38. How to Choose the Right Marketing Tools with Irit Levi

Although she has tested 978, if I'm not wrong, uh, tools, She's about scalability, not the software. And she believes technology is just a tool for us. Welcome Irit. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited. Oh yeah, me too. Well, I mean, if you're excited as a, you know, person who knows this type of, uh, video platforms and so on, then, you know, I feel, uh, feel quite important.

And then when a meeting is coming up, the lights will flicker and slack will turn to do not disturb. Do you need that? I don't know if you need that. So there's so many things that you can start automation with. It really depends on what process you want to automate, what steps you're repeating, what you need to automate. And I don't know that until I know your process.

We can automate sending proposals and sending contracts and NDAs and follow up emails and so many things in, from that moment that you collect the email that the person reaches out to you until the moment you onboard them, there are so many steps that you go through that you can delegate to a tool. If you don't have a full pipeline or if you're, I say marketing slash sales is very simple and short, then you may want to automate your customer journey.

I usually tell smaller businesses to start with automating that. Because that's going to make their life easier and help them focus more and not give their client the best experience. But again, it depends on what process it is that you want to automate. I think the sales pipeline is the easiest thing to automate because there's so many automation potential points.

And then the question is what is the customer journey that you want to put your Potential leads or clients through, right? And if it's a once a week newsletter, once a month newsletter, let's just create a template and do it. I'm not going to say the M word, like you use human interaction. Try to do it. Like, I can't say manual. I can't think, okay. I can't say, I can't say it. Um, just so people know what it is, but that's it. No, no more.

Yeah, so you can do a weekly or a monthly one simply by having a template. A template is a type of semi automation, I guess, because then you're just plugging and playing in variables. But if you want to nurture your clients, or if you're doing a marketing of a product, a service, or something big, you want to have a flow. What happens if they do this? What happens if they do that?

And I'm not gonna, For C questions that you're probably going to ask about, but there's so many questions that you have to ask in order to put in place a sequence of marketing automation, let's call it. And then what happens if they buy? And what happens if they're just interested? And do you send like a nurture email? Do you send an abandoned cart email? There's so many questions that you have to answer. The more complex your campaign. The more complex your automation is going to be.

What are we going to communicate there? And so on. Those are so many other questions that you'd have to, um, get ready. But, uh, how about the email lists? Uh, how can you build that? Because probably you have like a sales pipeline or you have some people that connected to you through the website. How can we start building that list? If. We haven't built a list yet.

That's the simplest solution, not necessarily one I recommend, but doable and free just so people can send me your email and I'll add you to my list. Terrible process, but doable. Want to take it one step further? Have a form. We're not going into tools yet of marketing, email marketing tools, just regular to collect the list. Have a form. It could be a Google form. It could be, it could be an air table form, have them fill out the form with their email and their name and possibly a question.

to segment them. But again, you have to recognize the more questions you ask, the more friction points you're going to get, you know, the more potential signups you're going to lose because people don't want friction points. They want to make it as simple as possible.

The reason I set a form and not a website form is because that kind of form, if you're giving the lecture, if you're, even if you're giving a face to face lecture, And you want to have people write down the emails, having a form to put it in just makes it easier for you later. And that form is automatically connected to a Google form would be connected to a Google spreadsheet and an air table forward to an air table database table. There's no integration. It's just like a simple form.

It's not being pushed anywhere. It's just, you're collecting the emails for now. And when you're just starting out and you don't know what tool you want to use, you don't know what emails you want to send out. You just want to collect people who are interested. What we need to recognize though, is that emails have value. So if people are going to give you their email, they need to feel that a, you're not going to abuse it and be that they're going to get something in return.

Now, it doesn't have to be something big. You don't have to give them a lead magnet. We're not even there yet. We're not in that automated space yet. We're just talking about collecting the emails right now. But when you tell someone, give me your email, I'll add you to my list. I'm not sending anything yet, but I will. Okay. They have to really trust you and know that you're going to give them value and that you're not going to abuse their email.

