing for a
marketer.
So is there one particularmarketing channel that works
best for you?
Carol Howley (19:04):
So we do have some like higher performing
marketing channels.
Sometimes marketing gets a badreputation because it is hard to
explain the kind of like themathematical channels, the
elements of like trust andreputation and relationship, and
how all of that kind of playsin together to kind of, I guess,
optimize your business kind ofreputation, your opportunity for
sales, and each channel playskind of a different role.
(19:27):
A really good statistic I thinkit was Gartner again that
quoted I think it's 300% higherresults if you integrate your
marketing campaigns, which meansacross multiple channels.
So more than four channelsgives you that opportunity to
drive much higher resultsbecause you're reaching people
not only multiple times butyou're also kind of reaching
people in different areas andthe places where they'd go.
So our kind of idea is that wewrap people in the same
(19:50):
messaging so that they seethings you know over and over
again.
And part of the reason for thatis that it takes over kind of a
thousand touch points for acompany to find a person, to
find out about company, toactually end up buying, you know
, on average.
So some people go instantly andthen other people will take all
these kind of multiplecircuitous routes and they'll
see you at an event and they'llsee an ad, or they'll receive an
(20:11):
email, or someone will say, oh,I've just bought this, did you
know it's actually quite good.
Or they'll see you on a podcastand you know, hear you talking.
And so diversifying yourmarketing efforts means that you
reach people in different areas, whether it's like search
engine, social media, email, theoutreach.
So we try and kind of retain anelement of consistent messaging
, reinforcing our brand, andkind of really encounter people
(20:32):
multiple times so that it bringsthem through in the journey to
invest in a really good contentengine.
You have to do paid advertising, but you have to scale beyond
paid search across differentareas such as display, social,
all of these side of things, andalso start to leverage
opportunities from other areas,as we were just discussing
around review sites, influencers, community, the news, pr,
(20:56):
podcasts.
So really starting to do thosetable stakes elements and then
leverage everything else thatyou could do to sort of start to
, I guess, hit people inmultiple ways and also tell your
story in different formats.
Andrew Grilll (21:07):
So we can't do a podcast in 2024 without
mentioning the A word AI.
I'd love to know how AI isbeing adopted within your
marketing team and processes.
Carol Howley (21:16):
It's funny, in the last year, you know, ai, from
what it was over a year ago tonow, has just been this
explosion, I think there's, likenow, thousands of tools being
launched every single day.
They were saying in terms oflike having AI, or claiming to
have AI, as some of the tools do.
So for us, very much, adoptingAI into our process has been
hugely important for that kindof sustainable growth.
(21:37):
And but what I can?
What I initially said to myteam when you know know, we had
a bit of, I guess, pushback bypeople like, what if it takes my
job?
What if I'm replaced by allthis kind of thing?
And I was actually yes, youwill be, but you won't be
replaced by AI.
You'll be replaced by someonewho's understood how to use it,
how to leverage it, how to useit in an intelligent way that
enables us to scale faster.
(21:58):
So we're investing in AI toolswherever possible to scale our
operations, to automate tasks,to do routine things, to
personalize at scale, to analyzedata as well.
So one thing that we did in thelast week was pull out all of
our reviews, obviouslycompletely anonymize them and
make sure there was nothingthere that would relate to us.
Run them through AI, pull outthe key trends like what's
(22:18):
happening, what should we do,what are some great product
ideas so you can do.
If we did that, we'd spend awhole week doing that analysis
normally and it's taken us about20 minutes to kind of do that
whole thing.
So for us, the massiveopportunity with AI is to like
absolutely speed everything up.
Another thing we've got is youknow, if campaigns aren't
running well enough, then weautomatically switch budget and
(22:38):
we switch money into kind of thenew ones, whereas before that
would be someone monitoring,working out percentages and it
just gives you it in thedashboard.
So that's a great opportunity.
And also using tools for writing.
So obviously you can use chat,gpt.
We've actually got jasper um,which is an amazing tool for us.
There's other otheropportunities, but we are using
jasper um and it helps us createthese really amazing tailored
(23:00):
content and experiences that wecan then use in our marketing to
scale.
And we've actually taught ourtone of voice for our brands.
They really really scarilytaught my tone of voice, so
every now and then they werelike this is in your tone of
voice and I'm like really, itactually is a little bit like me
, it's a bit horrible.
