Aleksandra Korczynska of GetResponse: How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales
An Interview With Orlando Zayas
Be data-oriented — you can’t optimize what you cannot measure. Always think about the results of your marketing campaigns and their impact on business growth. Understanding CAC, LTV, conversion rates, and ROAS is the basis for becoming a successful business leader and making marketing an irreplaceable part of your organization.
Marketing a product or service today is easier than ever before in history. Using platforms like Facebook ads or Google ads, a company can sell their product directly to people who perfectly fit the ideal client demographic at a very low cost. Digital Marketing tools, Pay per Click ads, and email marketing can help a company dramatically increase sales. At the same time, many companies that start exploring with digital marketing tools often see disappointing results.
In this interview series called “How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales,” we are talking to marketers, advertisers, brand consultants, & digital marketing gurus who can share practical ideas from their experience about how to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, & email.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Aleksandra Korczynska.
As current CMO for GetResponse, Aleksandra Korczynska is guiding global marketing and growth. Driven by data analytics and growth hacking, she has crafted exceptional go-to-market strategies for international brands (ex-Uber) and tech startups alike. She completed a business and leadership education title graduating from Harvard Executive Education. Her data-driven attitude in marketing stems from a master’s degree in data science obtained in Warsaw, Poland.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
My interest in marketing and the internet began very early. During Junior High School, I played with some design tools, like Photoshop, to prepare some marketing projects for promoting school events and launched one of my first blogs. Together with my best friend in high school, we launched a website to offer inspiration for creative birthday gifts. I guess that was even before Etsy went online!
I then applied to a top business school in Poland and studied data science and IT project management by combining creativity and math skills.
During my studies, I joined a US-PL startup called Inteliclinic, which created an intelligent sleep mask to help manage sleep. I worked on two very successful Kickstarter campaigns back then, traveled a lot, learned more about marketing, building software, managing teams, and scaling companies in practice.
I then joined Uber as one of the first people in Europe to build the Uber Eats brand from scratch. That was a great experience getting to join a fast-growing business, enter a new industry, and disrupt it.
I spent two years scaling the UberEats app in the Poland and CEE region from 0 to nearly 1 million users. To achieve this, I managed various marketing campaigns with a set of great MarTech SaaS tools. After seeing these great results, my goal became to also market and build marketing software products.
That’s why I joined GetResponse. Today I am developing a complete online marketing platform and marketing it to customers all over the world.
Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
While at Uber, I was building an email marketing campaign targeting over 100k subscribers. The email was perfectly designed; I clicked, sent and, … didn’t notice a small typo in the email’s subject line that completely changed the sentence’s meaning. It quickly went viral, and we prepared a follow-up email to clarify the mistake. We also designed a discount code featuring the incorrect word.
It turned out that the open rates sky-rocketed, and accidentally, it became a successful campaign!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Not just one person led me to where I am right now. It was a journey with many inspiring people involved.
However, I must say that the Executive Education course at HBS (Harvard Business School) has significantly changed my perception of leadership and scaling businesses. The case studies were led by really inspiring professors, who helped me to understand that it’s not marketing, product, sales, or brand that makes your business successful.
It’s the people on the frontline that are in constant touch with your customers. These people can make your company grow or fail very quickly. They’re the accurate representation of your company’s mission and brand.
That’s why right now, regardless of seniority within the organization, you need to be close both to junior specialists and customer agents to have an accurate picture of your business condition.
If you fail to be close to frontline employees, and if you don’t invest in their motivation or understand their positions, your business will eventually fail.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Coming back to what I have just shared about the importance of frontline employees, a customer-centric approach and investment into customer service quality are frequently overlooked but significantly differentiating factors.
All companies are building similar products, using the same UX & UI practices, coming up with more and more creative brand and marketing tactics. Eventually, what makes your customers stay with your product, is showing that you care. It is about understanding customers’ pains, treating them seriously, and showing that your business has a human (and not an enterprise!) face.
To share an example…
At GetResponse, we have a Slack channel with real-time survey answers from free trial platform users who decided not to upgrade their accounts. One of the answers caught my eye. Immediately, I wrote a short email to this user to understand his reasons fully and use it as feedback.
Five minutes after he completed our survey, I got on a call with him. We had a good discussion. I gave him some suggestions on how to grow his e-commerce business and learned tons of great feedback on new features to develop. Two days later, I saw this potential customer returning to us, and he gave us one more chance.
I have such conversations regularly. It’s not a scalable approach, and it doesn’t pay off if you calculate your time value.