And I think level of trust you build with relationships. So if you go on social media and you say, sign up to my email list, here's a form, you don't have to have a website. If you do have a website, have a form at the bottom of the website. And here I wouldn't use a Google form or an air table form. I would use. A form from the platform that your website is built on. So if it's WordPress, WordPress form or Gravity form or whatever form you're using.

And then you need to decide where am I pushing this email to? Because WordPress will collect it. Webflow will collect it wherever it is in their backend, but then you can using the third party tool, push it to somewhere else. Push it to your email marketing tool, push it to your CRM.

The one thing I would not recommend people doing is if somebody reaches out to you for a sale, don't add them to your email list automatically because you haven't gotten their permission to add them to your email list. They've signed up to have a sales call with you or, you know, whatever it is that you're selling, like a demo, they haven't signed up for your email list automatically and without going into GDPR and CCPA and all the security and privacy issues that we have.

I just find it unethical because I signed up to get on a demo with you. I didn't sign up to get all of your emails unless there's a checkbox or whatever, but yeah.

Airtable is just so simple to use and embedding their form is so simple. The downside is, A, you have less control over the design. So it looks like an Airtable form. You can recognize that it's an Airtable form. Airtable doesn't let you change the submit button color or the font. The WordPress forms, and this could be any type of WordPress form. I say WordPress form, but there's Gravity Forms, there's WP Forms. They usually integrate, some integrate really well with third parties.

And they definitely sit better on the website and look better. And it gives you more design flexibility. Now, if you're doing marketing and you define the target audience of, you know, four to five years in business, you probably have a brand by now. And you want the website and the form to feel on brand. You want the customer journey to feel on brand.

So, While I love Airtable forums, and I have a few on my website, even though you may not notice it, like, people won't see them as that because my developer was just a whiz, but still, so a lot of my forums are Webflow forums because it just looks and feels on brand. So people say, Oh, I'm Orange, day by day, you eat levy. Yes, I know her.

I mean, now they are reactive to what you are doing, other than that, they are just watching your website. And that's the only area that they are interacting with your website. And if. That's not on brand, then it might, uh, trigger some questions about trust also, if it's like a very simple, not on brand, uh, form. Wow. That that's an eye opener. Thanks so much for that. Yeah.

So the form itself, it's within a white box on the page, but the rest of the page is completely on brand. So again, you're still getting that feeling that you're on my website. You're on my brand. There's still trust. The messaging is always on like the redirect, like everything.

You have to think of everything when you do something like this, especially if you're not paying for Airtable and they have an amazing free plan, if you're not paying for it, when they hit submit, it's going to show the Airtable branding, which for some businesses might be fine, but for some that might be an issue. So just something to think about.

I have a real problem with it because I was just having this conversation with my husband the other day and he was like, I have finally gotten the algorithm to give me exactly the ads that I want and to give me exactly the content that I want and to give me every, and he was so proud of it. And I was like, do you know how much big data they have about, you know, like I was scared for him from a cybersecurity perspective. And I think we have to recognize that.

Google and Amazon and Microsoft and all of these apps, they have so much information about us from meta, from wherever, right? Like from, from LinkedIn, everybody has so much information about us today. They can know everything that we like from five clicks. So if I'm buying something from sound, like if somebody's selling my information, that's scary to me because what do they know about me and how is that information being used?

And am I now being targeted with only content that the big data companies think that I need? Like, how is that changing my experience? I would never buy third party data from someone. It just feels unethical to me. And it's also why I browse using like, um, no cookies, no like, I'm very careful about where I share my information. Because I'm very scared of it.

Like there could be different purposes and based on the purpose, again, just like the process, like based on what it is you want to get, what is the ultimate outcome, like goal KPI that you want to get, that's how you choose what kind of campaign you want to send. Um, a best practice that I've read on multiple places is to have a welcome sequence of at least six emails. Is that still the best practice? I don't know.