So it's really good to help uswith that content creation at
speed, because sometimes you'resapping like I know I want to
(23:25):
write about this but I've got noidea how to start, and it's
that amazing thing, just sort ofsay you know, here's what I'm
trying to say and it just givesyou such great inspiration.
So you know, it's a reallymassive transformative shift in
how we develop our products andalso how we can connect with
customers at scale and make itkind of personalizing quick as
well.
So for us it's just beenamazing and super exciting.
Andrew Grilll (23:42):
Now you mentioned Jasper.
That's a tool that I've alsorecommended to people in my book
for marketers.
That seems to lend itself wellto the marketing discipline.
But are there any other tipsthat you've seen that you can
give our listeners about how tobest use AI, the sort of key?
Carol Howley (23:55):
ones that I've said is around kind of content
creation, which obviously,jasper, we've also used Wr in
the past, both fantastic tools.
Um, you know, we've we'vemainly used a lot of things for
writing.
So we actually dabble in sort ofthings like claude and chap gpt
as well.
We have license for those.
Microsoft co-pilot is reallybrilliant as well, for you know
writing your emails and alsokind of it comes in and tells
(24:17):
you know how your tone is and ifit's kind of appropriate or if
you want to ask questions of howyou should write and introduce
that tonality into your emails.
We've used it within our salesprocess, which is really helpful
.
So we've taught a sort ofchatbot to understand our
company, our data, and also tokind of understand some problems
(24:38):
that people might beencountering from a customer
perspective problems with thetool or questions they may ask
so that we can very quickly,even if someone's not online in
the middle of the night, answerquestions that people may have
on the other side of the world,without necessarily employing
people to be available just incase someone needs help.
So you know, having that kindof ability to have sort of very
easily easy to find, becauseoften you sat there in an FAQ
(25:00):
trying to work out the rightthing, whereas if you can kind
of have someone sort of, I guess, curate that search, it's
fantastic.
And we've also used sort of AIto train some of our sales
people so you can do someamazing sales training where it
actually gives some feedback on.
You missed this point, or youshould have said this, and you
know actually, if you're sellingthe company.
You weren't quite right in thisdescription, because you can
teach, obviously, ai all of theelements, so having a sort of
(25:23):
ability to use it to train oursalespeople is really good.
And also we've beenexperimenting with Midjourney,
which is amazing for creatingimages, and it's incredible the
images you can create and wedon't use as much as we possibly
should.
And we've also beeninvestigating, like video
creation too.
So we do a lot of onsite videosthat we usually shoot, but
looking how we can actuallyscale that a bit faster if we
(25:43):
did use AI to help us as well.
Andrew Grilll (25:45):
It's fascinating how things have changed.
I'm just thinking about yourdiscussion about the chatbot.
Probably three or four yearsago, when I was looking at
playing with chatbots, you hadto give it a tree and a
structure, and only if thishappened then this would happen
Now, as you say, you can teachit its tone of voice.
You can tell it what to say andnot say.
I think this will revolutionizethings For marketers.
Listening to this.
They need to play with it.
Maybe they're not ready todeploy the chatbot yet, but they
(26:05):
should actually beexperimenting, see what it can
and can't do.
I think a lot of people, myselfincluded, have had that aha
moment.
It's like you mean it can dothis.
Have you had an aha moment withthese new technologies and
tools?
Carol Howley (26:17):
Yeah, definitely, I think, for me.
I was listening to an amazingpodcast a while ago.
It's by the CMO of HubSpot andhe was talking about actually
and I was finding I was doingsome prompting and learning
myself and teaching myself.
But he was like, actually AI isas good as what you tell it
because obviously it's a learnedmodel.
So he was kind of very muchtalking about you know, it's
(26:39):
only as good as your prompts,which made me kind of.
I went on a course run by ourinvestors, insight Partners, and
they ran a course on Gen AIthat they kind of effectively
walked you through the qualityof the prompts SaaS company and
this is our key audiences andyou can feed in some of your
audience data and then it givesAI that picture because you
(27:09):
can't expect it to automatically, I guess, read your mind and
know that you want to talk to amarketing audience in a
professional voice about thisand your product does X, y and Z
and all of this information.
