I speak with Susan Su who is Head of Marketing at Reforge. Before this Susan worked as a growth partner at 500 Startups and Head of Content Partnerships and Email Marketing at AppSumo. We discuss email marketing in detail and I understand Susans passion for making sure her email list is performing to it’s best ability. We discuss email list growth, SEO, and content marketing. This is a fascinating episode with tons of takeaways from Susans time at AppSumo, 500 Startups and Reforge.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
So right now I’m kind of in this research mode, so my current best piece of marketing advice is to go deep, deep, deep on qualitative research to add the why to whatever quantitative insights you’re able to pull from your analytics tools. It’s actually a lot more work in my opinion, especially if you don’t have a team dedicated to doing insights work, and it never feels quite scalable. I mean you have to reach out to people, you have to set up calls, you have to execute those calls. You have to take notes, you have to synthesize the notes. It’s a lot harder than, for example, looking in metal base or google analytics, but it will give you very, very precious nuggets that you can’t get from looking at dashboards. And then the secondary benefit is that, it also just fosters goodwill when your customers feel like you’re listening and responding, and actually care about what they have to say.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
So right now I’m actually reading a book called, Never Split the Difference, and the author’s first name is Chris, what is his last name? I don’t have it on my desk right now. It’s in my other room, but it’s by, he was like a former FBI crisis negotiator, and it’s not necessarily about marketing, but a lot of it I find is applicable to the art of persuasion into relationship building. And so if you’re a lateral thinker like myself, and you like stories about the FBI like myself, then you’ll get a lot of insights from that book.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
So given my kind of current bias for qualitative research, I think I could live without most of them, but the ones that I use most frequently and that definitely make my life a lot easier and more enjoyable are MetaBase for dashboards, and data reporting and then good old spreadsheets for just tracking processes and workflows. I currently have … we have a lot of different workflows and you always think there’s going to be whether it’s Airtable, or some other cool tool that’s going to solve all of your workflow problems and whatnot. I just always come back to good old google spreadsheets, works really well for me.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
I actually think what Stripe is doing with Stripe Atlas is really interesting. I don’t know if that fits squarely in the category of a marketing campaign. I think it’s a lot bigger than that. I think they consider it, sort of an area of their business, and a product, and an experience. But it’s also just amazing marketing for Stripe’s core business, the core API business.
I don’t know how familiar you are with Atlas map, but it’s basically gives you the ability to spin up a Delaware corporation from anywhere in the world, and gives you all the tools as well as a lot of expertise, knowledge, guidance, education on what you need to do in order to start your business early. And the reason why I think it’s so interesting and why it’s my current favorite is two things. One is I just think the execution is really good.
If you look at the concept, if you look at the branding, if you look at the content and the way they’re doing acquisition, it looks really good and it feels really good. It’s not pandering and it’s very, very high quality. And then the second side to that is just, I think it’s really smart of them to get in early. So right now I think the bread and butter for revenue is definitely bigger companies obviously that are sending a lot of volume, but early companies, it’s kind of I hate to say this, but it’s Kind of like big tobacco.
You definitely want to sort of get them in early because they understand that once you’re integrated, it’s very hard not to unintegrate, and so better to sort of close a partner early in their career, and close lots of them early in their trajectory even if a lot of them are going to end up failing, but the ones that do end up succeeding are the kinds of businesses that will help you to scale your business as they grow.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
Right now I have a number of podcasts that I’m subscribed to, but the ones that I actually regularly listen to are two, and they’re both very dense. One is, Shane Parrish’s, the knowledge project. You should probably know it’s pretty famous now. I really like that one. They just has different topics all the time. They’re very, very dense, so I learn a lot every single time.
I’ve gotten a lot of great book recommendations and further learning recommendations through that podcast. And then the second one that I really is also extremely dense. It’s called, Invest Like the Best, and it’s primarily about investment but not just investing money so much as investing time, investing effort. It really takes like a broader view of investment.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today I’m joined by Susan Su, who is head of marketing at Reforge. Before this, Susan worked as a growth partner at 500 Startups, and head of content partnerships and email marketing at App Sumo.
So I think it’s safe to say that what Susan doesn’t know about growth, isn’t worth knowing. I’m excited for us all to learn about Susan’s experience of growing the brands she’s worked with, and see what takeaways that we can implement in our own business. So let’s dive right in. How are you doing today, Susan?
Susan Su:
I’m doing great Matt, thanks for having me here.
Matt Byrom:
You’re very welcome. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on today. And to kick this off for the listeners, tell us a bit more about Reforge, what you do, who your customers are, and what problem you’re solving.
Susan Su:
At Reforge we offer professional development for mid career folks. That’s your senior PMs, your marketers, your engineers, UX design, data analysts, the ambitious types, anybody that’s working on growth at tech companies. And when I say tech companies, we have like a pretty specific definition of what that is as well for Reforge, and I’ll tell you why in a sec. So we are actually not targeting really early stage companies, your series A in earlier companies, but rather more focused on your leader [inaudible 00:02:25] more mature companies.
And the reason for that is because, the type of growth frameworks that we teach in our Reforge programs, and you’ll have more success with them if you have a team, if you have resources, if you have processes around growth kind of already established, or beginning to be established in many early stage kind of founder driven companies aren’t quite at that point yet. We don’t want to take anybody’s time or money that is not going to be returned two fold and [inaudible 00:02:54] for those participants.
The company was started by Brian Balfour. He was right before Reforge he was the VP of growth at HubSpot, and he left to start Reforge in order to solve a problem he was seeing as a manager in a big and growing company like HubSpot. It was really that sort of last mile to getting these very ambitious direct reports he had that were saying, Brian, Brian, how can I get better? The company didn’t have the infrastructure for it, didn’t have the content for it. And so Reforge was born.
An important thing to note is that it’s a cohort based program. So we actually have everybody that’s in a cohort start at the same time so that the cohort is eight weeks long. It involves both online and offline components. Offline for those folks who are in the San Francisco Bay area, but there’s parody to the online experience.
