Emily Popson is the Vice President of Growth Marketing at CallRail, where she leads demand generation, website optimization, customer marketing, and content marketing teams. Having previously been a small business owner herself, Popson is keen about making modern marketing analytics tools accessible to even the smallest teams and corporations.
Are you able to share more about your skilled journey and the way your experiences led you to your current role as Vice President of Growth Marketing at CallRail?
During the last 15 years, my skilled journey has been primarily focused on working with SaaS corporations with a concentrate on all elements of growth marketing – from demand generation to customer marketing, conversion rate optimization to graphic design and more.
Most of my experience has been within the marketing technology space (serving small and medium-sized businesses, hospitality, and nonprofits) and in roles within the virtualized IT backup and monitoring software industries.
While this past profession experience has largely shaped the skilled I’m today, my passion is actually what led me to CallRail. As someone who built and ran their very own small business, I saw a singular opportunity with CallRail to take the expertise I’d built working in growth marketing and B2B revenue leadership and use it to assist support small business owners. I understand the challenges that small business owners face and it brings me joy that I’m in a position to help our customers market and grow their businesses with confidence by connecting them with purpose-built solutions.
Because the Vice President of Growth Marketing, what are your primary responsibilities and goals? How do you approach driving revenue growth and demand generation?
I oversee our robust growth marketing team with the functions comprising this team including: Content & Copy, Website Strategy & Production, Demand Generation, and Customer Marketing. Together, we’re accountable for driving revenue growth for the business. We do that by attracting, acquiring, educating, converting, and expanding current and future customers along every stage of their journey. One among my biggest responsibilities is equipping these teams to leverage the art and the science of every functional area to maximise revenue impact on the business.
While our growth marketing team works together as a unit, each function also has its own unique set of goals that help contribute toward our collective goal of driving growth for the business. These include:
- Content & Copy: Efficient and impactful content production for each stage of the customer’s journey, increased strategic use of AI to enhance efficiency and impact, content influence on latest revenue generation.
- Website Strategy & Production: Enhancing site experience, web optimization performance, and increasing conversion rate from latest user to free trial.
- Demand Generation: Increased category and brand awareness, demand capture via free trial volume generated monthly, quality trial generation as measured by conversion rate from trials to customers, increasing customer mix from strategic verticals of focus, marketing acquisition cost (MAC) efficiency, achieving monthly targets for brand new MRR.
- Customer Marketing: Driving customer engagement, customer product usage and adoption, collecting and utilizing the voice of the shopper across the business, driving free trials for add on products, achieving cross-sell and upsell latest revenue targets monthly.
I approach revenue growth and demand generation by taking a unified approach to our marketing efforts. While our team has different functions with different sets of goals and responsibilities, each of those goals feed into each other to assist drive us toward our growth goal.
How have you ever seen the marketing industry evolve during your profession, particularly by way of growth marketing and demand generation?
Reflecting on what the industry looked like once I began my profession in comparison with what it has transformed into today, I’d say the largest change the marketing landscape has experienced is the emergence of so many latest possibilities—from latest channels and tactics to how we approach segmentation and targeting.
It’s exciting to see this evolution unravel. The space has seen an emergence in things like Connected TV marketing (CTV), which delivers video ads to viewers via a streaming service once they’re watching content, and the rise of influencers, which have modified the approach marketers are taking to get their message on the market.
The way in which the industry engages with customers is so different from what it once was. Now, it’s easier than ever to interact with customers directly – from inside your product to social media – and this kind of direct engagement has been a game changer for voice of customer (VOC) collection. Marketers can engage with their customers instantaneously and this more real-time engagement is driving more seamless VOC, which allows marketers to get feedback on their messaging, services or products – should customers have a difficulty, this enables marketers to deal with things quickly and efficiently.
In a world increasingly driven by data, the marketing industry is not any stranger to the ability that comes from data and the AI explosion. With increased data availability, marketers are equipped with latest personalization capabilities – allowing them to take extremely personalized approaches for goal audiences and existing customers. In terms of AI, the industry is using the tech to rework how we approach all the pieces from web optimization to content creation and duplicate writing to buyer’s journey insights and website conversion optimization to UX research and behavior evaluation.
While this evolution has generally been a positive one, the industry can be experiencing plenty of noise. With what looks like limitless latest technologies popping up, there’s this “shiny object syndrome” that may creep in and really distract from great marketing. While each industry at all times desires to be an early adopter of those emerging technologies, now greater than ever marketers need to make sure they’ve the tools and processes in place to maintain true to their objectives. Marketers should have a transparent mission and trust that in the event that they have the suitable tools, processes, people, and data in place – they’ll be properly powered to attach their solutions with their audiences.
