Challenges and Tips for Marketing Automation with Mike Korba, CCO and Co-Founder of User.com

I think, even with big companies or smaller ones, it doesn’t matter—they can end up with a messed-up data structure. So what kind of attributes should we have on the user? What attributes should we have on the company? How do we understand that something is a lead and not just a prospect?

We gather a lot of information in our CRMs and so on, but many times when I’m working with customers who are migrating from another solution, I’ll check the data and see it’s really disorganized. So I think having the right data, structured and planned out, and understanding what each conversion event means—like how people are added to a newsletter list or what sources they can come from—is often a major problem from a marketing automation standpoint.

Yeah, so depending on the size of the customer, we handle it differently. For example, one of our biggest sources of customers is migrating from Intercom to us. We’ve grown as an alternative to Intercom. Now, Intercom is not a CRM, but because of its detailed tracking, many online businesses treat it like one. It’s like a source of truth for user data, and for Intercom companies we’ve built a migration solution. You add your API key, and we take all the customer data and communication. It’s plug-and-play, but in terms of CRM migrations—say, from another solution—sometimes it’s best to do it manually.

We have a premium option where we work more in an agency/client relationship than as a typical software provider. A user of the software can be on a premium account and delegate to our onboarding migration specialist. He’ll make sure everything is clear. Often that involves clearing databases, doing spreadsheets, importing CSV files, and making sure the proper description, event names, and values line up. It can take one, two, or three weeks, working on the same data, but in the end, we can handle those automations because both the client and we know how to organize everything related to the data.

Yeah, like with Pipedrive, we have a CRM automatic connector too—similar to Intercom. But many times we’ll say, “Your current setup is so strange that maybe we should do this with a more manual approach,” because I don’t know why you’re using activities for these purposes. You should tag them or something like that, not sign up with activities.

I believe well-implemented CRMs are not as common as they should be. I know from my experience that a tool is not what matters most, but how you use it. You can even use Airtable or something like a spreadsheet to manage your contacts. But if you clean the data—think about the proper structure—and everybody is doing the same processes in the same way, then you can make it effective.

I think the main feature of user.com is the drag-and-drop builder. You create these paths, like: if the user visits the pricing page, check whether you have their email. If you don’t have it, show a pop-up. If they submit the pop-up, send them an email. If not, reach out via chatbot. It’s so easy that people jump straight into dragging and dropping blocks, which can be the worst thing to do.

It’s like trying to create a great movie when you don’t have a script or actors—you just pick up a camera and start shooting. You might have a movie, but you don’t know what it’s about or how long it will be. It’s the same with marketing automation.

A good framework starts with defining your goals: what do you want to achieve? Let’s say you want to generate more leads from anonymous traffic. That’s a goal. Then think about how—maybe you’ll use chatbots on your blog. So now you know the “title” of your movie. Next, write a script, which we call user stories. For example, if someone visits your blog post, check what you know about them. If they’re a returning customer, reach out with a personalized chat message. If they’re unknown and it’s their first time, do something else. Ask about company size or goals. You’re writing a script, just like you would for a movie.

Once you have that script, you know what kind of data structure you need. If you want to treat paying customers differently from anonymous users, you need that information in your marketing automation software. If you’re doing a lead-generation chatbot, you also need content—a PDF, an ebook, or a checklist. Now you have your actors and your set. Once you have your goal, your script (the user stories), your data structure, and any assets you need, that’s when you start building the blocks in the drag-and-drop editor. If you jump into the drag-and-drop first, it won’t be as effective.

Yeah, like everybody says AI and machine learning will do our job. And I think machine learning and AI are really useful—great technology. I love it. But I feel people still want different types of interaction. Sometimes, when I’m at an airport dealing with support, I’d rather talk to a chatbot because it’s a simple path. I don’t want to fill out a form, or be handled by a real human—I’d prefer something fully automatic. Maybe I don’t want to type or choose options; I’d rather speak to my phone or somebody else.

But that’s one side of marketing automation—repeated tasks that can be handled 100% by algorithms. On the other hand, as a consumer, when I’m looking for a new bike, I might want to speak with a real person who’s a bike enthusiast so they can tell me, “What should I focus on?” Right now, in our live chat, we’re working on a feature that lets you start a video conversation right inside the chat widget. I think sometimes customers prefer to speak with a real human.

It would be great if it’s not some random outsourced support. India is a great country—don’t get me wrong—I have great customers from there. I just mean many businesses underestimate that region. But like many times, as a client, I’d still prefer to be handled by a person with real experience and knowledge.

Well, for really big, great results, I have NDAs, so I can’t share them directly—sometimes these cases are in the financial market or other sectors. We do share really great results in our customer stories, though. For example, we have something called “Most Successful Wednesdays,” and each Wednesday we share on our Facebook page one client’s story: the numbers, the use case, what the problem was, and how we approached it.

Those are real numbers and real names, but sometimes customers think, “Okay, let’s try another option.” They resign from our solution, and a great sales guy at a competitor might say, “Their platform will be great, yeah.” And I’m happy whenever a customer leaves, not when they’re actually leaving, but when they come back later because they know what to expect from us.

We’re not a perfect solution—no such perfect solution exists. Maybe Mailchimp is better for email, maybe HubSpot is a broader platform, or maybe Pipedrive is a better CRM solution, or Intercom is a better live chat, right? But when you compare all-in-one solutions to separate tools—including return on investment—it should be affordable for your business, and we think we give so much value that customers do come back. So this is, like, the moment I feel we’re doing a great job—when someone returns.

100k MRR.

And 1 million Annual Recurring Revenue.

Being honest, I would prefer to be much further. Like, plans for this year, plans for last year—there were goals we didn’t reach, but they were very ambitious goals. So we feel we’re still at the beginning of the journey, yes. When we compare ourselves to the big players—HubSpot or Intercom or Drift or such companies—we’re tiny in comparison. Sure, we didn’t, well, we did take a round, but we’re not VC-backed. We bootstrapped for a long time, and our approach isn’t to just burn money and grow that way. Still, we believe we should go much, much faster. We should double, triple, or quadruple it quickly.

Yeah, right now I’m the CMO—Chief Marketing Officer—so it’s a growth team, but we try to work closely with each department. Marketing, sales, success, and support, because success and support handle the implementation phase. So onboarding features, onboarding plans, manual onboarding for higher-ticket clients—not the $49 plan, but the higher-touch subscription plans.

I believe we have this growth approach, where marketing and sales work hand in hand. I’m pretty proud of what we accomplished, even if I’m not so proud of our current numbers because I believe they should be much higher. But the team spirit and how far we’ve come without spending so much on ads, etc., that’s what I’m happy about.

Yeah. I think even when I look at how we developed our product—when we were called User Engage, it was a chat solution with automation features, but we realized we needed a CRM. We could go with HubSpot, but we decided to build our own on top of that. So it’s like “dogfooding”—we use our own solution for our own purposes, which makes it easier to operate on it. That’s part of our culture and part of our offer. It’s deeply built into our technology.