Magnus Unemyr

Almost every company struggle with one question – how to get more leads? One of the companies offering solutions for this problem is Sumo, and I got to interview David Kelly who is the General Manager of Sumo Dojo — part of the Sumo.com and AppSumo brands.

Within KingSumo, David leads the KingSumo and SendFox products. These SaaS web products have generated seven-figures in revenue, and have been used by 2.5+ million people including New York Times bestselling author Ryan Holiday, finance guru Pat Flynn, and more.

Before Sumo Dojo, David was the first marketer for Student Loan Hero (sold to LendingTree for $60 million), a copywriter for I Will Teach You to be Rich, and a Product Manager for News Corp.

Now, over to the interview!

What is Your Company’s Background?

Sumo Dojo, and the KingSumo and SendFox products, were conceptualized by Noah Kagan — an early employee at Facebook, Mint, and the founder of Sumo Group (Sumo.com, AppSumo).

We built Sumo Dojo because we wanted to create amazing products to help small businesses grow — inexpensively and automatically.

There are a lot of marketing tools and marketing channels that are expensive or built for enterprises. But we wanted to focus on small mom-and-pop shops, small online businesses, and e-commerce stores just starting out.

What Problem Does Your Product Solve?

The first product, KingSumo, helps small businesses get more customers and grow their email list at a much lower cost than other marketing channels.

The second product, SendFox, is a very affordable and simple email tool.

What Does Sumo do, and why is it Important to Your Customers?

Marketing is hard. And most marketing tools are expensive. We built KingSumo and SendFox to be easy and affordable.

KingSumo helps you grow your email list and customer base quickly and inexpensively using viral giveaways. We built the KingSumo tool because when we ran viral giveaways for one of our sister companies, it worked VERY well.

In the early days of one of our sister companies, giveaways made up 20% of our revenue. (And now that sister company is an 8-figure business.)

So we decided to release the same tool that we used internally to the general public — so that ANYONE could set up a viral giveaway in 5 minutes to get more email subscribers and customers.

SendFox is a very affordable email tool. It’s meant to be a simple tool that helps you communicate effectively with your customers, without all the bells-and-whistles.

In our experience, we notice that email marketing is too confusing, too complicated, and too expensive.

We wanted to take the overwhelm and doubt out of email marketing and make it easier for all small business owners and bloggers to use.

Can You Give a Few Examples of Lead Generation Strategies that Work Well Now?

There are a lot of marketing strategies out there that people will tell you… but they’re too expensive. Or there’s too much competition. Or they just don’t work well.

We built our companies with guerilla, on-the-ground marketing. Many times, we had a zero-dollar marketing budget but we still were able to build 8-figure businesses — so we’ve actually walked the walk.

Here are the big three marketing channels that are working GREAT right now. Just don’t tell anyone. 😉

• It’s popular, but it works extremely well. Here’s the thing people don’t know about YouTube… you can LEVERAGE your competitors. Instead of Google, which is a zero-sum game with everyone fighting for a spot on the SERP, you can use your competitors on YouTube to win. The key is targeting the keywords they’re targeting, and you’ll appear as a suggested video. Just look at the page source, see what other popular videos are using for keywords, and create a video with a click-y title based on that topic, and make sure to use the same tags in your video. 5 tags work well. One last tip: We tested putting a link at the top of the video description and the bottom. And the bottom of the description, with a maximum of 100-200 words in the description, works great.

• We did an analysis on posting on LinkedIn every week for about two years. We even did a correlation analysis with 532+ points of data, and we saw that the BIGGEST success metric for generating more clicks are getting more views. And the best way to get more views are to get more likes. So push people liking your post as much as possible. The biggest keys are not using images, writing two amazing intro lines, and keeping your post compelling and short. Another trick is asking people to comment to get something (like a PDF) which will boost the number of likes.
• Direct outreach. Yes, it’s manual. And yes, it’s also a great way to generate leads. Use a spreadsheet to track people you contact, and a tool like reply.io to build an automated funnel with simple follow-ups. Some general outreach tips: Always mention the person’s first name in the subject line, keep your emails ultra-short, and follow-up every 24-48 hours for a few days in a row.

How Would You Grow an Email List From Zero With Little Traffic?

Viral giveaways are the key. Starting a simple viral giveaway and then sharing with all your friends and everyone you know will help you grow a list.

I helped a friend who was starting a new business run a viral giveaway recently, and he increased his list size by 30% through a simple viral giveaway.

Also, if you’re really starting at zero ask you friends to join your list. Seriously. You need to start somewhere. I grew a list of about 200 people by asking a bunch of friends if they wanted to receive a new newsletter I was starting, and then it started to spread a bit virally.

I also recommend using “lead magnets” or content upgrades on any blog posts you write.

We notice that lead magnets (also called content upgrades) convert 2-10x higher than normal popups. To make a simple lead magnet, use a popup tool like Sumo, and link a related YouTube video you love for the content piece.

For example, if you write a blog post about marketing, tell people to enter their email address to get access to your FAVORITE marketing video ever, and then redirect them to the YouTube video. Easy! You don’t even need to create new content.