How is CallRail leveraging AI to reinforce its services and products? Are you able to provide examples of how AI is getting used to enhance call tracking and attribution?
At CallRail, we’ve been using AI for nearly a decade to offer small businesses with Conversation Intelligence, which unlocks insights from customer conversations to raised optimize marketing campaigns and convert more leads.
As AI continues to revolutionize industries, the technology has empowered us to unlock latest frontiers in understanding and optimizing the customer’s journey. Within the last couple of years, we’ve leveraged AI to unlock much more insights from businesses’ conversations that allow them to fuel higher marketing, higher reference to their customers, higher conversion, and overall, more business growth.
I’m particularly proud and enthusiastic about our AI-powered self-reported attribution (SRA). Whether a business asks its leads, “How did you hear about us?” or the leads offer the answers unprompted, SRA uses AI to grasp, extract, categorize, and report on the attribution insight alongside a business’ software-based attribution data.
How does combining self-reported and software-based attribution provide a more comprehensive view for marketers?
This approach is revolutionary and the subsequent frontier of attribution, I consider. Businesses not utilizing self-reported attribution alongside their software-based attribution are using dated and limited practices.
While software-based attribution, like we provide in CallRail’s Call Tracking and Form Tracking solutions, solves for platform bias and increases visibility into each online and offline touchpoints – it isn’t without its own set of limitations. Software-based attribution struggles to beat opacity attributable to dark social, word-of-mouth referrals, or human bias for convenience. It will probably also struggle to capture the influence of brand name marketing maneuvers fully. It has been notoriously difficult to measure the impact that these levers have on a business – but this previously hidden data can now be unlocked with CallRail’s self-report attribution.
Businesses can pair CallRail’s patent-pending self-report attribution data with data from their software-based attribution to eliminate blind spots and enable more confident and accurate marketing decision-making. Marketers will now not wonder what drove results in them; they’ll at all times have the opportunity to understand how their business got on each lead’s radar and what marketing converted them to ultimately reach out.
Give it some thought like this: you’re a landscaping company working with a marketing agency for a rebrand and marketing strategy overhaul. As a part of the brand new strategy, your agency designs eye-catching latest yard signs to be used while on the job. Because of this, prospective customers that notice your great work are also being attentive to your yard signs and brand. The prospects seek for your corporation and call the number in your Google Business Profile (GBP). You receive a spike in qualified leads and dozens of calls from GBP and on those calls they mention seeing your signs of their neighborhood. But you’ve only received just a few calls out of your yard sign call tracking number. Using just software-based attribution or simply self-reported attribution alone would lead you to:
- Software-based attribution: Only using this, you’d attribute this revenue increase to Google Business Profile and also you’d never understand how influential your latest branding and yard signs had been on this journey.
- Self-reported attribution: Using this method alone, you’d attribute the revenue to the yard signs. You’d lack insight into the role and importance of a well-maintained GBP.
By only having data from one or the opposite available, a business may make strategy or investment decisions based on limited insight. Together, the software-based and self-reported insights give a clearer understanding of the customer’s journey, providing visibility into the influence these “invisible” aspects can have.
This approach helps to bridge the gap between traditional attribution methods and AI-driven insights. Self-reported attribution empowers marketers to make much more informed decisions and confidently navigate the complexities of today’s marketing landscape.
What emerging trends do you see in AI and marketing technology, and the way is CallRail positioning itself to remain ahead on this space?
Because the space gets noisier and more crowded, we are going to proceed to see strong user demands and preferences for purposeful AI solutions. This appetite will further catapult CallRail ahead.
CallRail is leading the charge here with our explicit commitment to developing solutions that solve real problems for businesses and doing so in accessible ways. We also work with the most effective partners within the space and leverage the most effective models available for the needs of the companies we serve.
The marketing technology landscape has experienced many seasons of pleasure around latest capabilities which, within the short term, resulted in a boom of jumbled martech stacks stuffed with disparate vendors, followed by platforms that consolidate capabilities for easier and less expensive access. CallRail is targeted on serving our market in as some ways as we’re in a position to do best in a single platform.
With AI, much like any marketing technology, value will come from the user’s ability to leverage AI output – be it data, insights, actions – more broadly. CallRail’s wealthy ecosystem of strategic tech partnerships will proceed to permit businesses to leverage the information, insights and actions we offer across their tech stack.
How do CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence® and Convert Assist products use AI to offer deeper insights into customer interactions and help businesses optimize their marketing efforts?
Our suite of AI solutions allows businesses to investigate conversations for deeper insights into leads and customers in order that they can attract, convert, and optimize with confidence.At a look, our solutions provide insights that help businesses attract more leads, like attribution insights and keyword spotting to tell their channel mix, marketing investments, and content strategy.