So if you’re not, for example, we have lots of participants in Argentina, and Australia, and Singapore, and the UK everywhere you can pretty much think of, and they participate completely online, but there is an application process, and we are in an open application window right now for the next program that starts at the end of September this year.
Matt Byrom:
So time for people to apply.
Susan Su:
Yes, that’s right.
Matt Byrom:
If you’re listening, take a look and apply. But this is so as you say, this is really to take people not to introduce beginners to growth, but actually to take intermediate people or people who have been doing this for a period of time to advance level, or actually help them have strategies that they could use to [inaudible 00:04:25] their actual results from their growth experiments I presume.
Susan Su:
That’s exactly right. So, we believe that there are a lot of good products out there for career switchers, or those who are just at the beginning of this journey, and there’s very little that’s tailored to the person who is fine with their current path. They’re happy there, they’re happy in that category, but they just want to accelerate.
To your point, it is about increasing the velocity of to scale, but there’s another dimension to it which is that, growth is definitely a thing now, but it’s still somewhat emerging, especially in a lot of more established companies, and we’re hearing at least some people are finding that they need to still make the case for what growth is versus product versus marketing versus, even business development or user experience. Our programs are really designed to also help people to master that language, and to take home some frameworks that they can then take into those meetings and make a really compelling case.
Matt Byrom:
And actually convince their bosses that this is something they actually need to test, or grow with, or perhaps even just learn further strategies to help them implement in their existing businesses as well.
Susan Su:
Exactly.
Matt Byrom:
I’m really interested to learn a lot more about Reforge, and the marketing strategies you use to get in front of the right audience there, but before we do that, I’d to just step back a little earlier in your career to the point where you were at App Sumo. App Sumo, a company that I’ve been, sorry, I have known for quite a long time, and the fast growing software discount site that has a very large email list, an enviable email list almost of, I guess over 700,000 subscribers.
During your time there, you say that you led the team to triple the number of content partnership deals closed, and grew monthly sales revenue by three times, and that’s obviously super impressive. And I was just hoping you could tell me a bit more about your time at App Sumo, and we could learn a little bit about the marketing strategies that you used during that period.
Susan Su:
Of course. When I was there, that was actually our email list at that time was already 700,000 strong, so I’m sure it’s more now. But I also think since then that was a pretty long time ago now and since then, in the past five or so years since then, companies have really started to pay a lot closer attention to list hygiene.
I mean, I think probably the bigger companies even at that time were looking closely at that, but now as email as a channel has gotten, I would just say a lot more crowded in general, and the email service providers are [inaudible 00:07:05] email tools that we all use are using [inaudible 00:07:08] machine learning to determine what is going to make it into which inbox. It’s just not as kind of a blast strategy as it has been in the past, and so I’m not sure what the size is now, but I’m sure that that changes the selling dynamic for App Sumo as well.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. What you’re saying there is actually that you are using some advanced segmentation techniques to make sure that the right emails are going to the right people so that they’re not guessing offers that they made that you would expect they have a high likelihood not to buy for example.
Susan Su:
Yes. Well I’m sure they do that now. At that time we were really just still getting started with that, and so we actually ran, I remember this was kind of like a controversial. So in the very beginning when I first joined we would just send out one deal one day, and basically if you think about App Sumo at that time. Now App Sumo has daily deals but also has created SumoMe, which is this host of plugins and tools and that’s really part of the business.
But back in those days App Sumo may hadn’t been created yet, and we were actually just working on the initial prototypes that would later become SumoMe. And so early on, we were just like, we would just send a deal a day to our sort of email based affiliate network, and that worked okay, and then as the list got bigger and bigger, of course the efficacy goes down because you’re targeting just gets spread out more.
And so we implemented a system called Bandit, and Bandit was a way of sort of multivariate testing different offers and headlines or subject lines to different micro segments of the audience, kind of whichever was the winner of the Bandit tests will get rolled out to the rest. And that was an in house kind of testing system that we rolled up on our own. Ultimately I think probably the next phase which I wasn’t part of the company for this, but the next phase would be to start doing a lot more clear segmentation on the audience itself.
So for App Sumo was something understanding, who are designers, or primarily designers and secondarily marketers. Who are primarily marketers, who are primarily founders, who are primarily, and then even within marketing they’re sort of a subset of different categories. And then being able to target offers and deals just to those identities. That’s sort of a much better way of doing it.
That at that time we had just been so focused on just top level list deal acquisition through partners and then also just subscriber acquisition that we hadn’t gotten yet to that point, and we were mostly focused on the multivariate testing to tell us which offers to send out on a given day to those 700 K subscribers.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. I guess as you grow less you end up actually segmenting and doing everything that you come to get the most out of that list, but I suppose what you’re saying though is actually it was growth before getting to that stage I guess.
Susan Su:
I think so. I think that segmentation is definitely the right thing to do, but it’s also something where let’s say your list isn’t super big, or it’s not super engaged. It may not be, it’s question of operations more than anything else. So it may not be quite yet the time to invest in. You’re doing advanced segmentation like that.
Matt Byrom:
And I don’t know that this was particularly your area at App Sumo, but I know a lot of our listeners will be interested in growing their subscriber list, and I know App Sumo was a wholly focused around that subscriber list. Is there any takeaways that you can provide that people can learn on this podcast about how to grow their email list, and how to keep subscribers rather than unsubscribing?
Susan Su:
So it’s interesting because both App Sumo and Reforge are very dependent on email as a channel to promote and to sell our products. But in very different ways have we done the acquisition to those lists. So App Sumo was 100% at that time. Now it’s different again, because it’s a while ago. But at that time it was 100% paid. So it was paid acquisition that drove leads to the email list. In a way we ran paid acquisition was primarily on Facebook, sort of the heart of an ad would be an actual live offer that we were selling through App Sumo.
