Digital Marketing Archives

The Struggle of Marketing To Skeptical Developers

Selling software is an exercise in convincing the buyer that what your software can do is worth the cost, and they can trust you to deliver. It boils down to a comparison; however, when your software is aimed at solving problems for developers, the math gets more complex. Developers buy with time and risk, not […]

What BuzzFeed Can Teach Us About Image Sliders

Image sliders: People don’t click them, read them, or like them. You can come up with a better way to use your home page and present your content. Image sliders are ubiquitous across the web. I can’t complain, I’m part of the problem. Over the years I’ve built my fair share. However, now when asked […]

What is a Marketing Developer?

When surgery was invented, the job title “surgeon” came with no modifiers. It didn’t matter what needed to come off or go in, you could see the same person. As medicine advanced, the job splintered. More knowledge meant increased complexity which necessitated specialization. Soon you would see one person for your war wounds and a […]

How to Apply Design Principles To Your Marketing Initiatives

I want to review a quote from Mike Monteiro’s book, You’re my Favorite Client: — So let’s look deeper into the design process, with a giant caveat. Every designer claims their own process… But whether you’re working on an agile or a waterfall process (or smartly between the two), all processes break down to some version […]

Win Clients With Robots: Marketing Automation for Consultants

A few weeks back a reader asked: Where should consultants start with marketing automation? I wanted to take a second to answer this. Here’s the challenge consultants face: working to relationships based business. You want to be efficient without being robotic. How can you put systems in place that make you more effective without turning clients off? Most of the times, […]

Salutation Formatting For Nameless Subscribers

It’s a common use case: You want to personalize someone’s email by using their first name. You may try to use a liquid snippet like this: Hey {{ subscriber.first_name | default: “” }}, But there’s a problem. If the first name isn’t set, you end up with this wonky salutation with an awkward space: Hey […]

How to Trigger a Workflow For Every New Subscriber In Drip

There’s a weird gap in Drip’s functionality: You can’t trigger a workflow or automation rule for all new subscribers. You can trigger rules based on “Submitted a form,” but that doesn’t work for users that are created via import or API. Here’s how you can work around that: Drip Doesn’t Have A Trigger, But Zapier […]

How to Run Losing Split Tests and Still Win

By showing different variations of a product or feature to segments of your audience, you can quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. There’s a reason that every major tech company such as Google, Apple, Uber, etc. Use split testing as a part of their design and research process. Done correctly, you can learn about […]

Drip Workflow: Split Full Names into First and Last Name

If you get your subscriber’s name as one field instead of two, it can make for some awkward salutations. “Hey John Smith!” Here’s a simple workflow that will take full name fields and split them into first and last name fields for you. Want to copy this workflow directly into your Drip account? Get the […]

12 Ways to Increase Revenue With Drip

Email marketing is so much more than a “weekly newsletter” these days, and with powerful tools available at lower price points, a lot more companies can take advantage of these. My go-to tool is Drip. It has a great balance of affordability, simplicity, and power. There’s a lot of businesses out there that could gain […]

How to Share Your Google Analytics With Your Consultant

Providing access to your Google Analytics account can allow consultants to gain insight and help you find better ways to collect data and make smarter decisions within your business. 1.Go to analytics.google.com Log in with your Google account. Do not share your Google account username and password with anyone for any reason. EVER. 2. […]

Using Growth Initiatives To Increase Focus

Is your marketing department allergic to project management? Here’s a strategy that might help you reign in the chaos a little bit: Morphing my vague marketing tasks into discrete, measurable projects: I call them growth initiatives. Others call them experiments, which I don’t use here because when I say that people tend to think “A/B testing”. […]

The Difference Between Marketing and Growth

Marketing and Growth are two terms have different meanings depending on company culture and context. Here’s how I think about the difference: Marketing is the discipline of increasing the number of eyeballs on you. Marketing is focused on lead generation; building email lists, getting people to sign up for free trials, and general brand awareness. […]

How to Increment a Custom Field In Drip

Let’s say you want to keep count of how many times a user performs a certain action in Drip, how can you do that? Drip doesn’t support this feature natively, but it’s easy to implement. Here’s an example using a rule that counts the number of times a user completed a particular event: Check out […]

How to Write More Analytics Friendly Code

Why Does Tracking Matter? Software built for business should be useful to the consumer and valuable to the company that produces it. To optimize software towards these ends, you need a way to track results. No analytics tool does this out of the box. You can install Google Analytics and see how many monthly visits you […]

How to Hide a Secret Landing Page from Google in WordPress with Yoast SEO

Let’s say you create a special offer for a particular audience, event, or your mailing list. You can “hide” the page by not including it in any navigation, and usually, Google won’t pick it up. However, if you want to be extra sure, you can do so with the Yoast SEO plugin. You only need […]

Integrating Calendly with Drip

I hate playing the back-and-forth “what times works for you?” game when it comes time to book a meeting. As a one-person shop, I’d rather spend my time providing value to clients and taking care of more important matters than spend time negotiating appointment times. I use Calendly to make booking appointments easier. I can […]

Automatically Prune Inactive Subscribers From Drip

Want to keep your list high quality and remove people who aren’t opening your emails? Here’s an automation rule I got from Kurt Elster and Philip Morgan that can do just that:

How to Use First Names With a Fall Back (Drip Quick Tip)

You probably have different methods of adding users to your list. Or maybe you are testing whether or not asking for a first name affects conversion rates. Either way, there are situations when you want to use the first name if you have it and have a fallback if you don’t. Here’s a quick code […]

How to Change the Confirmation Link Text in Your Drip Welcome Emails

If you are using Drip for your marketing automation, you might want to change the copy on the “Confirm Your Subscription” Link that gets sent when people fill out a form. This link is an important call-to-action, and this little piece of text can have a big impact on your subscription conversion rate. Drip doesn’t […]