Still, C-level leaders need to do things that ‘do not scale’ and, sometimes, instead of building long-term programs and strategies, spend some time talking to customers and frontline employees, showing that we do care about everyone.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Strong ownership — I am a person who cares for overall business results and engages in projects even far beyond my own responsibilities. I was always treating every company as if I was working as the CEO of the company, regardless of whether I had any shares or was just one of the hundreds of employees. Getting beyond my responsibilities, putting company growth (and not my own corporate career growth) in the center, and seeing the broader picture, made me very successful.
Creativity — is a result of time spent on following various brands, creative ideas, and benchmarks for various industries and business models. I very often jump to different brainstorming calls on the next campaign, and I love it! The process of creative creation with many people gives me tons of energy. We achieved the best results by challenging our ideas and pushing ourselves even harder to work out the initial ideas until perfection.
Extraversion and optimism — my energy, general optimism, and ability to motivate and inspire people were particularly important during the hard times of the COVID-19 pandemic. While you’re facing uncertainty and a global crisis, it’s hard to find the positive sides of being locked in your home. As a leader, I was doing my best to build faith in the team for a better future, always find the bright sides and new opportunities, and inspire them to think big and work hard (by my example).
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Yes, I’m excited about launching a Freemium model for GetResponse that means giving the world a free email marketing platform, free website builder, and FREE lead generation tools for starting businesses.
If you want to kick off your business idea, you need various SaaS tools, from servers, domains, website builders, email marketing, analytics, payment processors, CRM, and design tools.
All combined, you need to spend at least hundreds of dollars monthly before earning your first cent!
That’s why at GetResponse, we’ve decided to launch a free plan to make it easier for entrepreneurs to kick-off their marketing activities without spending any money.
The mission of increasing the GDP of the Internet is so inspiring. Investing in early-stage businesses and helping them break even as soon as possible with free software is just the right thing to do.
Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. As we mentioned initially, companies that just start exploring digital marketing tools like PPC campaigns often see disappointing results. In your opinion, what are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when they first start out with digital marketing? If you can, please share an example for each.
PPC shouldn’t be the first and only marketing channel to invest in.
My recommendation is always to first build solid foundations for organic traffic (SEO), take care of website rate optimization (CRO), build educational content that helps the user make a final decision, build partnerships, kick-off a viral social campaign, promote on review sites and invest in referral channels.
Then, once we have maximized opportunities for organic, direct, referral channels, we can invest into paid search, paid social, or paid display channels. Keeping the marketing mix healthy is crucial.
The maximum share of user acquisition for PPC campaigns should be around 30–40%, no more.
One of the biggest mistakes that many companies make is to bring traffic to the website and not think about conversion rate optimization and the customer journey. Boosting traffic to our website only makes sense if the website is well optimized, loads fast, works well on all devices, and has clear CTAs and messaging.
Another big mistake is when companies don’t keep brand or messaging consistent between ads, website and product. This could make the user lost or confused.
Considering the user’s attention span (it’s 3–4 seconds now!) and information overflow, businesses struggle more than ever to keep users focused, encouraged and curious.
If you could break down a very successful digital marketing campaign into a “blueprint,” what would that blueprint look like? Please share some stories or examples of your ideas.
The basics haven’t changed much. In Peter Thiel’s & E. Jerome McCarthy’s marketing bible, we learn the rules of the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
Online disruption has changed the mediums, but this marketing mix (4Ps) is still valid.
First, you need to start with a product that satisfies customer needs. If you don’t have a product-market fit, or your product doesn’t respond to customers’ needs, then you shouldn’t think about marketing (promotion) at all!
Most startups fail because of the lack of a product-market fit. They start to invest in fancy marketing campaigns and ads before they’ve even checked with early adopters to see if the product is working for them well.
The product needs proper positioning, messaging, narrowing of the target audience, packaging, and design. It would help if you started with adequate positioning: analyzing the target audience, keywords, and unique selling points that differentiate the product from competitive alternatives.
If you’re entering the blue ocean (category with no players, disruptive product), your job is more complex. You need to build the whole category and check if your hypothesis is something that people need.
Then, you move to price, including the business model (e-commerce, subscription, demos, freemium, free trial, resellers, etc.) and deciding on the pricing strategy, discount strategy, etc. The pricing strategy will be the base for your CTAs (call to action).
Placement is more about providing customers access to your product. You usually use your website or mobile app in digital marketing campaigns, and sharing access is entirely scalable.