Like I said, I'm not an email strategist, but my welcome sequence has about six emails and it's not selling anything. There's a soft sell for someone who's like looking to set up a call, but it's not, the purpose of it isn't to sell. The purpose of it is to show. Okay. Cool. Appreciation. Thank you for signing up. Here's what I'm giving you in return. And then sharing case studies and stories and telling people how I help others. And, you know, maybe they'll see themselves there.

Maybe they won't. But the idea is to sort of tell them about me and what they've signed up for and what we're all about. And it's asking for feedback and I give them one of So this is where I get complex and have to show off because this is I mean, if I don't do it in my welcome sequence, who's going to do it? The second email is already asking them, choose your path. Like I'm asking them what they are interested in. This helps, A, with segmentation.

But B, the emails that they get following that, Change based on whatever it is they select. So that's the idea. It's a complex sequence. It's not a simple sequence and it interacts with my website. Not everybody needs that. You may just need a, hi, I do marketing, you know, this is what you can expect from my emails. And then email number two is saying, here's the story of how I helped a client. And then email number three is here's how I can help you. That could be, you know, a sequence.

What's going to come next and then if you don't show up then probably you're going to, they're going to come with like a discount or so on and so on. And then from there it goes, the relationship continues. But I'm going to close the loop on the email marketing and we move on to another topic. But what do you think about email marketing platforms?

Because once we have the list and once we decide the scenarios and what type of an email that we want to share, then you have to interact with the email marketing platform, which is, I'd like to get your thoughts on. So

So I love active campaign. Two months ago, I put in a very complex sequence and it didn't keep up. It totally screwed my launch, but it's not their fault. A hundred percent. So now I'm like, I don't know, but I would stay away from the, the free tools, the ones that have really great, seemingly great free tiers, MailChimp, MailerLite, SystemIO, it's like, oh, you get 2, 000 contacts for free, even HubSpot, you get 2, 000 contacts for free, right?

And, and, You use those 2000 contacts, but they're giving you very simplistic, if any workflows and automations, like you can maybe send two emails, one after the other, usually it's just one off emails. So you can't do any advanced sequencing for sure. And then when you upgrade, what you're getting for your money is a lot less than you would be getting an active campaign. Um, I researched, I think six. Eight or maybe 10, I don't remember, this is a while ago. Tools, like different email tools.

And I put in a scenario, I was like, okay, I wanna create a signup page where people can sign up a form that they fill out, they get an email and then something else happens. I don't remember what it was. And with all of these tools, like I tried get Response and I tried, um, ConvertKit and. With all of these tools, by far, ActiveCampaign gave me the easiest sequencing, the easiest email builder, and the easiest way to see where a given contact was at any stage of any sequence.

And people don't recognize the value of that. So we get hyped by, I get 2, 000 free contacts! Yeah, but what else do you get? And then, how soon, you're gonna probably have to upgrade when you have like, 200. And then, and then it's going to cost you a lot and you're not going to really get what you really want unless you get a really high up tier. So we have to think ahead when we choose the right tool.

Um, is it like, since you have, you are working with so many softwares, if you have a proper business, is it the way to have a subscribed plan rather than a free plan? Uh, if you are using like, let's say in your, for your business, you are using 10 tools, then what would be the approach? Is there anything, a general approach, let's say? My general

For me, when I see an email from a business that I consider serious, and I see that logo on the bottom and I realize that they're using the free version of MailChimp, that's harming the business. That's like using a Gmail address as opposed to a professional address like in your email. So if you're using a freemium tool. And people don't know it. Like if I'm using Airtable on the freemium plan and nobody knows it, then great.

But if I'm putting a form up and at the end I have the Airtable branding and that's hurting my branding. Maybe I need to upgrade. Use freemium as much as you can. Listen, we spend so much money on tools. If you, you know, you're spending 10 here and 20 there and 30 there and it adds up. But at the end of the month, you're like, Oh, I spent 350 on tools. Where did that go? And 350 seems like nothing, but depending on how many team members you have, it could get up also to 3, 000, right?