So if you remember to kind offeed it in or, you know,
obviously teach it through amodel that you paid money for,
then you've got that ability toactually, you know, use it in
the best possible way.
So I think because the wholeelement of AI is it's as good as
(27:32):
what you tell it and it's asgood as you are in using it.
So I think that's the biggestlearning sort of aha moment for
me was how much better, how muchbetter content I could create
and activities I could do when Iactually learned how to explain
myself properly.
Andrew Grilll (27:47):
I suppose you mentioned that AI is not reading
our mind.
I think we're not far off,because if it knows everything
about us, it can infer maybebetter than our spouse can as to
what we're thinking.
So wouldn't it be amazing if,as a marketer, you could know
what your customer was thinking,or vice versa?
Carol Howley (28:05):
Yeah, definitely, and I think you know some of the
things.
I was at a conference thiscouple of weeks ago actually,
where they did a demo of, youknow, a trained AI model who
would be almost like yoursolutions engineer on a call.
So the AI joined.
I think they were calledOneMind and the AI joined and
was there like knew all thetechnical data, all of the
information, everything you know, and it was interacting with
(28:26):
people and it's definitelycreepy, but I do think that will
.
You know.
Obviously, if you spend time,it'll increasingly understand
what you want and what you needand how you do it and you know
it is fascinating to sort of seehow that kind of I guess, ai
has sort of synthesize peopleand talent.
Andrew Grilll (28:42):
It's amazing.
Well, it leads me to my nextquestion synthesize talent,
audio and video cloning.
I have an audio clone.
I have a video clone with acompany called Veed that have
done a video clone for me so Ican now appear in multiple
places and actually I played myvideo clone on stage 15 to 20
minutes into me being in frontof an audience and they've gone.
Oh, my goodness, that is acarbon copy of you.
(29:04):
This is really scary scary ornot?
Where do you see audio videocloning working and marketing
programs going forward and howimportant you think it is to
label ai generated content?
Carol Howley (29:15):
in terms of on the marketing and using it.
I think it's amazing for like,especially for us, for different
languages.
We operate in multiplecountries, so being able to have
you know that kind of clone,being able to instantly sort of
translate or, you know, do whatyou need in that language, is
fantastic.
Have dialect, differentdialects and also kind of adapt
to demographic profiles and youknow there's no need for kind of
multiple people to be broughtinto things.
(29:36):
You actually you can justliterally replicate things or
clone yourself to a degree.
And I think it also reduces thecosts with content production.
I know that we've savedthousands and thousands of
pounds in translation inproduction.
You know all those costsassociated with the traditional
content element and hiring,talent and logistics and you
know it's just speeded upeverything we can do and
(29:56):
decreased our costs enormously.
So it's really interesting.
And then in terms of likelabeling and sort of I guess
saying whether or not it'sreally interesting, and then in
terms of like labeling and andsort of I guess saying whether
or not it's ai and and we'vecertainly come up against that
discussion in in our kind ofbusiness and we're like you know
, effectively it's anything thatyou produce that's through ai
is kind of copied or taken orreplicated the information
(30:17):
somewhere.
But then I guess thatinformation, by putting it out
there, you're making it publiclyavailable.
So I so I guess what's your.
One of the interesting thingsand I'm sure we'll see more and
more cases is like what isproprietary ownership of thought
leadership?
If you are publishing it andmaking it available, you know
someone's, you publish thingslike you know, I'm reading a
book at the minute and I'mprobably taking ideas on board
that I'll, you know, reiterateto other people.
(30:39):
And you know, in a sense AI isdoing that, but with a lot more
kind of capability forremembering than myself, for
example.
I think it's more you know,more accurate remembering and
also synthesizing at speed.
So I don't know at what pointand I certainly don't want to be
the person making the decision,but you know there is an
element of like copywriting andsort of rights and you know, do
(31:00):
you distribute other people?
But then if you are putting iton the, what right do you have
per se?
So yeah, I don't necessarilyhave the answer, but I think
it's a fascinating debate thatwe need to be having as well.
Andrew Grilll (31:12):
So what should marketers be focusing on
preparing for in the age of AI?
Carol Howley (31:16):
So I think the biggest thing AI is going to do
is when you think about whatwe've just been talking about,
with that huge proliferation ofcontent, that ability to create
content.
There's already more thanenough bad content out there,
let's be honest.