In Your Mind, What is the Future of Digital Marketing and Marketing Technology?

Good products make marketing. The better your product, the easier your product will be to market — and the more successful your marketing campaigns.

Also, referrals are something we’re betting on big at Sumo Dojo. We think that motivating people to share a product or service by offering incentives is one of the best, longest-term marketing channels there are.

Do You Have Any Other Thoughts on Marketing Technology and its use in Marketing onwards?

Experiment a bunch. In the past, we’ve come up with a strategy that was to test a new marketing channel every single month. At the end of the year, that means you would have tried 12 different marketing channels.

This is important because a marketing channel that works for one person might not work for another. For example, we’ve successfully used Facebook ads in one sister business, but not in another. And another sister business of ours was successful with content marketing, while it’s failed in different situations.

Marketing channels often work because they’re not saturated. Once a lot of people use a marketing channel, there’s a lot of noise and it becomes less effective. Think about Facebook ads five years ago vs. today.

To find those new and exciting marketing channels, you always have to experiment!

You can find David at dmkthinks.org, or on Twitter @dmkthinks. Connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/thedmkelly/

In a previous blog post, I outlined how Internet-connected devices could propel marketing automation far beyond AI-driven insights based on how people (leads and customers) behave.

We are at the precipice of a new world that is unraveling right in front of our eyes.

We will soon see completely autonomous marketing systems, where data from how machines are used and operate will trigger automated marketing outreach, thus making marketing automation far more powerful.

The only company I have seen so far that appears to understand how disruptive this will become is Amazon. Holy smoke, are they positioning themselves to leverage this!

If you read further, you will come across what might be Amazon’s secret plan for world domination.

What Amazon is currently doing – entirely off the radar – have the power to completely change the market dynamics and disrupt entire industries, affecting millions of companies globally.

But first, let’s dig a bit deeper in why Internet-connected devices (Internet-Of-Things, or IoT) might be a big deal in marketing in the near future (read the previous post for more background information).

Machines Becoming Customers 

Washing machines self-ordering detergent and industrial machinery self-ordering spare parts, service visits, and consumables may not be as far off as you’d expect.

In 2017, Amazon acquired the world’s most popular real-time operating system software, which is used to develop many IoT products (the control electronics in IoT devices use real-time operating systems instead of Microsoft Windows, MacOS X, Android, iOS or Linux).

Many people assumed this to be a move to widen the market for Amazon’s data-center cloud services, which makes perfect sense from Amazon’s point of view (in addition to their eCommerce business, Amazon is one of the world’s largest providers of data center services for cloud hosting).

If a large proportion of the trillion or so Internet-connected devices will use Amazon’s operating system (which is called FreeRTOS), then it is likely that many of the companies who are developing those IoT products will look to Amazon for hosting data from those products on their cloud services as well.

After all, IoT products need to store their data in cloud servers somewhere, and if Amazon’s operating system would be extended to include readymade functionality for uploading, that would be the easiest choice for developers.

Thinking one step further, it is not difficult to see Amazon also extending their operating system to enable Internet-connected products to purchase products automatically from the Amazon store.

Thus, it makes perfect sense that a supplier of operating system software – used by developers of IoT products – also include functionalities for autonomous online purchases, like Amazon’s eCommerce platform.

With such functionality integrated into the software of IoT products, the potential customer base of an eCommerce site could be increased to tens or hundreds of billions of autonomous machines, all initiating purchases automatically.

This assumes the software is integrated into most of those IoT products, which might become the case with Amazon’s operating system as it is free of charge and already wildly popular.

Already before Amazon’s acquisition of FreeRTOS, it was the most popular real-time operating system software in the world, with a 20% market share (EmbeddedLinux, that came in at 22% is also free, but is not a real-time operating system and requires far too much memory to fit in many of the IoT products that manufactured in massive volume).

I expect it will not be too long before we see machines starting to make autonomous product purchases based on AI-predictions from machine-generated data.

Coffee machines ordering coffee beans and washing machines ordering detergent are just a couple of examples. We might not be too far from our refrigerators ordering new milk automatically, and industrial machinery ordering new spare parts just in time.

There are probably millions of examples of both B2C and B2B products that would benefit from automated purchasing and re-ordering.

Amazon is clearly well positioned here, as they now own the operating system that is used to develop a large share of all Internet-connected devices in the world, and have the cloud services to store the data generated by those devices as well.

Not to mention how the market dynamics would shift if billions of Internet-connected products were pre-programmed to order products from the Amazon webshop autonomously.

If McKinsey’s prediction of 1 trillion IoT devices by 2025 is correct, the current 20% market share of FreeRTOS means that Amazon’s real-time operating system could be installed in 200 billion Internet-connected devices and machines just a few years from now.

It would be very easy to add self-ordering to these machines, as Amazon’s FreeRTOS is already built into them – assuming Amazon will add self-ordering API’s to it. I cannot see how they could miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and not do it. Trust me, it will happen.