So there was really strong relevancy. If you clicked on an ad for, for example, Piktochart which is an info graphic tool then you go to the landing page for that very same deal. It’s got a really sweet discount. It’s a good tool because, it just is, we made sure to source good deals, and you maybe bought your Piktochart subscription for 15 or 20 bucks, which is a great return on the ad spend that we had there, but also really great for the user.
It’s just counted and it’s affordable, and then you’re the list from there. And then we could sort of continue to market subsequent deals based on that initial action that it got you subscribed. But what got you subscribed was a conversion option in the first place, and that was all driven by paid. Now at Reforge we’ve tested paid of course, but it hasn’t been our biggest driver. Our biggest driver to our email list has just been content marketing, influencer marketing, and it’s all been organic.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. How have you used a influences to build your email list?
Susan Su:
At Reforge we’re pretty lucky. We started out with two great anchor influencers in our corner, one of whom was Brian Balfour himself. He had it been building up an email list through his personal blog for about 10 years. The other person was Andrew Chen who was previously doing growth at Uber and is now a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and he had built up a significant email list as well from over 10 years of high volume blogging.
And so these were people that had a direct relationship, sort of an influential authoritative relationship squarely within our audience range. So these are people that are in established to late stage, and some of course early stage startups. They’re people that are interested in growth and growth topics from everything from [inaudible 00:13:17] to building a growth team, and they’re people who trust and listen to Andrew and Brian.
And so those are kind of our two really big influencer properties that we had pretty much [inaudible 00:13:29] I’ll say it in the present tense, pretty much 100% control of sort of the type of content and marketing that we’re able to promote through those channels, and that has been a really big help. That’s been a really big boost. And so when I say influence or marketing, anybody that creates content, they all have a shared problem which is their editorial calendar.
If you’re a content creator, it’s just a slog. It’s hard to create content on a regular basis and satisfy your raving fans. And so our strategy with influencer marketing was really to be that middle layer, to support the influencer, to create content on a regular basis, engage their audience, and then come time promote to their audience.
Matt Byrom:
I guess what you’re trying to do there I guess is, create great content that would then equal a subscriber to your content to a future content really, whereas App Sumo really there almost selling a product that results in an email subscriber. Reforge comes from a totally different point of view where it’s actually, see our great content and subscribe. You’re committing to the future rarely rather than actually buying something that you want to use as a product.
Susan Su:
I would say the Reforge way is much more standard-
Matt Byrom:
Yes, absolutely.
Susan Su:
… for most companies. Just your typical kind of content marketing strategy with the exception, and we always kind of do it traditional, but with a little bit of a twist, and our twist was that we had these great influencer properties. We believe that people don’t really to listen to companies. It’s 2018 and we’ve been exposed to a lot of marketing and a lot of advertising in every single channel from offline to every single digital channel that there is.
Trust is, I would say a little bit lower than it was before. Andrew has a favorite saying that is, back 15 years ago you could ask people to import their entire email address book and they would do it. And that was a great growth hack so to speak, to growing an audience really, really fast. But people don’t do that anymore. I mean if you were to sign up for new service and it asks you to invite all your friends, and just automatically import all your contacts and “invite all your friends,” you would hit skip for sure.
We see the change or let’s call it what it is, the decline in efficacy in those techniques, and I think the same goes for content marketing. And so people are a lot less willing to listen to persuasion that comes from the brand, that comes from a company, and on the flip side, much more willing to listen to that same type of persuasion, and teaching really is what it is from a real person who’s an influencer, whom they respect.
Matt Byrom:
And you’re putting the people front and center. So it’s actually, as you say, not the brand talking, it’s people every time.
Susan Su:
Right. Exactly.
Matt Byrom:
And then do you find that the email list is something that’s really important for you to build up so that you can stay in contact with people who have made that connection with your brand, and does the email less result in most of your sales? So is it almost, I’m assuming here, but content upfront results in an email list results in people on the course [inaudible 00:16:44] in the cohorts down the line.
Susan Su:
Exactly. I mean, I think a lot of growth in marketing, what it comes down to is, things that are really simple. Flows that aren’t extremely complicated. I mean, if it’s really complicated then it might be actually too complicated for people to successfully complete. And so Matt, you basically summed it up. Content upfront results to subscribe to an email list, nurture on that email list with luck hopefully results in an applicant, which may or may not result in an acceptance, which then we hope 100% results in a purchase.
Matt Byrom:
And then how do you see that the success of that less, is that something that you measure really to say, what percentage of people are turning into subscribers, are turning into customers [inaudible 00:17:34] granular detail?
Susan Su:
Of course. Yes, we definitely do. So the other kind of say that the main metric by which we measure our email list is, active subscribers, and I think that’s also something that way back rewind 10 years ago people were probably a little bit less focused on active subscribers and a little bit more focused on just subscribers. But now I think that’s really the metric that anybody that’s got an email based business and there are a lot of them out there, either is or definitely needs to be paying attention to active subscribers.
And I think the kind of qualifications around active depend on, what’s your send frequency. For example, if you send every single day or even multiple times a day, what counts as an active is probably going to be a higher requirement, higher threshold than something like Reforge where we send once a week.
So for us we really care about weekly active subscribers, which we hold ourselves to a high standard. We send about once a week, but we’re really looking for how many people are opening our email every single week. Then that’s number that we pay attention to, and that’s the number that we try to drive growth around as opposed to just total subscribers.
Matt Byrom:
So you take opens as your active subscribers?
Susan Su:
It’s actually a combination of three different factors. Opens is definitely one of them. It’s really important. And then also clicks. So we have, I’ll tell you why we layer it, and the three layers are opens, clicks and onsite visits. And the reason why we layer it is because, clicks basically shows sort of a greater level of intent. But it also helps out with folks who have, for example, pixel blockers, or who aren’t loading the tracking pixel within an email, and so their open may not get recorded.