Last but not least — promotion. In the digital world, how are you going to target your target audience? Which channels will you use? A golden tip here is to keep a proper mix. To maximize the campaign’s outreach potential and have many touchpoints with a potential customer, you need to balance all channels (keeping a good mix of organic, direct, referrals, PPC, display & video, social, affiliate, offline channels).
To sum it up, successful digital marketing campaigns are both product-oriented and customer-oriented. Don’t overcomplicate it, and don’t try to sell something you don’t own. Be authentic, and remember the 4Ps!
Let’s talk about Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) for a bit. In your opinion, which PPC platform produces the best results to increase sales?
It depends on the business model you have.
Generally, Paid Search is the best performance-oriented (conversions oriented) channel for most industries.
For e-commerce, Google Shopping (related to Google Search) and Facebook/Instagram would be the top channels for sales performance.
For B2B companies, Google/Bing/Yandex Search will effectively grow sales. At the same time, LinkedIn might also be useful for lead generation (however very expensive, working more for Enterprise-level SaaS).
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram work very effectively for local services, particularly if narrowed down to the local audience.
For all businesses, display DV360 / programmatic platforms drive brand awareness, measured by impressions and reach rather than actual conversions, leads, or sales.
Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?
- Don’t oversell. Keep track of your quality score. This means that your ad content needs to resonate well with what you have on the landing page and the product features. Don’t sell something that you don’t have.
- Experiment = test various placements, copy, audiences and check if the results are statistically significant.
- Know your goals = expect the right results from your campaign settings. Don’t expect sales from brand awareness or consideration campaigns that should be measured with impressions or engagements.
Let’s now talk about email marketing for a bit. In your opinion, what are the 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful email marketing campaign that increases sales?
Send email marketing campaigns:
- To the right audience (segment) — define your customer segments, name them and make sure to keep CTAs, sending frequency, and content relevant for this segment. Messaging that “fits them all” doesn’t work well.
- With personalized content, CTA, and subject line — personalization is your way to the highest open/click rates and conversions from email marketing campaigns. Experiment with various messaging and tone of voice based on your audience demographic, behavioral, or geographic characteristics (example: a stale customer aged 50-years-old requires different text and visuals than a 25-year-old super-active customer).
- At the right time — use functionalities like perfect timing and time travel to make sure that emails will be delivered to the top of the inbox when the user is online. Create event-triggered automated emails to target your audience based on the in-app or website behavior (send the email as a reaction to the user’s action on your website or in the app).
What are the other digital marketing tools that you are passionate about? If you can, can you share with our readers what they are and how to best leverage them?
Amplitude for product usage, retention and users’ behavior analytics.
Chartmogul for financial reporting for subscription-based businesses (with tons of great educational materials about SaaS business models).
Survicate for customer feedback.
Here is the main question of our series. Can you please tell us the 5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer? Can you please share a story or example for each?
- Become a t-shaped marketer — learn some basic knowledge about every marketing area (from design, PR and PPC to marketing automation and data analytics). You can specialize in your area, but you need to have holistic knowledge about all marketing areas.
- Learn some design skills — you won’t believe how often I was using my design skills and fluency with Photoshop or Figma. Being able to express your ideas is helpful while running a brainstorm for your next marketing campaign or talking to designers.
- Learn the basics of coding — basics of HTML and CSS are essential to optimize websites. Having solid basics of coding and system architecture will make it easier for you to talk to IT teams, be treated by IT leaders as a partner, and eventually get what you want quickly.
- Be data-oriented — you can’t optimize what you cannot measure. Always think about the results of your marketing campaigns and their impact on business growth. Understanding CAC, LTV, conversion rates, and ROAS is the basis for becoming a successful business leader and making marketing an irreplaceable part of your organization.
- Think big, but be a hands-on person too — if you don’t get your hands dirty with operational tasks in marketing, you’ll never learn, and you won’t be able to inspire your team to get the things done more efficiently.
What books, podcasts, videos, or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?
- My favorite book: Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan. Great and funny stories on the metrics’ interpretation (e.g., the difference between correlation and causality) for beginners and advanced marketers.
- Reforge growth series and marketing strategy course.
- CXL institute for data-driven marketing knowledge and channel-specific training.
- The Inside Intercom podcast to learn about growth tactics.
Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
First, we should reshape curriculums at primary schools, high schools, and most universities. Second, we need to add more classes about digital marketing and technology led by practitioners. It amazes me how many hours children spend learning unnecessary things detached from our modern, digital reality!
How can our readers further follow your work?
Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandra-korczynska-b6ab8485/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!