Frequently Asked Questions
Below are questions that many prospective clients ask about my expertise. Have a look and reach out if you’d like more information.
Can you describe a successful marketing campaign you’ve led?
I have many successful marketing campaign case studies. I’ve included one, but can describe more upon request. The referenced campaign describes when the client first started with the agency I worked for (2020 to 2024).
Client Background: Small business owner selling high quality dog treats with heavy competition from big box stores plus local small businesses. The client sells via his BigCommerce storefront & also multiple marketplace platforms. As the client built his customer base, he couldn’t keep up with the marketing demands and was reluctant to hire internally for his marketing needs.
The marketing strategy & tactics:
We started out with a new omni-channel campaign calendar a quarter in advance. Because the client captured “owned marketing data” over the years we planned our first set of campaigns centered around email & SMS marketing.
– Month 1: Deploy 1-2 emails per week to spark customer engagement with educational material – highlight blog posts, infographics on why their treats vs.the lower quality, lower priced options.
Next, based on the time of year, we peppered in promotional campaigns that were sent to email & sms subscribers. Note: The client had very predictable monthly promotions. The customers would shop during those times and rarely at full price.
– Month 2: Dive into the data and start to refine the customer lists with profile segments. These results informed tweaks to upcoming one-off campaigns along with building ongoing, automated/triggered campaigns for email & SMS (identify high/low average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV), next expected order date and more).
The email & SMS campaigns continued as in Month 1, however we started layering on targeted social campaigns to compliment the email/SMS messaging. We started with a new social organic post calendar and worked with the social agency to deploy posts.
Because the campaigns were built & scheduled in advance, we were able to build and launch automated/triggered email/SMS flows (welcome series, abandoned browse, abandoned cart, abandoned transaction, Winback Series).
– Month 3: Build and launch customer loyalty program and launch customer reviews portal (App plugin for BigCommerce, Stamped & Smile).
Post launch we added email, SMS and social campaigns to communicate the new program & to promote with special offers (double rewards when you sign up, referral rewards and review rewards). These types of campaigns were layered into the new Marketing Calendar and was a nice promotion campaign vs. always running a % off or $ off special.
This helped reduce the client costs while increasing customer engagement along with increased revenue due to repeat purchases.
After these 3 critical months, over the years we added new marketing tactics across multiple sales channels. Here is a short list:
– Started running paid ads on Google (search, display, text, and video), paid ads on Meta, both Facebook and Instagram.
– Launched a new client app and started marketing to this channel & integrating app awareness in email/sms campaigns, social and onsite.
– Built and launched phase 2 of the client rewards program – Customer VIP program. Again, we utilized the email/SMS, app and social campaigns to create awareness and buzz.
– We dug into the Customer Reviews platform to help increase the client’s net promoter score (NPS), which impacts the client’s Google site reviews.
We achieved a 200% increase in site reviews reaching out to post-purchase customers asking for a review via an email or SMS with link to complete review.
After year 1, tripled email and SMS influenced revenue, 40% list growth while maintaining less than 8% customer churn.
After year 1, through year 5 (2024), email and SMS revenue consistently increased by $20k per quarter on average. Decreased client ad spend by half while increasing social sales conversion consistently month over month (average increase, 25-40%). Improved customer retention with rewards, reviews and VIP, and autoship programs.
How do you stay up-to-date with current marketing trends and technologies?
As a marketer, knowing marketing tactics isn’t enough, you’ve got to be an expert at understanding and knowing the entire marketing tech stack.
Because of this, I’m a huge proponent of always learning. Each quarter I set a personal goal to enroll in a class learning about the field of marketing, sales cycle engagement and overall market trends. Along with traditional classes, | regularly attend industry in-person events, webinars and devour pretty much most marketing podcasts.
In conjunction with my quarterly industry learning, I’m regularly enrolled in marketing tech stack “university & certification” courses. Most recently, Klaviyo Certification, ClickUp University, Shopify Academy & BigCommerce University. Member of DigitalMarketer.com, DigitalMarketingInstitue.com.