We also provide the insights businesses have to convert more of those leads into customers. To discover qualities of a conversation, and robotically qualify, rating, tag, or assign a worth to their leads. One other capability, call coaching, allows businesses to robotically coach their teams on the way to improve each conversation – providing real-time improvements to assist your corporation run seamlessly. Our offerings also allow businesses to create AI-generated motion plans and follow up messages in order that despite how busy their teams are, they’re in a position to consistently keep leads engaged and moving forward.
CallRail’s AI capabilities, like our multi-conversation insight, reports help marketers optimize their business. By aggregating insights across all calls from a selected channel, businesses not only can discover opportunities for where they’ll optimize their marketing, but additionally help to pinpoint any messaging confusion, spot commonly asked questions and average sentiment. For businesses investing in marketing, these insights help to maximise spend while also providing optimal return on investment faster.
In what ways do you think that CallRail’s AI capabilities give it a competitive advantage available in the market?
CallRail has been using AI to assist businesses solve problems and grow confidently since 2016. We’re not latest to this, so while other corporations are working to resolve the initial AI pain points, we have already got the partners, people, and processes in place.
Constructing an AI strategy generally is a difficult process – especially for those starting out whose focus is on attempting to work out how and where AI will fit into their solutions. We have already got this strategy in place and for us, our focus is on keeping closely aligned to the clearly defined “AI North Star” that we use to guide us.
We do that by testing, iterating, and collecting feedback. This is finished formally through our CallRail Labs program. In only one yr, CallRail Labs has released 12 features, helping to bring intentional AI-powered products to our customers.
CallRail’s solutions are designed with purpose in mind—they solve real-world problems without creating latest ones for our customers. A key differentiator of our solutions is the pairing of AI insights alongside wealthy attribution—our self-reported attribution is patent-pending, and our multi-conversation insights reports are the primary of their kind, aggregated AI insights for quicker motion.
By harnessing our deep expertise in attribution, conversation intelligence, and the SMB market – paired with our wealthy and broad partner ecosystem – our solutions power confident marketing and enable growth for the companies we serve.
What advice would you give to marketers trying to integrate AI into their strategies?
My biggest piece of recommendation is to be daring in testing and intentional in implementation. Spend the time to essentially take into consideration how you need to use AI to create space, capability, and opportunity and test, test, test.
Take tasks like content and duplicate, for instance—use AI to jump-start content and duplicate, and use it to create different versions of your copy which are specialized for every of your channels.
For marketers who don’t have the time for deep exploration or evaluation, AI can allow you to to quickly uncover data-driven insights, empowering you to take motion faster. For those kicking the can down the road on their web optimization strategy, a conversation intelligence product can surface common topics utilized by your leads and customers; these may be great starting points for web optimization content production. These same AI-surfaced insights can allow you to spot opportunities for brand new marketing ideas and even latest service offerings.
Don’t have the time to be QAing sales and repair calls? Conversational AI like CallRail’s Convert Assist can provide positive and important feedback in your behalf after every call, helping keep your corporation running, improving and growing.
In case your marketing is actually beginning to perform, but bandwidth is proscribed on the sales and repair side, use AI to create efficiencies of their work flows. Convert Assist also can write follow-up messages for team members following every conversation ensuring every lead you generate receives an amazing experience and the most effective probability to convert.
What are your future goals for CallRail and its growth marketing initiatives in the subsequent few years?
Looking ahead, there are just a few growth marketing initiatives we’re tracking towards. Top of mind for me straight away are expansion of strategic influencer deployment and impact in key verticals and evolving our site and in-app experience optimization efforts.
Additional core focuses for us over the subsequent few years include:
- Prioritizing ongoing rapid experimentation: Growth marketing impacts not only latest user growth, but additionally growth through our existing users, and protecting our growth by stopping churn. Using latest tools – especially those powered by AI – to raised understand user behavior and discover opportunities for revenue driving or churn reducing optimizations will likely be a priority team wide.
- Protecting and expanding web optimization: Amidst landscape changes – from AI Overviews to insights from the Google leak – maintaining web optimization strength and advantage is critical. We’ll achieve this via strategic adjustments, AI assistance and ongoing investments.
That is only a glimpse into what lay ahead. Our growth marketing team will repeatedly concentrate on the assessment and evolvement of our attribution practices. As seriously as we take our attribution products that we offer our customers, we also walk the walk internally. By paying significant attention to our buyer’s journey, we’ll use our own insights to maintain pace with their preferences – we understand that this journey is ever-evolving alongside the evolving marketing landscape.
