In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson welcomes Micki Howl, Chief Revenue Officer of Marigold, to discuss relationship marketing and its importance in today’s business landscape.

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Best Moments:

(01:47) Micki’s background in reality TV and transition to marketing

(05:33) Definition and pillars of relationship marketing

(07:59) The importance of personalization in relationship marketing

(11:03) Insights from Marigold's relationship marketing trends brand rankings report

(13:33) The role of SMS in building customer relationships

(15:25) The importance of leveraging customer data effectively

(17:52) Steps to implement relationship marketing in a brand

(20:22) Upcoming Guru Conference and Micki's session

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Guest Bio: Micki Howl is the Chief Revenue Officer of Marigold, a relationship marketing, loyalty marketing, and email marketing platform with over 40,000 customers globally. With a background in reality TV production and retail marketing, Micki brings a unique perspective to her role in solving problems for marketers and delivering valuable outcomes for customers.

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MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!

Marigold is a relationship marketing platform designed to help you acquire new customers and turn them into superfans with their best-in-class loyalty solutions. Don’t take my word for it though, American Airlines, Honeybaked Ham, Title Boxing, and Notre Dame University are also customers!

Regardless of your size, check out Marigold today to get the solution you need to grow your business!

Check out this free content from marigold that Jay has loved digesting, 5 Steps For Selecting The Right Email Marketing Platform.

Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for do this not that podcast. And today we have an awesome guest I'm very excited about. So who's here? We got Mickey Howell.

So Mickey Howell is the chief revenue officer of of Marigold.

Now, if you don't know what Marigold is, you're living under a rock because they're an incredible relationship marketing, loyalty marketing, email marketing, everything platform. They have over 40,000 customers around the globe.

And maybe you don't know the name Marigold, but you should, but they're a roll up of some of the best brands in the industry.

Things like Sail through and Campaign Monitor and Cheetah Digital and Emma and Live Clicker and so many others all rolled up into one, which is why they're able to have this incredible a platform for marketers. And Mickey's here. We're going to talk about relationship marketing, but not in a way that's vague and weird.

Some way that you can actually understand it and use it. So, Mickey, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Jay. Thanks for having me.

It's exciting to be here. I'm excited to talk about this.

So before we get into the whole world of relationship marketing, whatever this is, this big word phrase is, tell us, how did Mickey become Mickey?

Okay, but before I do that, did I hear you hit number one?

That's so nice. Yes.

This podcast is the number one marketing podcast in the United States, which means people like marketing and reality tv because about the only two things I talk about, which is super embarrassing, but do you like reality tv?

Okay, so that's the perfect segue into how did Mickey become Mickey? So first of all, congratulations. Thank you. Second of all, I love reality tv.

I actually started as a an associate producer at Entertainment Television.

No way.

I lived and breathed in the reality TV world. And I won't tell you what shows I worked on because that will totally age me.

But yes, it was like the first couple seasons of the Kardashians and Girls of the Playboy Mansion and all that fun stuff. So I was definitely deep in the throes of the reality, the evolution of reality television.

And I loved the world of production and I thought I would do that. Forever and ever and ever, because I was in my 20s, and that was my dream. But, you know, the. The pay.

The pay ain't so good, and you gotta make a living at some point. So one thing led to another, and I. I got back into the corporate world. I was a marketer at Neiman Marcus Group. We lived here in Dallas.

So working for Neiman Marcus Group is just kind of the mecca of. Of for any marketer. And I did that for a while.

And then I got a phone call from a friend who said, hey, I'm working at this tech startup and we could use some. Some folks that are ready to jump ship from client side the. Come into the vendor space.

And so I did that, and one thing led to another, and I've somehow ended up here.

But what I always like to tell people is I actually somehow weirdly achieved my dream in a roundabout way because I really wanted to be a showrunner, which is just. It's just operations at the end of the day and running something that's just bigger than yourself and takes a lot of puzzle pieces to put together.

You need to motivate a big team. You need to make sure deadlines are met, and you need to deliver to your, you know, in the. In the entertainment world, your executive producers.

And here it's. It's our. Our board members. And so I like to say I'm the showrunner at Marigold, so I somehow did achieve that dream.

So will I be able to twist your arm and have you come back so we could do a full reality TV show breakdown? Can we do that?

Yeah, we totally can. Yes.

Okay. I'm not kidding, because that's like. I mean, love is blind, Bachelor nation. You name it, I'm a loser. I watch it all.

I love it. And like, the, The C list celebrities are my, like, that's. I'm more excited to run into them than I am anyone else.