It's hard enough to findsomething on the internet.
So I think for sort of searchand awareness building, ai is
going to be a massivecomplication for people as it
becomes harder and harder tofind the right information and
(31:38):
also people will then start, Iguess, using ai to curate the
information available to them.
So you'll be living in more ofa bubble, so it'll be harder and
harder as well to reach newpeople across mediums.
So for us, what we've kind ofstarted to do with that more
channel element is kind of startto have more and more chances
to to speak to people acrossdifferent mediums, different
formats.
(31:58):
Because if, for example, ai iscurating your search and only
serving things it thinks youwant to hear, we may not be
within that kind of bubble ofwhat people are sort of being
told they want to hear.
We're also competing againsthundreds of millions other
brands creating really fast,quick content.
So I think for you know, thatkind of awareness driving, it's
going to be massivelycomplicated and it's already
having massive impacts in termsof search, what google will be
(32:20):
doing, how their age is evolvingin terms of how they display
results and also in terms of,like you know, do they trust the
, the actual website of thebrand people aren't necessarily
within their buyer journey,going there until the end or do
they trust other sources?
So then you need to think abouthow do you kind of be present
on all the other sites that youcould be to make sure that you
reach people.
So I think the biggest area inthat sort of top of funnel
(32:42):
search is going to be where wesee huge disruption and
complication.
We've also got that coupled withkind of cookie-less advertising
and sort of Web3 coming in.
So I think for marketers it'sgoing to be a lot of fun over
the next sort of few years tonavigate that process.
I think AI will have a hugeimpact, as we've discussed, in
terms of that conversion element.
So at the point that they comeinto your ecosystem, being able
(33:04):
to serve personalized, relevantweb pages based on where they're
coming from, being able to ofadapt your emails very, very
quickly without humanintervention, to kind of speak
to people in the right tone ofvoice and the right relevant
information.
You know change campaigns andactivities and, you know, make
all of that happen reallyseamlessly.
So the the opportunity forconversion and really investing
(33:24):
in that conversion is isincredible because of the
personalization and the speedyou can work.
So I think you know they're thekind of two areas that will
have the biggest impact and beable to kind of have the biggest
challenge on one side, andimprovement on the other side.
Andrew Grilll (33:38):
So you mentioned cookie-less advertising.
So how does that change the wayyou market your product and how
important does first-party databecome for you and your clients
?
Carol Howley (33:47):
I think it's a real shift in how we approach
targeting and data collection,like we won't be able to use
that third party data as much asbefore, so we have to kind of
rely on the first party, whichis the information you can
collect directly from thecustomer, so them actually
saying, yes, you can definitelymarket to me, versus being able
to kind of market to themwithout necessarily all the
permissions based on theirbehaviors or things.
(34:08):
So in order to navigate that, Ithink you have to develop those
direct relationships.
You have to, you know, reallyoptimize your channels so that
you can reach people and makesure they're performing really
well, such as your website, youknow, being present in search
results, being, you know, leakedto by other companies, other
companies, other media, you know, doing more and more and kind
of diverse by the mediums ofyour marketing.
(34:28):
You can do a lot more throughsort of email marketing, but to
your own base.
I think you need to reallyexpand across those other areas.
That you know means that youcan ask for people to opt into
your ecosystem a lot more andalso sort of be more present in
other areas.
And also you're going to haveto encourage people to share
their information and have areally good updated preferences.
(34:49):
Sites offer great experiences,discounts, content, things that
will actually make people wantto engage with you, retain that
relationship and sort of keepyou in their books as such.
Andrew Grilll (35:00):
So leading question how can an email
signature help in this regard?
Carol Howley (35:04):
I think email signatures do become
increasingly valuable becauseit's the emails that you send as
a person or as your business,to people that you have already
interacted with.
So it's all the contacts or allthe people that you're directly
reaching out with.
So you're not necessarily inthat kind of situation where,
with mass promotional emails,you have to very much be mindful
of things like GDPR andspamming people.
(35:25):
You know it's past that point,someone's already there.
So you have 100% deliverabilityof the messaging that you're
sending because it's in thatsignature.
It's not like an add-on or, youknow, sending an image or an
attachment that say it's part ofyour email.
And I know that I send like toomany emails probably about 50 a
day and I receive probablyabout 500.
