Hello $Firstname, with Rasmus Houlind

Hello $Firstname, with Rasmus Houlind

Episode 180

 ‘1 to 1 Marketing,’  sounds wonderful. Don Peppers & Martha Rogers wrote a series of books in the 1990s called this. We have thrown all kinds of technology, content, and persona construction at it over the last 25 years. But it still eludes us. Architecting communications that converses with each person, at their own point in a conversation with our brand is hard.  Is it marketing’s job to actually have 1:1 conversations? And with  what’s at stake if we  screw up personalization, can we implement or maintain it without losing our jobs?  

Today’s guest is here to help answer that. 

Since getting his M.A. in Information Studies from Aarhus University, our guest has lived at the intersection of data and communications.

Since 2020 he has been the Chief Experience Officer at Agillic, an omnichannel marketing software, where he works primarily with large companies involved in omnichannel marketing, customer experience management, and customer lifecycle projects. 

He’s on a mission to ensure that the end user gets consistent, timely and relevant communications across channels – be it web, email, app, text, social – or even in-store. He often presents keynotes on Omnichannel Personalization and sits on the jury for that at the Danish eCommerce Awards.

His first book, written  together with Colin Shearer, was a bestseller on Omnichannel Marketing. We’re talking with him about his book “Hello $Firstname,” which came out in 2023. Joining me from Copenhagen, let’s welcome Rasmus Houlind.

Chapters & Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

2:30 – Book’s Main Theme 

37:48 – Public Service Announcement

38:41 – Quantifying the value of Personalization

1:00:25 – Rasmus Contact details

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Rasmus on LinkedIn

Rasmus works at Agillic

Book has versions available for North America & Nordics

Bowtie framework
Bowtie framework

Plato’s theory of forms (here is a YouTube video on it)

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Example in book used the Financial Times

Episode Reboot

Download a free abstract of the book

Privacy & data governance, with Siobhan Solberg

Privacy & data governance

Episode 178

If you go to Wikipedia and type Zero-sum game, it’ll describe it as “a situation that involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one’s gain is equivalent to player two’s loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero”

Many think that’s how privacy regulations are affecting marketing. Anytime client privacy is upheld it’s at our expense. We’re losing; they’re winning. Zero-sum game.

Siobhan Solberg disagrees.  She says you can effectively market to your client in a way that does right by them and is privacy-compliant. 

She calls herself a protector of privacy, while also being a marketing consultant, the founder of a marketing agency. She has over a decade in the measurement space, having created CXL’s course on personalization. She’s also been a speaker at conferences like Superweek and The Copywriter Club. She also writes on privacy and marketing on her blog and is host of a podcast whose name is spelled out in the shownotes but which I’ll call Marketing Unf*d.

She is currently enrolled in the Master of Laws program for Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Data Management at Maastricht University. 

When she’s not not pushing these boundaries, Siobhan loves to get outside and test her physical limits

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Siobhan’s agency is Raze

Siobhan’s podcast, Marketing Unfucked

She writes on privacy and marketing on her blog, siobhansolberg.com

Chapters & Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

0:46 – About Siobhan 

2:11 – What marketers should know about Privacy

20:56 – PSA

21:53 – Privacy across the organization

39:59 – Siobhan’s contact details

Bye KPI. Hello, full-funnel dashboard, with Jacob Varghese

Episode 177: Bye KPI. Hello, full-funnel dashboard, with Jacob Varghese

Episode 177

Today’s talk is with a technology vendor, as a Disclaimer, please note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. They’re simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.

Today we’re going to talk about leveling up beyond KPIs to data that visualizes our full-funnel.

Comedian George Carlin knew how complicated things get with marketing technology. Or, you can imagine that when you hear him talk about stuff. This is the feeling we can get watching our Marketing technology evolve before our eyes. As our  software tools grow, so does the complexity. We’re beyond the point of logging into each of them to see individual KPIs. They have just become too specialized, and now we need meta-tools, crafted solely to connect with the specialized marketing systems, to extract and roll up streamlined data that we can analyze or see on a dashboard.

It’s against this backdrop that I invited today’s guest. 

Jacob Varghese hails from India, having graduated with a BA from University of Mumbai. Since moving to Canada in the 1990s, he’s focused on building marketing machines and crafting go-to-market strategies that yield repeatable, predictable, and scalable revenue. 

Following experiences as a senior executive at numerous  B2B SaaS outfits, he’s now the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at AgencyAnalytics.  His passion for augmenting marketing and sales through data and automation comes through in the insights he shares on his blog.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Jacob on Twitter

Jacob is with AgencyAnalytics

Scott Brinker

Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

03:09 – Background on Jacob

09:33 – Getting to useful dashboards

26:14 – PSA

27:08 – Presenting data as a story

46:46 – Get in touch with Jacob

Visualizations that inspire action, with Lee Feinberg

Visualizations that inspire action, with Lee Feinberg

Episode 176

If your job involves numbers, you likely spend time graphically plotting it.  Whether it’s for analyzing or presenting, we usually toss our datasets into our visualization tool (mainly because it takes one button click) and start visualizing it. The problem here is that we’re making content before knowing our intent, we’re making the software master over us instead of being its master. 

Today’s guest says the visualizations that come from this won’t be intelligible, won’t make them motivated to act and won’t yield good decisions. However, he does passionately believe that when people who know how to read numbers, see it presented the right way, it’ll motivate them to make the right decisions. 

Lee Feinberg graduated from Cornell University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. In 2012 founded a consultancy to help data leaders create armies of trustworthy decision makers.  He has worked in the analytics and data visualization fields for 20 years.

He is associated with Data Science programs at both NYU and the University of Chicago. When he’s not talking about visualization, Lee likes experiencing concerts – from the front row,  and also hanging out with his wife and kids.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Lee’s Website : https://www.DecisionViz.com 

Lee Feinberg – DecisionViz | LinkedIn

Edward Tufte

TV Show Shark Tank

Chapters:

0:00 – Intro
02:13 – What we’re doing wrong
33:46 – Lee’s framework
58:25 – Where to find Lee and visualization resources

Must-Reads for business in an all-digital world

Must-reads for business in an all-digital world

Episode 175

There were a lot of books  covered on the podcast in 2023 – 44% of this year’s shows were with book authors. Combined with previous years’ book episodes, we have reached the 60-book mark on this podcast – you can sift through them all on our site by clicking on the “books” category on the right-hand menu. 

But I’ve had the chance to read books outside of these, and found even more I’d like to feature. I’m not saying all all biz books that come out are good.  To be honest – a decent portion of them are aren’t good at all. But since I set out once per year to make a special show, I felt it time to review some of the business books that shouldn’t slip by unnoticed. 

After you hear brief reviews of these 6 books, you’ll hopefully put one or two on your To-be-read pile.

Shownotes:

Friction, by Soon Yu 

“Sell The Way You Buy” by David Priemer

Impromptu :: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI

The Attention Merchants, by Tim Wu

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur by John Jantsch 

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

Chapters:

0:00 – Intro

02:08 – Friction, Soon Yu

08:40 – Sell the Way you Buy, David Priemer

17:12 – Impromptu, Reid Hoffman

24:52 – The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu

30:40 – The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur, John Jantsch

35:30 – The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman

A few of the titles reviewed in this episode