But if they click, that’s definitely going to get logged. Or if they visit the site, hey, maybe you see the email. So it’s really thinking about, what are all the human flows. You know maybe Matt, you get the email, you see it in your inbox, it’s folded. You don’t unclick it because it might be an inconvenient time for you, or you’re in the middle of something, but then later you go and visit the site that same day because the email served as that reminder for you.
Matt Byrom:
So you’re tracking that person through a repeat visit because they would have already been to your sites of fill in the form and get on the list?
Susan Su:
Right.
Matt Byrom:
So how would you track that third one? It would be if somebody is currently on the email list, and then they revisit the sites, but maybe they’ve not open the email or click the email, but they just revisit the site and you would still consider that as a weekly active subscriber.
Susan Su:
Right. And we have to be flexible with how we define people’s activity. I mean not every once again, like I love email newsletters and I tend to really dig into the ones that I’m subscribed to, but not all the time. So we are both rigid or rigorous and flexible in how we define an active subscriber records because we only care about active subscribers, not so much those that top level number. Flexible in that we realized that not everybody engages with the brand in the exact same way, and we’re okay with you engaging with the brand in whatever way fits best for you as long as you’re engaging.
Matt Byrom:
And then do you do anything with non active subscribers? When do you consider to be nonactive?
Susan Su:
In our particular case, we have a cutoff threshold of eight. If we’ve sent eight different emails to you and you haven’t opened, clicked or visited the site a single time in the span of those eight sends, and again we send once a week, so that’s about two months. Then that sort of our threshold for saying, this person is not an active subscriber, at that point we send what we call a breakup email. So we send an email just asking, hey, do you actually want to be on this list? If not, no worries. If so, all you have to do is click this link.
That click action is what sort of resets them so that they can sort of start the whole active subscriber account again. But the idea behind that is, we don’t delete the subscribers, but we stopped sending to them after that point. The idea behind that is really because we are pretty fanatical about list hygiene, and keeping a strong and clean email list so that we can get good deliverability.
If you continue to send to people that aren’t opening your emails ever, not even one every two months, then the ESPs, email service providers are going to know that, and that’s not gonna be good for your sender rating, and anyway, it’s just a vanity metric. So might as well just cut it off and look at the subscribers that are your real audience.
Matt Byrom:
That totally makes sense, and I bet you’re in the moment of percentage there of people that really do it to that level. But it’s super interesting, and I feel like we’ve almost got an email marketing episode on our hands here. We’ve really focused on email marketing. Actually, one more thing on email here before I just ask a few other questions is, for a company like Reforge which has an excellent selection of content and a blog that people would want to subscribe to it.
How do you increase the visit to subscribe conversion rate? What things are you testing and what have you done to influence the amount of people that actually end up on your list? What would you suggest that people do for their blogs? For example, our blog, what would you suggest that we do to actually increase the amount of subscribers that we generate?
Susan Su:
Well, I think the very first step is really early, which is just understanding your target audience and what they care about, and what they’re willing to let into their lives. Giving an email address is a little opening, like somebody opening their front door, opening their mailbox to you. It’s a little bit personal. Ideally it should be personal. It should be a good email address that they actually check, and people are aware and so there’s a really big trust factor.
I think in order to overcome all those inherent barriers, you have to, really deeply understand what it is that they value enough so that they’re willing to give up a little bit of privacy for, let’s call it what it is. And so, with that caveat in mind, I think what that informs is, a lot of user research into the type of content that resonates, that’s going to kind of increase trust and get people over that barrier so that they actually subscribe.
And then onsite, you know, so that’s Kinda the high level thing. And then onsite, I think there’s a lot you can test around the specific forms. Some are really simple things. I hate to say this but, full page takeovers, there’s a reason why they’re on a lot of sites. They do tend to work. At Reforge our formula has really just been a combination of, doing that customer or that reader insights research to understand what it is that people value. Applying that and trying to create the highest quality version of what they value, and putting that out there.
So again, high quality content at the right frequency is really the magic sauce. There’s nothing more to it than that. And then after that we really kind of just play around with our actual collectors in, up until now, because Reforge has been rather early. We’ve been pretty generous and not very aggressive with the way that we collect emails. The reason being, we don’t want anybody on, again going back to the list hygiene, we don’t want anybody on the list who doesn’t really want to be on the list.
And so we’re not going to put up aggressive turnstiles, or popups that you can’t opt out of, takeovers that you can opt out of. But we do sort of have the standard mix of inline forms, full page takeovers for first time visitors, and exit intent forms. And I think it’s important to combine a multitude of types just because we, especially depending on what kind of company you are coming from, and what background you have, we may be wary of asking too many times, or too many ways for a person’s email address.
But oftentimes that’s what’s necessary. We need those multiple touch points and multiple places in order to get people to seal the deal. And then to your second question about, what would I advise for people? Well, I think probably most people who are interested in doing some email, I think most businesses can benefit from email marketing. I think most that are trying to collect emails are probably not doing it in the right time or not doing it enough.
And not doing it enough is actually one of the bigger problems that I’ve seen out there. For example, when I was at 500 Startups, I can’t tell you how many companies, especially at the beginning, I mean I evangelized email quite a bit over the years. So especially at the beginning, a lot of companies didn’t want to do email marketing. They didn’t really know what it was aside from, well, it’s spam, so I don’t like it. I personally don’t like it, so I don’t want to do it at my company.
After a couple of years the tide started to change and people earlier stage companies were much more on board with it. But still not very sort of understanding of exactly when, how much, where. And my best advice on that is really to be the user yourself and go through the flows, and look at what other sites are doing in your category, and be critical and yourself, is this what I would do? How does this feel to me as a user? And then do some user testing around it, and then you can apply what you learned from those experiences to your own email marketing, your own email collection.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. I mean that’s some great advice right there. And what you say is it all comes back to, exceptional content really, creating content that people want to subscribe to, that people want to be on the list for and continue receiving overtime as well.