And you know if they're notkind of properly branded and
they're not standing out andpeople do generate a lot of
(35:49):
trust from that kind ofrelationship, so you can
dynamically update them.
You can make sure that it'sreally, really relevant to that
sort of recipient.
You can promote your marketing,as we said, present your brand
very professionally.
You can also personalize it bythe person who's receiving it.
So it does give you thatability to actually get the
message across.
When you think about the numberof people you'll actually see
(36:10):
you're advertising and you'repaying for that opportunity.
So the ROI on actually using anemail signature we do have an
ROI calculator on our website sopeople can actually put in.
You know what, if I did onadvertising what they do, what
my reach be, and we usually seebetween six and eight percent
click through on our signatures,so people are actually clicking
.
You can obviously see all thatanalytics within your dashboards
(36:31):
as well, so you know which ofthose people are doing what.
So you can actually start tobuild a really good picture
through those signatures to seeand just make sure your messages
are received.
Andrew Grilll (36:40):
I think so we're almost out of time, but we're up
to my favorite part of the showthe quickfire round, where we
learn more about our guests.
Iphone or Android iPhone round,where we learn more about our
guests iPhone or Android iPhone,window or aisle?
Carol Howley (36:50):
Definitely the window.
I love looking out the windowIn the room or in the metaverse.
I spend a lot of time in bothof those places, so for me I'd
love to say outside, because thesecond that I'm not at work,
I'm out the door.
Your biggest hope for this yearand next.
We've been investing loads inmy marketing team and I'd love
us to get to the point wherewe're really able to invest in
everyone's careers and give thema great opportunity to start
(37:10):
learning.
I wish that AI could do all ofmy Dishes, I think.
Andrew Grilll (37:13):
The app you use most on your phone.
Carol Howley (37:15):
I think it probably is LinkedIn at the
minute, the best advice you'veever received.
You can choose to feelfrustrated, you can choose to
feel angry or you can choose tosay that can you solve it?
Yes or no.
And if you can't, do you worryabout it because it's not going
to change?
And if you can, let's go and dosomething about it.
What are you reading at themoment?
I'm reading two books, becauseI can never manage to focus on
just one thing.
I'm reading Mind the InclusionGap and also the Courage to Be
(37:37):
Disliked.
Final quick fire question howdo you?
Andrew Grilll (37:39):
want to be remembered.
Carol Howley (37:40):
I think, for sticking to my values.
I think it's really importantto do so.
You know, I care a lot aboutpeople.
I care a lot about how peopleshould be treated and how the
best way to behave and all ofthat side of things.
Andrew Grilll (37:55):
And do your best to be a really nice, genuine
authentic person, and so I thinkI'd like to be remanded for
that.
So my view is that our emailsignature is a unique piece of
marketing real estate.
So what three things shouldbrands be doing to capitalize on
this?
Carol Howley (38:04):
So I mean, obviously, invest in a managed
email signature tool is it's areally good, so you know, making
sure that you do that and thenbringing in things like we've
seen having photos in youremails massive impact for people
because it's like that's a realperson, you know they're
genuine person, they exist, andso actually having photos in
your email signatures and thecorrect information means that
they can contact you and thenutilizing you know it to promote
(38:27):
something relevant.
I think when you can speak topeople in a way that's timely,
relevant and provides reallygood, valuable information is
the best way to kind of like notonly to market to them but
actually kind of build arelationship.
So what we're really about isbuilding our brand is all about
building connections, buildingtrust and enabling that other
business or that person todevelop or to grow those
(38:48):
relationships, know thoserelationships and that trust by
the sort of method ofcommunication.
Andrew Grilll (38:52):
Carol, a fascinating discussion.
How can we find out more aboutyou and your product?
Carol Howley (38:57):
www.
exclaimer.
com and also on LinkedIn.
You know my name is CarolHowley, our company's Exclaimer,
so the company page and mineare on LinkedIn, so very active
on there as well, carol, thankyou so much for your time today.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Voiceover (39:09):
Thank you for listening to Digitally Curious.
Andrew's new book DigitallyCurious is available to order at
digitallycuriousai.
You can find out more aboutAndrew and how he helps
corporates become more digitallycurious with keynote speeches
and C-suite workshops atdigitallycuriousai.
(39:30):
Until next time, we invite youto stay digitally curious.
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