What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you consider most important in a campaign?
Depending on the type of campaign, the KPIs will differ.
Email/SMS campaigns: Open rate, click through rate, unsubscribe/spam/bounce rates, conversion rate, order value compared to average order value (AOV), deliverability rate. These KPIs will vary based on subscriber segment & if the campaign Is a promotion vs. an engagement/educational message.
Paid social media campaigns: Engagement, likes, organic vs. paid followers, reach, impressions, audience demographics & demographics, sales conversion, web visits by channel, follower growth, return on marketing investment (ROM).
How do you approach developing a marketing strategy for a new product or service?
There are several steps I take when developing a marketing strategy for a new product or service. Below are the basic steps I take:
Complete a market research audit to understand the product/service market, the competition and their sales and marketing channels. Once competitor space Is identified, subscribe to the top 3-5 companies (email, social, get the app if they have one).
lf the customer is established, perform a full site & tech stack audit (| love using Builtwith.com). It’s important to me to understand the previous marketing tactics and if there is a list/database of subscribers. This data will be used to build out the marketing channel plan. If there are zero subscribers, the budget may need to include more paid campaigns & driving top of funnel prospects. On that note, full understanding of the client marketing budget so the marketing partner can allocate human/tech resources.
Conversely, if there is a group of subscribers (they accepted marketing), those profiles will be used in email/SMS campaigns, and pairs nicely with a well placed web pop-up, slide out, exit forms. The form may offer free educational download, % off w/ promo code and more.
What role does content marketing play in your overall strategy, and how do you develop engaging content?
Content marketing was a part of every strategic/tactical marketing plan. As mentioned above, the data analytics, A/B testing results and segmentation drove the majority of the content plan. This is true for when I was creating the content or had a team taking the campaign brief and creating the assets. Additionally, having a full understanding of the market and continually shopping the key competition is imperative to the final content
strategy and development.
How do you incorporate customer feedback into your marketing strategies?
Each client that | managed not only had regular touch base calls, typically weekly for larger contracts and also a month end recap scheduled for the first week of the new month and also a quarterly review with the client C-Suite team.
However, at my last agency, my ClickUp system was created to share certain pieces of task deliverables directly to the client. Some of these milestones for client feedback were: copy text and design. The client would be notified that assets were ready for review/editing or approval vs. getting stuck in a long email chain. Feedback along the way helped our internal teams become more streamlined and to immediately take the customer feedback into the campaigns vs. waiting until a “post-mortem” client meeting.
What experience do you have with social media marketing and influencer partnerships?
Each client that I managed had a social and/or influencer component to their marketing strategy. Depending on the client our agency would manage the tasks or in many cases there was a separate agency that we interfaced with. If we were handling the partnerships and the client used Shopify, we’d use an ad-on app such as Shopify
Collabs. I’ve also used other platforms that were very successful such as: GRIN, Upfluence, Creator |Q, and Captiv8.
Can you share an example where data and analytics influenced your decision-making?
Data and analytics influenced the majority of my decision-making on a day to day basis.
For instance:
Creating design & text assets for campaigns across all channels. When working with my clients we employed A/B testing on subject/preview lines, call to action statements and visual design. Copy text/heat map analysis, viewed pages, click through rates/frequency to name just a few.
Marketing automation tasks relied on data analytics. Specifically, segmentation of the email, SMS, and app push audience with the end goal of sending the right type of communication, message and offer to the right set of people.
How do you determine and segment your target audience?
– Start with a clear, concise campaign brief with the goals outlined.
– Understand the offer in terms of where people are in the buying funnel. If the campaign/offer is targeted to new subscribers that aren’t actively buying but actively researching the parameters I use to identify the segment is:
New subscribers in the last 30-60 days, have never purchased, have opened and/or clicked email in the last 30-60 days. If possible, layer on web insights – has viewed product, greater than 1x.