So, if we were to talk about before just content, you guys create some exceptional content and if anybody who’s listening who hasn’t checked out the brief or the block or various things that Reforge create, I’d highly recommend going and taking a look. Could you tell us a bit more about your content calendar, and how you decide what type of content to create?
Susan Su:
Sure. So it’s been a long journey for Reforge. In the beginning we started out as I mentioned with sort of influencer driven content and it was all long form. So these long essays that took several weeks to put together and this is by a team that knew how to do that kind of stuff. We were definitely not newbies too long form content creation, and still it would take several weeks per post just to really get original ideas said in the right way, said in a way that we thought was good enough for Reforge.
And we were starting to see kind of diminishing efficacy on the distribution of that content. So we did see some search traffic but a lot, when companies are first starting out, a lot of traffic just comes sort of from social, and at the beginning it worked really well, and then months went by and it started working less and less well over time. And we started to hear from our friends in the industry that they were seeing the same.
Which is to say that, distribution channels for content are getting more crowded and they are sort of changing their criteria for how and when and what content they display, that they’re going to sort of distribute to new audiences. And so that was the impetus behind Reforge Brief which was, hey, how can we, there’s so much content out there already, so many people doing a great job with this. How can we add value without being another long form content originator out there in the world?
And so with brief, we’d go out and source the best content around growth that’s already out there. We sort of take a summarized version, we do a summarized version. We add some graphics and make it a little bit more palatable and easy to read. Not everybody [inaudible 00:29:11] not everybody has time to read a 6,000 word essay just to stay up to date with their job. And that’s been a huge hit. It wasn’t sort of like a magical discovery. We did a lot of user research to arrive at that exact format and frequency and all of that.
And we just kept hearing over and over again from people when we have these conversations that, it was just a time issue and that they are feeling bombarded, and there’s so much noise, and it’s hard to sort out the signal. And so we thought that there was a really unique opportunity to do content rather than continuing to add to the noise to do content differently, and help these people with this kind of time volume problem that everybody echoed.
Matt Byrom:
People want good content, but they just don’t want to spend the time reading it. So it’s almost a [inaudible 00:30:01] isn’t it?
Susan Su:
Yes, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
And how does that work in terms of SEO? In that case, are you creating enough original content in there that the search engines are seeing that as somewhere where they would send people over their original pieces? Or is it different how you finding that?
Susan Su:
It’s definitely not as good for search as the original pieces. I mean, search now still really goes for longer, denser type of content. But we’ve decided that’s okay for right now. By the way, Reforge Brief is still pretty nascent. It was launched. We launched the site just in mid May of this year, so it’s only been a couple of months. But we’ve kind of really decided to bet on virality and sharing, and kind of referral traffic as the way to go for us.
And I think that makes sense to because when we’ve had the traffic that we do get from search, the intent is so low for our product, and our product experience it’s pretty expensive, from both an effort standpoint and also financial aid. So if you think about it, the vast majority would say over 95% of our participants have their program fee paid for by their company. They get it reimbursed by their company, and then there is that application window and that whole application process that I mentioned earlier.
So there’s sort of a high barrier. It’s got to do the application, wait around, get accepted. You have to pay this four figure amount, get your company to reimburse you. There’s all of these different steps, and search just tends to bring folks who are a little bit more just kind of early in their consideration process, and it’s a great touch point.
But somebody that subscribes off of search is going to need a lot more nurture, and they’re going to need some weeding out, some qualification before you can call them a proper lead. And so for those reasons, using Reforge Brief as kind of an acquisition engine for us, it’s been less reliant on search and much more so on sharing and people kind of forwarding the email, sharing it on social to get in fresh leads from that list.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. So it’s almost forgoing research benefits to actually get benefits from people who are already subscribed, or referrals, or through some of the social media channels, and your other communities and things that you’ve built up your email list, people forwarding it on and things like that as well.
Susan Su:
That’s right. When you think that warm intro, think about it as a warm intro, tends to be a better fit for the commitment level of our product.
Matt Byrom:
Is content still something that gives you your biggest win? So is what we talked about earlier of being content email customer. Is that really how it flows for you, or is there other factors that players where a bigger marketing [inaudible 00:32:56] Is content still your biggest driver, or do you have other things? I guess referrals is quite big for you as well.
Susan Su:
We’re seeing a growing portion come from referrals, and so that’s actually probably gonna be the next sort of frontier for us. So we’ve done a little bit of programs around referrals, but I think that, that can be built out much more going forward. I think in order for [inaudible 00:33:20] it’s kind of a chicken or egg problem. In order for referrals to work, there has to be some existing base, there has to be a great product market fit, and then there has to be a connection between your current customers and potential future customers.
They can’t be too isolated, or it can’t be a product that people don’t want to talk about because maybe it’s embarrassing or it’s too personal or whatnot. And so I think we have all those elements in place, and it’s just a matter of understanding when we’ve done referrals in the past it’s just been kind of, it’s been non incentivized, and it’s worked decently well.
And so now it’s thinking about, well what is the right incentive structure to create a referral program that’s going to work even better without, once again eroding that trust. Over marketing things can erode trust really fast, and we’re in this tricky position of, are her audience being marketers and [inaudible 00:34:14] people and so they’re especially sensitive to it. They’ve got their antenna up for sure.
Matt Byrom:
We’re in a similar place where we’re actually marketing to marketers and you realize, there’s no, you can’t pull any fast ones because people know what you’re doing.
Susan Su:
Exactly. And they’ve seen it all before, and we actually, the other interesting thing about that is, we have a higher percentage of people that have, I don’t know if this is scientifically true, but I believe we have a higher percentage of people that have pixel blockers, for example, on their email.
So we actually aren’t able to fully capture open rate accurately because we have so many really savvy people on our email list, that know how to implement stuff like that. Whereas for example, if you’re doing a primarily consumer play, or B2B but to a different segment, you may not experience that challenge.
Matt Byrom:
I guess that’s not that helpful for you guys as well as the people that would benefit most from it are actually blocking these things from you seeing and being able to influence it.