That's amazing. So before we get to relationship marketing, you said something, though, I'm curious about.

You went from client side to, you know, vendor or platform side. How's that? Because is that, like, a hard transition or was that a really valuable experience for you to have?

Well, I mean, you. You're asking. You know that you know the answer, right? Because at the end of the day, I was a marketer and went to solving problems for marketers.

So it's incredibly valuable because you understand exactly what pain points they have each and every day.

It's one of the reasons why we're going to get into what the heck is even relationship marketing, and turn it into plain speak, because at the end of the day, it's truly just solving pain and solving problems and solving challenges and making sure we're delivering the right outcomes. That's all there is to it.

So in that sense, it was incredibly valuable because I had a great understanding of just what was happening in retail marketing, the retail landscape overall, the dynamics and the workflow and efficiencies that marketers are looking for each and every day inside the companies that they're. They're, you know, trying to deliver an incredible experience for their customers.

I think that's so great to have that. Be client side, platform side, all of it. So. So let's jump into it. Relationship marketing. I. Sometimes I feel like it's. It's like a.

It's like a gimmick.

It's a word or phrase we throw around because I don't understand how someone can have hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers and people in their database and stuff and have a relationship with them. So what is relationship marketing? Is this real or is this just total garbage?

So it's. It's definitely not garbage.

I look at relationship marketing as a lens or a framework for how you develop your overarching marketing strategy, and that's people, process, and technology. So in its simplest form, relationship marketing is three key pillars.

It's acquiring or acquisition of your customer base, and it's development, getting to know them, learning things. You know, you think about it like being on a date, right? You have your first date, maybe your second, third date.

You get to know a little bit more about them.

You start to personalize the experiences together, find common interests, and then ultimately, you're understanding if you're pushing that person into the cultivate loyalty space. So again, just three key pillars. Find your people, really get to know them, turn them into loyal superfans.

And when people hear the word loyal, they immediately think a loyalty program or a product. And that's not what we want to talk about here today. We can talk about that and do a whole other podcast episode on just that.

But really what it is is challenging marketers to understand that while they have to go and find new customers, they have to learn more about them.

And then they have to ultimately decide if those customers are going to be loyal super fans or if they need to purge or put them in another segment of some kind.

So at the end of the day, it's about understanding those three cohorts, understanding the movements between them, understanding the dynamics, and then coming up with A playbook or tactics to move people efficiently through that framework.

So I think that's a really important point, that just because you want to have a relationship marketing program does not mean you must have, you know, a points program or something, a redeemable whatever. I mean, you want to have a loyalty program, that's, that's an add on and make it even better. So what is the secret sauce to having a relationship?

I mean, is personalization the thing that's necessary to actually have a relationship if you're not going to have a loyalty program?

Yeah. So everybody has a different secret sauce.

And that's one of the reasons why I love working with our customers is because they come in the door and they're like, great, I'm all in. How do we do this? And the answer is, well, it depends and you have to figure out.

You'd have to start at the beginning, which is, let's just talk about data in general. How siloed is your data? How are you accessing it? How are you currently segmenting customers? What journeys are they on? What's the intended outcome?

You start to ask some of those questions and you can quickly understand that a lot of marketers are really being very reactionary, which is, okay, we've kind of lived in that landscape. But post Covid, we need to now switch back to being really proactive and thinking about it from a dynamic cohort.

At the end of the day, you're talking to people. Are you talking to them in the right way?

And I'd say 20 years ago, with all of the introduction of new technology and new channels that you could engage people on, people just started to acquire tech and they started to acquire people and data, but they didn't really understand how to push people into the funnel, talk to them and in really their, their authentic brand voice and create loyal customers and be okay if other people raised their hand and said, you know what, this actually isn't for me because at the end of the day we know that loyal customers come back for repeat purchases. They on average spend much more. And so what does that look like in practice?

That means that whether or not you have a, to your point, a points program, an offer program, really, you can do this through any type of messaging journey. It doesn't have to be through a loyalty solution. It can be, but doesn't have to.

It's just messages at the end of the day and where you're meeting your customers.

So that might be understanding that your loyal customers don't need that higher, you know, 40% off to push them over the edge to have to have a purchase. They're probably going to spend full price at some point.

It's understanding what those leading indicators are and going back and targeting maybe that group that you don't know a lot about. Hey, fill out this survey.

Hey, if you give me some data, I'm going to reward you and I'm going to reward you not just from a points based offer or a percentage off. I'm going to reward you by using that data in a way that makes your life easier.

Because at the end of the day what people want is they want a message in their inbox or on their phone that really speaks to them. And so that does go into the hyper personalization world, which is again another fun buzzword.

