Summary

We interviewed Jackie Cobb, Director of Marketing and Gabrielle Lambert, Director of Finance and Operations at Epoxy TV in their Venice Beach, CA office to learn about how they do their job and where KISSmetrics and other tools fit into their workflow, processes, and organization.

Key Findings:

• Marketers need help prioritizing what they should do or pay attention to
• Marketers determine what’s important based on what they see in emails as tasks
• Marketers create a weekly report on funnel from email campaigns to sign up/activation and retention from logins to feature usage. This report goes out to the whole company. A weekly retention report goes out to a few executives. Everything else is ad hoc.
• Epoxy marketers do not follow a formal process except for weekly reporting.
• Marketers need tools to help them do more without development resources like tracking events/properties or cleaning up data. Lack of development resources and incorrect setup prevent marketers from using one tool to measure marketing performance and app usage together.

How the 2015 Product Vision Fits in with Epoxy’s Needs

With the launch of the 2015 product vision, we wanted to know if the product vision’s key points fit Jackie and Gabrielle’s workflow, needs and preferences. We didn’t ask them about these topics directly, but had a discussion around their workflow, their processes, and how the do the work they do. We came in with the product vision as the hypothesis and asked questions that would enlighten us about their work.

Based on our visit, here’s what we learned:

“It is difficult and inefficient for people to context switch between art and science.”

• False: Jackie and Gabrielle don’t switch between art and science at all. They specialize on the science part. The art (copywriting, videomaking) is done by the copywriter and account manager who don’t handle measurement of their work, but look to Jackie to report on it back to them to tell them what went well and what didn’t.

“Science helps marketers focus their time. Analytics should tell them what is working and what is not.”

• True: Jackie and Gabrielle need help on how they should prioritize tasks to drive conversions and retention.

“Art helps marketers create more effective initiatives. People create better copy, design, and unique campaigns.”

• True: Jackie has her copywriter and account manager handle all of the creative work (copy and design) based on what she interprets from the data and then instructs them.

“Marketers aren’t looking for an analytics product, they are looking for a product that makes their jobs easier.”

• True: Jackie likes tools (any tools and willing to use multiple specialized tools) that allows them to do more without engineering resources.

“KISSmetrics takes care of the science of marketing so you can focus on the art of marketing.”

• False: Jackie and Gabrielle want to spend less time on science so they can do the other parts of their job which is NOT art. KISSmetrics takes care of the science of marketing so they can focus on informing people to produce better art. This is because they are Directors and don’t do the creative themselves. Instead, they do direct marketing by talking to customers (MCNs), meeting with studios, and developing relationships with YouTube stars. The art part is handed off to their copywriters and account managers.

Jackie Cobb: Director of Marketing at Epoxy.tv and a long-time Google Analytics user. She recently started using KISSmetrics in September 2014 to pull conversion data from the Funnel Report. She also uses the People Search and Live. She is in charge of partnerships and “analytical” side of marketing. She builds relationships with multi-channel networks (MCNs).

Gabrielle “Gabby” Lambert: Director of Operations, new to analytics. She has no experience in any tool, but primarily uses KISSmetrics for its Cohort Report. She exports data from the Cohort Report into Excel to clean up data and make her own custom visualizations for board meetings. She also uses Live “to monitor and play around.”

The company launched in May 2014. The Chief Product Officer, Jason Ahmad had set-up MixPanel with former Mixpanel engineer, Peter Skirko (Peter has now left Epoxy to join Google). They started using KISSmetrics in September 2014. The product team still uses Mixpanel somewhat, but mostly taps into an internal admin interface that they all use that pulls data from a database. Google Analytics is the main analytics tool the company uses for in-app usage metrics because it was implemented long before Jackie joined the team.

The Epoxy team works out of a three-story triplex in a residential neighborhood. The team is separated into two separate units on the property: Product and Engineering are in their own unit while Marketing/HR/Finance/Operations lives in another. (The third unit is rented out by another start-up.)

Communication between the two teams is open and accessible. But, it doesn’t always happen as much as it needs to. As a result, the marketing teams’ needs are lower on the list of priorities. For example, KISSmetrics has not been fully implemented or correctly — the marketing and engineering teams haven’t had the time to meet and get it done.

Activities and Tools

To get things done, the marketing team invests time and money into at least 9 different tools: “The challenge is that we use so many different tools that have different types of data. Ideally, we could all use one tool.”