Susan Su:
Exactly. Well, I mean, they’re not blocking it from reaching them, but it’s harder for us to know whether, how well it’s working. And I wouldn’t say it’s the majority of our audience, but when you’re marketing to marketers, be careful, because those people are really smart, and most of them have seen most if not all of the kind of tactics that you’re using on them. And so I think it’s important to always go back to that kind of user research, and just being honest and trustworthy, and delivering value.
Matt Byrom:
And I’d to just take a little slight diversion now. I mean, I know you’ve got a really interesting parts of your career that I really wanted to touch on, and that’s your time at 500 Startups, and part of what you did there was evaluate portfolio companies and support them with growth. I’m just interested to learn a bit more about what you saw successful companies doing that really stood out, or things that were quite common with successful companies, the other people might be able to look at or replicate. I’m interested in your experience at this level.
Susan Su:
500 was so much fun, and it was really great to be able to see so many companies at once. So I would say, here’s something really counterintuitive about the successful companies. And you hear a lot of push to scale and to, don’t do things or don’t do gross things that aren’t going to scale.
Growth is all about scale, but in my experience at 500, the companies that were the most successful eventually were the ones that were not afraid to, I know this is also a little bit of a cliche, but they were really not afraid to do lots of tactical things that didn’t scale initially, or that didn’t seem they were going to scale and that eventually did for them.
So I’ll give you a really small example. There was a French 500 company called Air Talk. It’s a B2B SAS company. And at one point, still pretty early in their company’s life cycle, they closed uber as a client, which was like a huge win for them. Really, really huge, really unexpected. And I said, “Hey guys, that’s awesome. How did you, how did that happen? Did you have a connection there? How did they hear?” This was before they had a brand. This was before they raise their series B. So nobody knew this company.
And the founder said, “Well, you know what, it was really funny. We were all out on a run,” because I guess they would go jogging together in the afternoons. “We were all out on a run and we have an alert system for anytime somebody fills out a form or check out our site, we have an alert system and it sends a notification, so that we all see who’s checking us out. And we got one that said, that had an email with Uber as the domain, @uber.com email address. Immediately we all turned around, ran right back to the office and called that person.
And I think it was less than, it was just a few minutes later, and the person that they spoke to Uber was so impressed with that turnaround time that he had never seen before. And so happy about that, that that ended up being a major factor plus the product work, and it was solving for what they needed. But that ended up being kind of a major persuasion factor in closing that deal.
So I think that’s the lesson behind that is, it’s such a small thing, but the ability to understand a norm, which is that, most sales inquiries have a turnaround time of, I think they said at that time was like one day or even longer than one day, and then they were able to do there’s less than 30 minutes. That type of contrast was the norm is what will help an early stage company to stand out against the many, many incumbents that have more money, more people, better investors, more brand footprint that that’s kind of what will help you to get your foot in that door.
Matt Byrom:
Two things that bigger companies struggle to do because of size basically. So like take advantage of your small size and flexibility and just do the things that you have to. It’s almost being scrappy, I guess really isn’t it? Doing whatever you can do to get those customers on board.
Susan Su:
Being really scrappy. I think a lot of startups do think of themselves as being really scrappy, but then when it comes down to doing super manual stuff or things that feel really one to one, they say, I don’t want to do that because we’re a startup and that’s not scalable. While in reality, in the beginning, every single lead counts, every single sale counts, and it is actually worth, senior people’s time to stop what they’re doing and take a call or have a conversation or do a customer support email to really dig into understanding problem and sort of the dynamics of your value exchange.
So for me that story was very impressive and I loved it because they were so humble. Nobody was too important to stop what they were doing and literally run back to the office, and try to return that call as soon as possible. They could’ve seen it and said like, hey, the average turnaround time was 48 hours or whatever. Let’s just chill. This will be fine. We can wait till tomorrow, or we can wait till later this evening.
No, and instead they wanted to really create that massive stratification between what was average, and what they were able to do because of their size being small, so using smallness and to your advantage. And I thought that was really special. And that’s something that really differentiated the startups that ended up eventually becoming successful and the ones that didn’t.
Matt Byrom:
I guess you’ve just got to do that. Anything that it takes really isn’t it to actually make that happen at that sort of stage.
Susan Su:
Right, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
And you also allege 500 Startups thought leadership and initiatives, content, email, video. What activities did you focus on while you were there to get content and get people into the 500 Startups brand?
Susan Su:
500 Startups had a really great brand footprint already from doing lots of events, and from Dave McClure doing lots of publicity, and speaking, and blogging of his own, and really traveling and meeting with people, meeting with communities all over the world. So it was great to start with that baseline because it was already pretty high, and if we wanted to put something out, sort of the amplification factor that came from that could be really big because we had already built a really solid base.
And so when I came in to kind of accelerate that, to me it was all about two things. One was, showcase the kind of unique aspects of the 500 portfolio that the company success stories, so that more companies would be proud to put 500 on their crunch base and on their investor page, because that helped us to generate more deal flow.
And then the second part was, to showcase what people in the investment community were doing, what investors at 500 were actually, how they were thinking about their ecosystems, how they were thinking about building their portfolios, what was their investment thesis to really again continue to attract deal flow.
The other side of 500’s business which is to attract limited partners or investors into the fund. That is very hard to influence through online marketing. It’s largely kind of more relationship based, but in terms of building a reputation so that a lot of startups that would want to apply to the accelerator, that could definitely be done through online marketing and that’s what I focused on.
Matt Byrom:
I guess that’s why people the brand is out there really, and I can totally see how the investors is much more relationship based game. But I think what’s really interesting is that, everything that we’ve been talking about here, App Sumo with the email list, Reforge with email and content, and the people who get to create content as well. And then the relationships and content that you also created for 500 Startups.
It’s all really based around community. Community is like at the heart of everything that we’ve been talking about here really. Would you say that that’s been a big part of your career and journey and something that’s been super important to the success that you’ve had in growth and marketing?