Still, the explosive power and disruptive nature of this move has gone completely unnoticed in the eCommerce industry. I find this surprising. Perhaps the electronic design and eCommerce businesses are just too far away from each other for analysts to connect the dots.

I suspect that in a world of machines making autonomous purchases, the business models will change. Rather than buying products, you will subscribe to a service that automates your repetitive purchases like milk, coffee beans and detergent. And similarly, for lubricants and spare parts in the industrial space.

One can only guess how many markets will be disrupted when billions of machines start to make autonomous product purchases, shortcutting many companies down the supply chain.

This brings us to the next section, which might be a little scary to some marketers. All of this automation will change how we shop, but it also provides the perfect vendor lock-in.

How do You Market to a Machine? 

If billions of machines are able to order replenishments or spare parts automatically, marketers will indeed be faced with an interesting problem never conceived before.

How do you market your product to a machine that is pre-programmed to purchase a competing brand automatically? 

The frightening answer for marketers is likely that you can’t.

Marketers will have a whole new set of problems to address in the future. Not only do you have to outperform your competition, now you need to find a way to become the pre-programmed choice in machines as well.

Despite this, I have to give Amazon credit for being exceptionally visionary. Not only did they crush the eCommerce market thanks to AI-powered recommendation engines and highly efficient logistics.

They also had the insight to look into a different industry entirely, that of software solutions used for the development of electronic devices, to build a massive market for their data center services.

That move also scales their potential customer base to include hundreds of billions of machines that may start making autonomous purchases in their webshop, should they choose to enable this capability.

Hats off to you, Amazon! You made a really smart move with this one. I can only congratulate you for your visionary and disruptive ingenuity! 

Amazon’s competitors may be cheering considerably less.

It will be impossible for other firms to duplicate this move. It was an opportunity of a lifetime.

Why?

Only FreeRTOS has this strong market penetration in IoT device development, and only Amazon offers such a strong eCommerce platform combined with data center hosting services, making this practically impossible for others to replicate.

Certainly Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Apple are all missing at least one of the critical components required to pull this off.

The future is indeed intriguing, and traditional companies not moving fast enough will be punished. For some, it is already too late.

My guess is that the big vendors will become even more dominant, and we will enter a “the winner takes all” era where the famous Pareto principle (known as the 80/20 rule) will have to give way for the just coined Unemyr principle (the 99/1 rule), where 1% of the vendors take 99% of the revenue due to the first-mover advantage and economics of scale in the digital markets.

Most companies that are good at internet marketing today use marketing automation; i.e. software robots that measure how leads and customers behave online and customize the marketing activities against each person individually.

The right person should get the right message, at the right time, depending on what is likely to interest this person right now. It can also be seen as marketing automation leads potential customers to purchase throughout the customer journey.

Marketing automation turns a passive website into active marketing machinery. It is incredibly scalable and integrates sales and marketing in a seamless concept.

So what are the trends for 2019?

• Consolidation of the “marketing technology” industry. There are about 7000 different software products on the “Martech” market. I think we will see a consolidation of the industry, where large players acquire smaller companies or merge. A clear example of this is Adobe who bought Marketo this fall. HubSpot has also bought several smaller companies, for example, the chatbot development platform Motion.ai.
• Systems integration. I have long been a missionary that “marketing integration” can be a more important concept than “marketing automation”. Giving a marketing automation system access to more data from other IT systems makes it even more accurate with even better personalization. Consider integration with e-commerce systems, webinar- and video marketing platforms, online booking calendars, logistics systems, finance systems, etc.
• Artificial intelligence and related technologies such as predictive analysis and machine learning. We have seen predictive lead scoring and automatic data enrichment in CRM systems for a while, but now we will get adaptive customer journeys where AI algorithms determine who gets what, and when. Marketing will be data-driven at a whole new level.
• Chatbots everywhere. Even small companies will have their own chatbots that are integrated into chat windows on the website, or in messaging platforms such as Facebook Messanger, Slack, and Apple iMessage.
• Hyper-personalization. With new data-driven AI platforms, we will see personalized content at a whole new level. Think personalized banner ads, content recommendations, product recommendations, personalized search results, and curated content. For e-mail, personalized send time, cadence and content apply.
• Multichannel. Marketing automation systems will be better at measuring and controlling marketing activities on many channels. When it was previously mostly about measuring how visitors behave on the website and sending email, this is now broadened to social media, messaging platforms, push notifications, website messages, etc.
• IoT products run marketing. With Internet-connected machines and devices (Internet-of-Things, IoT) we get a new stream of data on how machines work and are used. AI analysis of this data will harvest business insights that can start marketing activities automatically to the machine’s owner or operator. Coffee machines will, for example, initiate marketing outreach promoting new coffee beans when the machine’s containers begin to run out – or the device itself orders fresh coffee beans when needed.
• The GDPR panic is starting to drop, and many companies will consider other legal bases for marketing communications than consent. For example, “legitimate interest” may be an option for some companies.

There are more trends in marketing automation in the coming year, but I see these as most exciting.