S01 E08: Bill Macaitis – Authentic B2B Email Marketing

Pushing Send

In this episode, we welcome Bill Macaitis, a marketer who is committed to taking a customer-centric approach in everything that he does. Bill has led marketing at Slack, Zendesk, and Salesforce and he talks about how he has used email to authentically engage B2B customers. For him, email marketing is more about adding value than making a sale, playing the long game of educating and entertaining the audience to gain their trust and build relationships. Email offers the exciting opportunity to connect with prospects on a highly personalized basis, and he talks about the part that technology continues to play in fine-tuning this engagement. During his time at Slack—the company that notoriously ‘killed’ inter-office email—Bill and his team still effectively leveraged this channel to grow their business and keep customers updated with the latest developments in the company. He also gets into their strategies for getting feedback from customers, how he manages to prioritize the human aspect of email, and how multitouch attribution can help you stand out from the crowd.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Find out what Bill’s earliest email marketing experience was like.
• The one-to-one connection that makes email marketing so effective.
• Bill shares about using catchy subject lines and being a customer-centric marketer.
• The evolution of the email channel from spray and pray to content that adds value.
• Thoughts on whether marketers today still struggle to put the customer first.
• How new software helps marketers to be more thoughtful and build better relationships.
• Learn about the benefits of multitouch attribution in an overly competitive world.
• Bill explains how he and his team leveraged email marketing at Slack (the email killer!).
• Creating content that does not necessarily sell but educate and entertain the audience.
• Get some insight into the thought processes behind email newsletters at Slack and Zendesk.
• How Bill ensures that he always considers the human side of email communication.
• Examples of how they have managed to elicit responses and feedback from customers.

Tweetables:

“At the end of the day, that one-to-one connection I thought was just so powerful and there’s just an immediacy that comes from it—it’s a personal connection.” — @bmacaitis [0:02:32]

“I’m a big customer-centric marketer. So, what that means is, everything I do, I think about what is the experience going to be for the average person.” — @bmacaitis [0:03:31]

“The world is just too competitive; there are too many companies selling what you sell. So, you’ve got to be able to stand out, and I just think through the email, through content, through tone of voice, those are all opportunities to differentiate yourself and provide value.” — @bmacaitis [0:09:09]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Bill Macaitis on LinkedIn

Bill Macaitis on Twitter

Slack

Zendesk

Salesforce

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