Marketing Automation That Doesn't Suck [Podcast]

Think about your email marketing for a second. Are you cringing with pain yet?Now imagine your email marketing without all of the hassles.James and Sean discuss what awesome email marketing automation actually looks, discussing some of their favorite features from Drip.

Show Notes

Things we mentioned:

• Drip - Marketing Automation That Doesn't Suck (link)
• Statups for the Rest of Us (link)
• Zen Founder (link) | Twitter

Social Links:

• Tick Tock Podcast- Facebook | Twitter
• Sean Blackburn- Twitter | LinkedIn
• James Carbary- Twitter | LinkedIn
• Rob Walling- Twitter

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Transcript:

Sean Blackburn:

Welcome back to the Tick Tock podcast. Today we are talking about Drip, marketing automation platform.

James Carbary:

Yes, I stinking love Drip. I just switched over, Sean, from MailChimp a few months ago to Drip. Drip is a little bit more expensive, so I pay fifty bucks a month for Drip where I was paying like fifteen bucks a month for MailChimp, but it’s so much cleaner. I don’t know if it’s a win for everybody, but for what I need it for, it’s been incredibly helpful. One of the biggest ways, just to kind of jump right into a use case and how we’re using it …

We do a ton of content upgrades on the Sweet Fish blog. We do our post on how to write the perfect blog post. Our content upgrade is this twelve point checklist that you can download. With MailChimp I would have to create a new list that all of the people that opt in for that particular content upgrade get put into a list.

Sean Blackburn:

Giant master list. Right.

James Carbary

We have several content upgrades on a ton of different blog posts, so merging all those lists together, making sure that every broadcast email that I send out every week goes to everybody, it’s just a pain. Drip actually puts everybody into one kind of mass subscriber list. When I send my broadcast emails out every week, I don’t need to worry about merging different lists and all this stuff. I just hist send to all.

Sean Blackburn:

Send it to this segment. Right.

James Carbary:

Yeah. You can tag different people with different things. Another really cool thing that I’ve just recently started doing with it is I’ve got a form whenever we onboard new writers on our team. They just fill out their first name, last name and their email address. I’ve got that form hooked into a Drip campaign. As soon as someone gets signed up, we’ve got an automation sequence that now drips out all of our writer resources. It’s also how we can distribute content assignments to our writers. We can just send out a broadcast with everybody tagged as writer.

Sean Blackburn:

So much cleaner than a giant CC list and having to go through and make sure you don’t forget somebody. Yeah.

James Carbary:

It’s obviously a huge step up from having to BCC people with email.

Sean Blackburn:

Oh my gosh, yeah. Even comparing it to MailChimp, like you said, I use MailChimp even for a different project that I work on and it’s really great. I’m using the free version of MailChimp which is fantastic, but if I was paying anything for it, I would want that ability to segment my list into just having that option. You can send it to all your subscribers, right, with Drip?

James Carbary:

Yup.

Sean Blackburn:

If you want to, you can send it to the master list, but you also have the ability to segment easier. You can do that with MailChimp, but it’s just a lot of back end work that you’ve got to set up to do it.

James Carbary:

If you’ve got a dedicated guy on your team, maybe it’s worth saving the thirty-five bucks if you’ve got somebody that’s there that you’re paying anyway to do it.

Sean Blackburn:

It is just another thing to do. Drip in general is very, very clean. I like the way that they’ve got the workflow to set up a new campaign. One of the things, to jump to one of the things that I think is really cool, is that option that you told me about with the unopened emails.

James Carbary:

Ah, yeah.

Sean Blackburn:

What is that exactly? You heard about that from Noah Kagan, right?

James Carbary:

Yeah, yeah. I heard about this tactic from Noah Kagan about a how a huge way to increase your email open rate is to send the exact same email a few days later to everybody that hasn’t opened your email yet, and then just put a different subject line on it.

Sean Blackburn:

Not rocket science.

James Carbary:

Yeah, not rocket science, but Drip makes it so easy. Every broadcast email I send, right before I publish it, it says, “Do you want to send this to all of your people that don’t open it?” Then you just hit yes and then you put in, “Okay, I want to send it in three days.”

Sean Blackburn:

Second optional title. Right?

James Carbary:

Yeah. Three days and then, “Okay, what do you want the alternate subject line to be?” It’s just baked into it so that it’s super easy.

Sean Blackburn:

That’s really cool.

James Carbary:

I don’t have to go back into MailChimp, find everybody that didn’t read it, send another email, copy and paste over. It’s just so simple and it literally, it’s increased our open rate by like 20 or 30%. It’s ridiculous.

Sean Blackburn:

It just shows how email is obviously still one of the best ways to do marketing. That’s been proven with ROI numbers. It just shows that even at the end of the day, people are just missing stuff and they’re not even meaning to miss your content, but it’s just another way to just circle back to them almost.

James Carbary:

Exactly.

Sean Blackburn:

It’s that follow up email that we all have to send.

James Carbary:

Exactly. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably real familiar with SumoMe, the guys over at AppSumo, Noah Kagan and their suite of tools that helps you collect emails. Drip actually just got an integration with SumoMe.

Sean Blackburn:

Sweet.

James Carbary:

Now we can play SumoMe really nicely with Drip.

Sean Blackburn:

To build your list, yeah.

James Carbary:

Yeah, to build your list. Love that. Really, really excited to continue pressing into that. I haven’t even started to take full advantage of what that SumoMe integration is going to allow me to do yet, but really excited to start doing that.

Sean Blackburn:

Well, even you were telling me about the podcast that the founder of Drip has started.

James Carbary:

Yup. He’s got two different podcasts that I know of, maybe more. His name is Rob Walling, I don’t know how to pronounce it.

Sean Blackburn:

Rob W.

James Carbary:

Yeah. He is the co-host of Startups for the Rest of Us, which is a phenomenal podcast. I think they’re like … They’ve done an absurd amount of episodes. I think they’ve been going for like five years.

Sean Blackburn:

Nice. Hashtag podcast goals.

James Carbary:

Yeah. It’s specifically for, they kind of target bootstrapped entrepreneurs, specifically kind of in software space. We’re a productized service, but I still learn a ton from his podcast. He and his co-hose, I think Mike Taber is his name, phenomenal show. Then Rob’s got another podcast with his wife, actually, who is a clinical psychologist.

Sean Blackburn:

That was the interesting one to me. I’ve got to check that out.

James Carbary:

Yeah, and the show is called ZenFounder. It’s him and his wife going back and forth on how do you run a startup and a family well, and hearing her perspective. Then her being a clinical psychologist, she can tap into just a different side of segment.

Rob is a phenomenal guy. I’ve had a couple email exchanges with him, really cool dude. All that to say, make sure to check out getdrip.com. Don’t go to drip.com, go to getdrip.com, G-E-T-D-R-I-P.com, check it out. They’ve got, I think, a fourteen day trial so you can check it out without spending a dime. I think you’re really going to love it.

Sean Blackburn:

Yeah, guys. Make sure to connect with us on social media. We are on Twitter @TickTockPodcast, then also you can hit me and James up personally @SeanRBlackburn is me, and James, you are …

James Carbary:

@JamesCarbary, C-A-R-B-A-R-Y. We’d love to connect with you guys on social media. Thanks again for listening.