There’s lots of “if/then” statements to be considered to segment across the funnel – top, middle, bottom. Additionally, I’d frequently use previous purchase statements to identify people that will only purchase on deep discounts. Sending full price offers to that segment didn’t convert and only dropped the deliverability metrics.
What digital marketing tools and platforms have you used, and how proficient are you with them?
The following tools and platforms are tools that I’ve used at expert level and/or have been certified in.
Marketing Automation: Klaviyo, Marketo, Salesforce, Attentive, Postscript, Braze, DotDigital, Yotpo, Hubspot, Zoho. (for very small clients, Constant Contact, MailChimp, Omnisend).
Project Management/ Client Campaign Calendar & Schedule: ClickUp, Monday, Zendesk, Gorgias, Notion, Zoho.
Design Tools: Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud – Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign, Canva. For iPad design: Procreate, Goodnotes.
Office Management: Microsoft Suite – Excel, Powerpoint, Word, Google Suite – Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms.
Describe a time when a campaign didn’t go as planned. What did you learn and how did you adjust?
In an above answer I mentioned a client that segments out “sale only/blow out shoppers” for full price offers. This segmentation was a solution to several cross channel campaigns that had the lowest sales conversation and engagement. The client email list contained over 1 million email subscribers and 400k SMS.
Without proper segmentation, not only were sales results extremely low, the email/SMS deliverability metrics were abysmal – increased unsubscribes, marked as spam, terrible engagement. We did a hard pivot on the campaigns before the client’s sender reputation was negatively impacted.
Immediately we created several segments beyond “sale only/blow out shoppers’, we segmented out the engaged population based on ‘recency, frequency, monetary value’ (RFM modeling).
Many new segments were created and then we mapped our copy, design and offer
specific to that audience. As a longer term tactic, we created a new “Preference Center”
in Klaviyo & Dotdigital where the customer can self identify on types of communication they want, product preferences and interests.
How do you manage deadlines and prioritize tasks in a fast-paced marketing environment?
I’m a planner, but can also pivot if needed. Most recently our internal agency & client
projects/tasks/campaigns were managed via ClickUp.
I’m ClickUp certified and build the workspace structure. From a technology perspective, I built ClickUp to streamline new client requests and automatically assign the proper team with a custom template.
The workflow created the task structure, applied timelines and sent team notifications. Additionally, for the management and client teams I built a high level dashboard that displayed the project/task timeline milestones completed and called out tasks that were behind with a “level 2” communication notification alert (send alert to slack channel, in app alerts, even text alerts).
While technology is super important, the people piece is just as important. Depending on the client size, there were team meetings, but each meeting had an agenda and a time limit. Again, depending on the client, smaller, break-out team meetings/sprint reviews, and work sessions were also scheduled using the ClickUp dashboard and data as our roadmap.
Can you explain how you’ve collaborated with cross-functional teams (e.g., sales, product, design) to achieve marketing goals?
As mentioned above, collaboration occurred across teams via virtual status/sprint meetings, starting a campaign with a clear, concise campaign brief that outlines each department/team projects, tasks and deliverables.
Finally, ClickUp streamlined a lot of the team communication and changes with usage of dashboards + personalized views for each team so they had the info specific to the success of that team. We also made sure that each team had a “living” wiki to help individuals find answers and minimize redundant emails, and one off slack chats.
How do you balance creative ideas with a data-driven approach in your campaigns?
While data played a huge role in my campaign development, understanding the client/product brand voice informed the creative piece. The content had to resonate with the shopper but also needed to speak to who/what the client valued and how they communicated their story overall.
We are seeking a dynamic and results-driven Marketing Specialist to join our team. The ideal candidate will be responsible for developing, implementing, and managing marketing strategies that drive brand awareness, engage our target audience, and support business growth. This role requires a creative and analytical professional who can balance innovative ideas with data-driven insights to achieve measurable outcomes.