Susan Su:
Yes. Actually now that you say it like that, I think it really has been. I’ve never considered myself a community person in our community marketer in that sense, but I do think, to borrow an old term from Seth Godin, I do think it’s important to know who your tribe is, to build that tribe, and to foster it. It’s an oldie but a goodie and it’s definitely still true. If you want to call it a community, if you want to call it an audience, if you want to call it a tribe, I don’t care, but the key is to really aggregate and sort of deliver that value outward and then listen inward.
And the reason why I think it’s such an important factor is because, the thing about a community is that every member of the community has at least one thing in common, which is their membership in the community. At least that one thing. But for the most part they probably have a lot more things in common. Let’s say you’re part of a church community, or you’re part of a running group. Well not only do you have the membership in that group in common, but you probably have also a bunch of other lifestyle factors in common.
Maybe you tend to get up so that you can do that same morning run together, or maybe you all tend to, maybe you don’t to drink that much because you guys are all really serious. You’re training for marathon, some kind of marathon together and so you’re really serious about your health in that point in time. And so there’s all these shared characteristics, and that’s Kind of the added benefit of a community is that not only are you aggregating this group together, but also they have lots of commonalities.
So you’re starting to create a network, and a network is what it’s going to help your company grow because you sort of persuade one person in that community, one node in that network and they are connected to lots and lots of other nodes in the network, and that can bring much more scalable growth to your business.
Matt Byrom:
And I guess what you really looking to do then as well is, when you’ve got that shared interest community that maybe it’s around your business or some of the other interests that you’ve mentioned there, what you’re really looking to do as marketers I guess is to find the channels to actually connect with those people in the way that they to be communicated with most.
Susan Su:
Exactly. There definitely needs to be an audience channel fit. So are those people actually hanging out on that channel? And then the second question is, are they actually reachable? They may be on the channel but they may be really hard to reach, or it may not be the appropriate channel for your product. If your product has a high degree of, it’s really personal, if it’s really private, let’s say it’s about health, Facebook may not be the best channel for you.
Matt Byrom:
If we were to bring this around to sort of a close here, I’m interested in what marketing strategies are on your radar, what are some of the things that you’re going to be focusing on for the rest of this year and into 2019?
Susan Su:
So I continue to be very interested in figuring out email deliverability. It’s a moving target, but I think it’s so valuable and it’s been really hard to find people who are truly experts in email deliverability, and so we’ve decided to sort of become those experts ourselves. So I mean, I think email marketing, we kind of get the just on the basic parameters of email marketing. But your email marketing won’t be effective unless you’ve really mastered email deliverability as well.
And email deliverability has a lot of technical aspects to it, and also some sort of softer content based on technical aspects, and I think both sides are really important, and it’s very nuanced. And again it’s a moving target. It’s literally changing and learning all the time as you continue to send. So I’m really intrigued by that.
And then another strategy is, as I mentioned, I’m really interested in referrals both organic and incentivized, and the reason for that is because, I think I mentioned this before, but I think we’re moving away from mass communication as the primary context for our consideration processes for anything, for any product, whether it’s consumer or B2B. And again, that’s because people are burned by decades upon decades of advertising, and even decades of ads just on the web.
And sort of due to that they are now gravitating more towards other humans to help them in the consideration process. But the caveat is that it needs to be other humans that they actually know and trust. And so that’s why I think referrals is going to continue to be extremely powerful, and then incentivized referrals as a way to sort of increase the velocity on that. I personally would hate to see incentivized referrals start eroding trust, which I think it could, but that’s where a two sided referral system really give get referral system comes into play and can be really helpful.
Matt Byrom:
Especially when it’s transparent and people say, this is so clear, you join, you get this with the person who introduced, but you will also get less.
Susan Su:
Right. Exactly.
Matt Byrom:
Cool. So, email very big on your radar. Referrals also very big on your radar for the rest of this year and next year.
Susan Su:
Yes, that’s right.
Matt Byrom:
Awesome. And just one question about further had on email marketing that, are you automating as well as doing your weekly emails?
Susan Su:
Yes, for right now we are main automation has to kind of comes down to just what are welcome journey is to get people warmed up. And then we have our weekly sends and then our conversion funnel is only semi automated just because we, the way our sales cycle is, it is sort of a long sale cycle and it’s cohort based so it’s not running all the time. But if I were, in a SAS business for example, I would definitely be working on email automation from the very beginning.
Matt Byrom:
We have a total different email automation journeys in our business, and some of it is just for, not [inaudible 00:49:24] but actually to help our sales team and alert people when certain things happen, which is just really helpful for actually, as you said earlier, actually hitting people in the, when we’re top of mind when they’re on the website, when they’re on the pricing page, when certain things are happening, when we’re top of mind for them. So it’s particularly interesting.
Susan Su:
I think for a business that has a sales team, email automation can serve another purpose which is to kind of set up these qualifying events. And so, your sales team can actually get more intel on how warm a lead is, or where they are in the lead funnel, and then actually use that to guide their actions.
Because, I think a like big issue with sales teams is really just, what is the signal to noise ratio for them, and really increasing efficiency, and so to the extent that email automation can help with that by creating kind of checkpoints and behaviors around those check points, that can be another added benefit.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. And we actually do almost that same thing where we create content for different parts of the funnel and different personas, and we actually filter and segment people based on what stage are they at in their buying process, what’s a particular category, what use case are they interested in, which industry are they interested in, and we get people to actually qualify these various different things.
Maybe not even intentionally, but actually by viewing certain pieces of content that we create, and we start to build up an understanding, a knowledge of that person. There’s various alerts that we get at different stages of the process to actually tell us these things so that we can act on various bits and pieces of data that we understand that various points in time.
Susan Su:
Exactly. I mean, everything’s a funnel. It sounds like you guys really understood that, and understood that each funnel kind of leads to another funnel, and the beauty of automation is that, you can set those up without having to sort of be manually running everything which you wouldn’t be able to do at after a certain point.