Here’s an overview of the activities and tools that the marketing and operating team engage with:

Takeaways

Biggest challenges with marketing

• Managing time
• Knowing what to prioritize
• Knowing what to pay attention to
• Repetitive sending of weekly reports
• Q/A-ing data
• Finding engineering time to implement correct data

Opportunities for KISSmetrics to improve

• Prioritization of what to do. Jackie runs a weekly report for the sake of informing people. Other than that, she doesn’t have a good idea of what she should be paying attention to in her campaigns so she runs ad-hoc reports to find that out. She pays attention to her email and that important tasks live there to inform her day.
• Scheduling reports to send to team members. Jackie and Gabrielle both send weekly reports. There is no way to automate that scheduled sending of reports to the company. Instead they run the report and email it out manually. Because everyone has to have a KISSmetrics account to view results, Jackie ends up just copying and pasting the numbers into an email instead.
• Bundling up multiple events into a single event. The KISSmetrics implementation was not done well so there are 5 events for an event that happens in multiple places but it’s the same action. They realized this should have been done with a property, but have no way of going back to fix it. It’s a slow and painful process to try to get engineering to spend time on KISSmetrics since Google Analytics already has all the usage data they need. Google Analytics, however, doesn’t let them track from Visit to Conversion as accurately as we do so they are stuck in between tools.
• Account-based analysis. There is no way to aggregate multiple users’ activities into a single account to see which accounts are the most active. They want to roll up events for people on the same account for some usage analysis much like how we roll up Channel data together.
• Messaging users based on what they do or don’t do. Jackie is currently trialing Intercom in order to message users during onboarding or when they look like they are about to abandon. She also wanted to message them when they reach milestones, like getting 1000 subscribers.
• Time-consuming and super manual process to clean data. Gabrielle pulls retention reports and presents them to the management team for review. To compile these reports, Gabrielle goes through a tedious process: she pulls the numbers from KISSmetrics Cohort Report, clicks each cell to run a People Search, verifies it has no internal Epoxy users, and cleans up the “dirty data” in Excel. “The way it’s set-up and our data is done, I can’t include our own internal accounts from it (cohort report data),” Gabrielle says. “For an accurate report, I have to physically click on each square, wait until it loads for People list, scan the people list to see how many are internal.” (This will be addressed once Global Filters is released)
• Q/A-ing data. Given the split between Google Analytics and KISSmetrics, Jackie spends most of her time Q/A-ing whether the data looks accurate (matching number of conversions). She knows this is due to the poor implementation of KISSmetrics, but the engineering team doesn’t time to clean it up yet. They’ve made some progress in past 2 months, but some older data is still dirty.

What they like about KISSmetrics

• The Cohort Report is well-formatted (if the data is clean) to export and present.
• Live is fun! Both Jackie and Gabrielle were bursting with enthusiasm for Live. “I love Live,” says, Gabrielle. “I use it to monitor and play around and stuff. I try to clean up and QA.” Live is a central place to see the history of everything she has done and Q/A.
• KISSmetrics is the only tool that can capture marketing data into the site and app easily. Both Mixpanel and Google Analytics could not solve this for them.
• Logo is great. The organization enjoys the light hearted approach our branding has that makes them feel good about using the app.

Threats

• The Epoxy team prefers the flow of Mixpanel over KISSmetrics. The UI seems more intuitive and clean. They can also combine events together without needing a developer.
• Intercom is currently being trialed in order to manage accounts VS users better and send messages.
• High switching cost. Jackie and Gabrielle are interested in moving from Google Analytics to KISSmetrics (if all of the data is correct) to centralize all of their data in place. However, there is a high switching cost. Founding team members, Jason Ahmad, the Chief Product Officer and Peter Skirker, former engineer had set-up Google Analytics when the company was first founded. They are unwilling to switch because they’ve spent time investing in these platforms.

Research Team Recommendations

Based on this visit, we recommend the Product team focuses on these things, in this order:

• Marketers need a way to help prioritize what they should do. Aside from weekly reporting, Epoxy TV marketers respond to things reactively instead of knowing what they should be working on. We recommend a tool that would help call out insights and tidbits that marketers can look at and address. As they look to their email inbox for deciding what to do, marketers want a similar method of scanning and deciding what to do, marking items as important or not important.
• Marketers need a way to automate sending of weekly reports. The most repetitive task for Jackie and Gabrielle was pulling the weekly reports and sending them to different groups of people. We recommend a tool that would help marketers schedule and send reports to people’s inboxes (without the need of a KISSmetrics account). The focus was for internal communication, not for external communication to customers. Their trial of Intercom seemed to be not their primary focus or interest, just a curiosity.
• Marketers need a way to track and Q/A data without the development team. Messy data and an inability to track events and properties without engineering resources force marketers to use manual processes to get things done. As a result, the flawed implementation of KISSmetrics means marketers cannot rely on KISSmetrics to fulfill their needs. We recommend a tool to allow marketers to track events and properties without engineering resources and a tool to allow marketers to clean up data without starting over such as combining events.
• SaaS-specific marketers need to do analysis on their accounts.Working at a SaaS business, Jackie and Gabrielle view their engagement based on how much account activity has happened. For example, she wants to see how much the YouTube Channel, EpicRapBattles used Epoxy last month. Currently she has to run People Searches on users on the same account and roll their activity up into multiple columns in Excel. In short, we recommend a way to roll-up users into accounts.