Like every tool you pay for seat, you pay for license, use free tools when you can, but when you're choosing the tool, If you decide to go with the free tool, don't just look at what you're getting at the free tier. Look at how much it's going to cost you to upgrade per seat and for modular tools per module. I could explain this more. For example, ClickUp, which is far from my favorite tool, gives you custom fields.

You're very limited and all of a sudden after you, I think it's like a thousand custom fields, but it's not really, it's a thousand fields, custom fields or something like this. This is the last time I tested, which was years ago, but like very soon after you have like a hundred records, all of a sudden you have to upgrade, but I'm not ready to upgrade yet. Right. And whereas with air table, you get unlimited custom fields because it's like a spreadsheet, right?

So if I can use that, I'll use that. When you look at a tool that you're going to use, look at the pricing, but look at the features list. And see, you know, everyone has those tables and they have a checkbox, what you get and what you don't get. That's my first stop for any software that I look at, because I want to see. What is the difference between the paid tier and the free tier? What am I not getting on the free tier?

And then if I say, okay, I'm going to need that for, you know, very soon. Okay. What's the cost and is it perceived? And can I have like one person on a free tier and one person on a page? I don't know, like different combinations, because if I have a team of five and I'm paying 20 per seat, well, there's a hundred dollars before you've even blinked. So

And the second is what are the steps that it's going to go through to achieve it? So that's process. And the third P, which I think is the most important P is people. Who are the people that are going to be using it? Because if it's just you, then it's your personal preference. But if it's a big team that can affect, you know, what tool you choose again, like pricing and other things. So that's stage number one, stage number two is looking at industry specific needs.

If you're in healthcare in the United States, your tool, all your tools need to be HIPAA compliant. If you're like a law firm, you may have other industry standards that you order construction. Like there may be industry standards. So that's going to limit the tools that you can use. Um, budget constraints, which we talked about, you know, how much is it going to cost me? How much is it going to cost me per user as a company in general per month, per year and team preferences.

So if we talked about people, if your team likes colorful things and they like things popping out and jumping at them. Monday may be a great project management tool because it's very colorful. If your team hates that they need monochromatic, you know, they just want very gray scale, they want it looking like Excel, that's not going to be a good tool for them. And like I said before, future growth plans, where are you going with this? If you know that you're going to have.

Hundreds and hundreds of sales, like leads in your pipeline, you need a strong tool. So maybe then HubSpot or Salesforce is the right tool for you. But if you know that you're going to grow, but you're not going to grow beyond, you know, maybe a hundred or 200 per year, then you can stay with smaller Sierra, just as an example. Right. So what are your future growth plans? That's the last thing. Oh, wait, I didn't answer your question because you mentioned, do we test them out?

So once you select that tool, have a scenario in your mind. Like I said, with the email tools that I tested, this is a scenario that my business goes through step one, step two, step three, choose the top three leading that you like, that your team likes that answer all the questions that we mentioned and implement that scenario, the same scenario in all three tools. And see which one is easiest to implement, easiest to use, easiest that your team likes. If you need, get on a call.

With a demo with the company after you've tried it, because then you have questions and then you see what's their support. Like, are they, are they attuned to your questions? Are there things that they're missing that you simply don't know about? Are there things that, that they can teach you or things that you're missing? But yeah, we're not going there. We're not going to be developing that. So, you know, again, how attuned are they?

I've been on calls with companies that are like, that's a great idea. And then two weeks later, I got an email saying, Oh, our development team is implementing it. I want to work with companies like that, that they're listening to their customers.

Give the email marketing automation to an agency rather than doing it on my own as an internal. I know that there is no one right answer for every business. I mean, like I can select that route also so that the email marketing company uses whatever software they want to use then, uh, which sounds a little bit interesting and easy for me also. Easy,

of your tools, of your lists, of your processes, of your automations. So handing it over to an agency, it depends on the agency and it depends on how you work with them. I do tool implementation for a living. I mean, I do process definition and then tools. So. Yes, hire someone like me, not me, if I hire someone else, I can recommend 10 people just now without blinking an eye that do what I do that are amazing at what they do. And they may be a good fit for anyone.