Matt Byrom:
Well, it’s been a pleasure talking to you today, Susan. I’m going to wrap this up and bring it to our last five, which is five quick fire questions. So question number one is, what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Susan Su:
So right now I’m kind of in this research mode, so my current best piece of marketing advice is to go deep, deep, deep on qualitative research to add the why to whatever quantitative insights you’re able to pull from your analytics tools. It’s actually a lot more work in my opinion, especially if you don’t have a team dedicated to doing insights work, and it never feels quite scalable.
I mean you have to reach out to people, you have to set up calls, you have to execute those calls. You have to take notes, you have to synthesize the notes. It’s a lot harder than, for example, looking in metal base or google analytics, but it will give you very, very precious nuggets that you can’t get from looking at dashboards. And then the secondary benefit is that, it also just fosters goodwill when your customers feel like you’re listening and responding, and actually care about what they have to say.
Matt Byrom:
So it’s almost doing the groundwork after you have the data.
Susan Su:
Yes, exactly. I think it’s an ongoing process. It’s a little bit of a dialectic where you want to set up your systems to collect data, but then you also want to do that qualitative work at the same time, and continue to cycle back to each of those steps in the process on an ongoing basis. The customer insights work really never ends because, they’re not static, and your business isn’t static. And so, why do we do it at the beginning, but not in the middle or later on as we continue to mature.
Matt Byrom:
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Susan Su:
Yes. So right now I’m actually reading a book called, Never Split the Difference, and the author’s first name is Chris, what is his last name? I don’t have it on my desk right now. It’s in my other room, but it’s by, he was like a former FBI crisis negotiator, and it’s not necessarily about marketing, but a lot of it I find is applicable to the art of persuasion into relationship building. And so if you’re a lateral thinker like myself, and you like stories about the FBI like myself, then you’ll get a lot of insights from that book.
Matt Byrom:
That’s cool. Well we’ll definitely link to that in the show notes, at mattbyrom.com. If you go to this episode there then you can click on the link and check out that book. So number three, what software tool could you not live without?
Susan Su:
So given my kind of current buys for qualitative research, I think I could live without most of them, but the ones that I use most frequently and that definitely make my life a lot easier and more enjoyable are MetaBase for dashboards, and data reporting and then good old spreadsheets for just tracking processes and workflows.
I currently have … we have a lot of different workflows and you always think there’s going to be whether it’s Airtable, or some other cool tool that’s going to solve all of your workflow problems and whatnot. I just always come back to good old google spreadsheets, works really well for me.
Matt Byrom:
It sounds we’ve got something in common there. Certainly I’m a spreadsheet fun. I think you’ve either got it or you haven’t. So number four, what’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Susan Su:
I actually think what Stripe is doing with Stripe Atlas is really interesting. I don’t know if that fits squarely in the category of a marketing campaign. I think it’s a lot bigger than that. I think they consider it, sort of an area of their business, and a product, and an experience. But it’s also just amazing marketing for Stripe’s core business, the core API business.
I don’t know how familiar you are with Atlas map, but it’s basically gives you the ability to spin up a Delaware corporation from anywhere in the world, and gives you all the tools as well as a lot of expertise, knowledge, guidance, education on what you need to do in order to start your business early. And the reason why I think it’s so interesting and why it’s my current favorite is two things. One is I just think the execution is really good.
If you look at the concept, if you look at the branding, if you look at the content and the way they’re doing acquisition, it looks really good and it feels really good. It’s not pandering and it’s very, very high quality. And then the second side to that is just, I think it’s really smart of them to get in early. So right now I think the bread and butter for revenue is definitely bigger companies obviously that are sending a lot of volume, but early companies, it’s kind of I hate to say this, but it’s Kind of like big tobacco.
You definitely want to sort of get them in early because they understand that once you’re integrated, it’s very hard not to unintegrate, and so better to sort of close a partner early in their career, and close lots of them early in their trajectory even if a lot of them are going to end up failing, but the ones that do end up succeeding are the kinds of businesses that will help you to scale your business as they grow.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. I know Stripe quite well. We actually used them on our product that we had a while back, but I didn’t know too much about Stripe Atlas, so that’s really, really interesting, and it’s interesting the way you say it. You bring it back to tobacco and say, get them in early.
But I guess actually that’s as early as you could get people in when they’re actually forming corporations really. So that’s really interesting. I’m definitely gonna check that out and I’ll also link to Stripe Atlas on the Matt Byrom website as well. So mattbyrom.com. Final question number five is, which are the podcasts do you listen to?
Susan Su:
Right now I have a number of podcasts that I’m subscribed to, but the ones that I actually regularly listen to are two, and they’re both very dense. One is, Shane Parrish’s, the knowledge project. You should probably know it’s pretty famous now. I really like that one. [inaudible 00:57:31] just has different topics all the time. They’re very, very dense, so I learn a lot every single time.
I’ve gotten a lot of great book recommendations and further learning recommendations through that podcast. And then the second one that I really is also extremely dense. It’s called, Invest Like the Best, and it’s primarily about investment but not just investing money so much as investing time, investing effort. It really takes like a broader view of investment.
Matt Byrom:
They sound very cool as well, and actually I haven’t heard of either, but I will definitely be checking both out, and I’ll also link to them both on the show notes as well. So please check those out. And Susan, I just have to say thank you very much. It’s been a lovely chat. It’s been really nice to talk to you, and everybody listening I’d really highly recommend you go and check out Reforge. As Susan said, applications are open at present, so if you like what you see, fill in an application and apply to their workshop.
Susan Su:
Thank you so much Matt, it’s been great to be here.
Matt Byrom:
Thank you all for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share with your friends. And also it’ll be extremely grateful if you could rate and review us on iTunes, or the channel you get this podcast through. Until next time, I’ve been your host, Byrom.
