Episode 304: How Marketing Teams Can Leverage Email Data with Steve Wagner of Webbula

Episode Summary

With more than 20 years in marketing, Steve Wagner has watched the demand generation concept “grow up,” so to speak. When he was starting out, it was in its “baby phase,” and he has since watched it become an integral part of the marketing life cycle.

Steven started his career on the account management and sales side of business — which helped him better understand and appreciate those teams — before working his way over to marketing.

These days, he’s the Senior Marketing Manager at Webbula, a data quality platform, where he heads marketing initiatives for its data hygiene and enhancement solutions for email marketers.

On this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino interviews Steve, who gives us an overview of what email marketing looks like in today’s climate. He discusses the importance of targeted email campaigns and explains why it’s important to have a “clean” email list. (Did you know companies get assigned sender reputation scores?)

Since joining the team more than a year ago, he talks about how he’s prioritized his marketing efforts, and he shares what he hopes to accomplish post-COVID.

Guest Profile

Name: Steve Wagner
What he does: Steve is currently the Senior Marketing Manager at Webbula, a data quality platform, where he leads its B2B marketing initiatives for its data hygiene and enhancement solutions for email.
Company: Webbula
Noteworthy: Steve started his career in account management and sales, where he developed an appreciation and understanding for that side of business. For the past 20 years, he’s been immersed in marketing, where he’s watched the demand generation concept come to life.

Key Insights

COVID-19 has disrupted traditional marketing channels that are more conducive to one-on-one engagements, like events and shows. This makes email an even more essential marketing channel in 2020. If you can tap into your subscribers’ data, you can create targeted messages to get more clicks and opens and higher customer acquisition rates.
Email service providers assign anyone doing email marketing sender scores. (These are like credit scores but for your email quality.) If you don’t have a “clean” database, your email deliverability metrics suffer. You risk getting a low sender score, which can land your messages in the spam folder.
Since joining the Webbula marketing team more than a year ago, Steve has focused on balancing the team’s inbound and outbound marketing efforts. He also led a website redesign, so he could better lead customers to “the path of least resistance.”

Episode Highlights

“Email has become even more important than what it already was as a main engagement channel. We have not seen any slowdown in that activity with respect to our customers and our business. In fact, in many respects, with many industries, we’ve seen a large uptick in the use of email as a result of those other marketing channels going by the wayside.”

“Knowledge is power, so take that email and then add certain aspects of their geolocation, buying interests, how they self-identify, their job title and things of that nature… You’ll be able to really segment down to have five to seven different micro-campaigns with different messaging based on that additional knowledge… We see a lot of organizations take our data enrichment and really try to customize that subject line, really customize those first couple sentences in the message to keep that person reading, so they just don’t simply have a nice high open rate, but they have a nice and increasing click-through rate, conversion rate and customer acquisition rate.”

“Everyone out there who engages in email marketing has a sender reputation score. Think of this as kind of like your credit score to the email service providers… They want to make sure you’re not a spammer… They’ll see the bounce rates, they’ll see the hard bounces, the soft bounces, things that happen in every single campaign, and then they’ll pick up on trends. If you are not regularly cleaning your list, you could run into situations where fake information gets into your database. So, it’s really important to maintain that good sender reputation and use a regular email hygiene service.”

“We have historically been an organization that was outbound and chased every lead we had ever generated. You certainly want to have a nice inbound/outbound balance as a demand gen or marketing professional, and I’m working hard to try to do that every day.”

“One of the first things I did when I came on board is I wanted to make sure our web content was really in line with that experience, especially on the Google paid search side. I figured out early on there were a lot of people who were having an expectation to get started right away. I had to make updates to the web pages and direct people right to the path of least resistance.”

“I wanted to have a good mix of targeting bigger organizations — dream clients for us — and really hit them with a mix of different touch points, like email, phone and your traditional assets there. But also giving them something as a takeaway at their desk, and something that really catches their eye draws them in and makes them get on the phone with us to learn more about our solution.”

Episode 304: How Marketing Teams Can Leverage Email Data with Steve Wagner of Webbula

Episode Summary

Guest Profile

Key Insights

Episode Highlights

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