But the one thing that I would note that I would mention when you're looking for to hire, just like with a tool, when you're hiring a person, be sure that it's the right fit. Be sure that they're using the tool that's right for you and your business and not that's easy for them and their business. If you hire someone to do your project management. And they love ClickUp. They're only using ClickUp. Great. But that doesn't mean it's right for you. That's easy for them.

If you hire an email marketing tool and they love, get response just to whatever. They love that tool. Why? Because they've implemented for a million people or convert kit. They've implemented it for a million people. That doesn't mean it's the right tool for you. And the problem with going with a tool that's right for them is. Even if they're there to hold your hand while implementing, as you grow, who says that you're going to want to continue working with them?

So you're tying your future to them or to the tool and it's not based on your needs. It's based on theirs. So yes, hire out. Yes, delegate. Yes, find someone, find an agency, find whatever that can manage it for you. But, Make sure that it's using the tools that are right for your business. And if I may, I have a very short story about this. I had a client who was looking to delegate her marketing to an agency.

And she found someone, she was in the healthcare industry for a specific segment, and she found someone that focuses on marketing in that specific segment, and it was perfect. Seemingly they started to create content. The minute she signed with them and gave them the first deposit without even meeting with her and asking her what her goals were, which she wanted to get out of the marking, like it was like a three month trial.

By the time we got around to making that first meeting, like getting on that first onboarding meeting, they had created tons of content that was not on brand or not in the On focus for what she wanted them for. The presentation was very, very generic. It wasn't specific to her and their email marketing was done through their tool only. Now she had a huge list. Inactive campaign, by the way, which was serving her great.

So now they wanted everybody to be moved to theirs and all new contacts to be pushed to theirs. But then what happens if she decides that they're not right for her now? What happens to her contacts? And we don't know, you know, the data, the statistics, we didn't know anything after three months, we realized, well, sooner, but like after three months, it wasn't. Right. And she, she stopped.

And so when we went through it, part of the reason I was involved was because I made that connection between her tool and their tool, because they insisted only on that tool. So we wanted the data to be synced so that she doesn't lose it. If she decides not to work with them. Which she ended up not doing.

I once had an issue with, uh, we were managing the social media of a client and we were taking over and they ended up with working with another, uh, social media agency long before, and they didn't, they stopped doing social media. And then we couldn't access. And so it was like a medium sized company. We couldn't access the company, uh, accounts on Instagram and we didn't know what to do. And then the, the founder was like, maybe it's the ex marketing manager that we hired has the data.

You know, it was a very long process. process and we had to spend, I think, three months to get their from the platforms, which is like, you know, we couldn't, even though we have a sign, a contract in place, we couldn't start. And I said, I mean, to the founder, you have to be the owner of this, not even the marketing manager, because. You know, at the end of the day, the marketing manager can leave one day and then get all the data with them.

Uh, another question would be about the tools is that most marketing automation tools or most business automation tools, they offer a wide range of automation features, which is like, okay, we think that MailChimp is a, a good tool. email marketing platform now, but they are also offering like landing page, they're offering CRM and so on. I feel like it's, it should be the best if you can get like, uh, more features out of the same platform.

It sounds to me the right solution, but what's your take here? Yeah.

But if I have something that's persistent, they're going to send me to a specialist. Same thing with tools. If you go to an all in one tool, or you use the expanded features in a tool, as long as it's serving you at that level, it could be fine. But it's never going to get to the same level as a specialized tool. So you said landing pages. Four years ago, I was using Unbounce.

I'm not up to date or up to speed on what the best landing pages tools are today, because I haven't researched it in a while. But at the time, Unbounce was phenomenal. It was giving us specifications and targeting and swapping out images. And now again, today, that's nothing. But at the time, that was relatively new. Using something like that versus using a landing page on Mailchimp.

You're not going to get the same success rate and not going to get the same ease of building the tool and complexity of segmenting visitors and doing all these things. An all in one tool is never going to be as good as a specialized tool because they're always going to be catching up because they have the entire tool to look at, not just one specific section. Whereas a specified tool is like, you know, that's the ear, nose, throat doctor. And they're specializing in just that.

So they know a lot more about ear, nose, throat than my generalist doctor.

So for the first year they get their clients 90 percent discount. Which is phenomenal because like I said, HubSpot is very expensive, but then what happens in year two? So if you're using HubSpot, absolutely. It could be the right tool for you. Just again, it's ROI, right? So it's my return on investment. If I'm investing time in implementing it and it takes time to implement it and they have the power, yes, it could be the right tool for you.

I'm not saying it's not, but again, you need to be a very big company in my mind to justify it. And just for the record. Every time I get an email from HubSpot Marketing, I have to re enter my email to download another booklet. So something in their tool isn't working properly because My tool gives the option that if you've clicked from within my email, it already knows that I've downloaded it without me having to input my email again.

So just saying HubSpot may have that capability, but they're not using it in their own email marketing. So just something to think about.

I can justify HubSpot for big companies, for smaller ones. I find it very hard to justify their structure and their pricing model and everything about it.

And so it's more affordable for everyone. And I'm really happy with them. So that's number one on my list. And I think it's easier to use and to learn than make. Number two, that constantly comes up and we've mentioned it in this podcast, as well as Airtable. It is not for big companies looking to do complex things necessarily. It can do complex things and it is a great, I'll call it a helper tool.

If you could use it in between to do a lot of data manipulation, it is a great data management tool. You can use it as a CRM for smaller companies. You can use it as, um, a project management for smaller companies. It requires more setup, but it's amazing. And they're free tier is just phenomenal. And they, Constantly improve their interfaces so you can do a lot with it. It gets expensive after five users, so you need like another layer on top of it, but not going into that.

The third tool may surprise you. It's actually the Google Suite. I am lost without my Google Calendar. I live in my Google Calendar. My scheduling goes into my Google calendar. Um, like people that fill out forms, I get go into my email, Gmail, Google Calendar, my Google Docs, um, the Google Drive, like the entire Google environment. I know it's a big fish and it's not like, maybe not politically correct or trendy to like one of those big corporations. I think they're doing an amazing job.

Their freemium software truly does help small to medium sized businesses. Um, big businesses can, you know, if they have the enterprise level and the workspace and a lot of stuff that can go even further, it integrates so well with other tools, it plays so nicely with everyone else and for me playing nicely with other tools is what it's all about.

It is a phenomenal tool. I'm trying to think I use only cloud based tools because I could pick up, give me a new laptop. I can start working right away. And one tool that every business should have is a password vault. You were talking about ownership before. If you have a password vault, the password vault is the owner. You're using the owner's email so that they can, you know, if they're locked out or whatever. But the password vault has control, the company owns the password vault.

You have access. Um, I can't say the right tool for invoicing or payment processing because it depends on so many other factors.

Um, they integrate with, you know, LinkedIn and or Gmail and or whatever other tools that you're using so it has benefits. Um, I am pro video in any way, shape or form. I do a lot of my client interactions with video. My email strategist sends me the monthly email sequence with a document and a video. Video is a great tool instead of meetings today. Definitely people should be using it more.

And I live in a war zone right now. So for me, it's all about conversations. And you know, one of my closest friends in business is someone who theoretically on paper, we should not be friends. And we are because The values that we share are more important than the values that we disagree on. And so talking about how to build a society that respects each other, for me, that's where it's at.

one single thing to do after I leave Nike, I'm just going to go and work at a library or a bookstore. I mean, how complicated can it be? I mean, like, I'm just, I just can sit there and guide people. So that was, yeah. And do you have on the non war times, let's say, what's your favorite coffee place to go? Is there any place that you go for coffee? Coffee or tea, uh, that you love to go in your city. So it's

And just so much love is in there and it's just the best coffee in the world.