But what it ultimately means is delivering the right message to the right person at the right time on the right ch channel. And you still need a marketer to be the conductor at the end of the day.

So you can't throw everything into tech, get rid of the marketing team and walk away.

What you need to do is you need to leverage the tech to make sure that the marketer is an efficient conductor and is delivering that authentic brand experience.

And you know, you touched on something that I also saw in your new brand ranking report.

So you mentioned that it's not always about just giving 40% off that's going to create that relationship and you all and we'll put in the show notes, but Marigold just came out with the relationship marketing trends brand rankings report which ranked 200 major brands in all these different buckets in terms of how they were doing relationship marketing.

And one of the stats that like I was in shock about was that what it was like over 60% of people are willing to spend more with a brand that they are loyal to.

And it's like that kind of blew my mind that this like loyalty that you're building up, not because of a points program, this relationship actually allows your margins to be better, your profitability better, your revenue be better. Is that, I mean, is that part of it?

That's it at the end of the day.

And if you think about it from the relationship marketing framework, I think one of the surprises is when we release that report, you know, there are 200 brands on there and, and some of them may surprise you.

To be at the top that are sitting in like the health care space or the financial, you know, industry space like big banks and pharmacies and healthcare sometimes isn't the sexiest thing when you think about a loyalty program.

But if you think about who you have a relationship with at the end of the day and who adds value to your life and you really put it down on paper like me, I'm a consumer who adds value to my life. I like cvs, adds value to my life, right?

They make it easy for me to manage prescriptions, take care of my family, get my flu vaccine, get a follow up reminder when my daughter needs the next tdap.

The back to school stuff, just the fun items that are at the checkout counter and the fact that I can just use a self serve kiosk and I can get in and out and get everything I need and be on my way and they remember that, they reward it. They talk to me because they know how I shop. That's the kind of stuff we're talking about at the end of the day.

It's the full end to end experience in the authentic brand voice.

And so that's why the report's interesting, because there may be some, you know, some guys up top that you, that you wouldn't think about having a relationship with in more of the conventional sense of relationship marketing.

And what I notice about a lot of the brands that are in there, I would say almost all them are not just doing email, they're doing sms and they're doing it in a really cool way.

Is SMS the channel that most brands are sleeping on in terms of building a relationship or do you think that it's a nice to have, it's not a must have?

So I. It depends again, it depends on the brand, right? And it depends on the outcomes, the objectives and the overarching playbook and strategy.

But at the end of the day, in the way we were talking about, loyalty is not just. Loyalty is a construct, it's not just a SaaS tool.

You need to think about mobile being the fact that it's not just the device showing up on your mobile phone, it's the fact that humans are now mobile. Right? So they're consuming messages in motion. Yes, that may be on the phone, that may be an efficient way for them to consume that.

It could be though on the phone that they're looking at their inbox, which is a curated experience for the person.

At the end of the day, think about it, when you get into your email and you see something that you didn't sign up for from a brand, that you didn't raise your hand and say I want to learn more about you, you kind of get a little offended. Like people are actually getting upset about that now. Right. And so the mobile space is incredibly powerful.

Again, if you can understand your consumer and ask to engage with them in the way that they want to be met, then yes, SMS mobile can be incredibly powerful.

Well, the other piece of that is, yeah, you want to meet them where they are, you want to meet them at the right time in the right moment.

But I think the other thing that consumers are expecting is that when give you data or they visit certain areas of your site or, or, or share any information, there's a, there's an expectation that the messaging back is going to be leveraging that data.

And is it fair to say that a lot of business, a lot of marketers that are, are sitting on data that they've received, that they've been given and they're not using it to personalize the offers, the messaging, everything, they're not living up to their end of the bargain and they're not building that relationship. Is that the epic fail?

It's an epic fail.

And the other thing that people make the mistake of doing is they just ask for a bunch of data that they don't need and then they don't know why they're asking for it other than they got a mandate from up top that we need to know more about our customers and we need to be collecting data. Let me put it into context for you. So I was talking with, we've got a great customer, World Market, they're about to hit their holiday season.

I love going to world market at holiday and buying all the things for all my family. I was talking with them the other day and they were, they were talking specifically about the data they have stored. Right.

Just hundreds of thousands of pieces of profile data when they're really only actively talking to a much smaller cohort of customers at any given time. So again, it's that engagement strategy of like, why were you guys doing this? Do we need to keep doing it?

Maybe we don't, we don't need to store it, don't worry about it. Right. The pressure of like, oh my gosh, what if I lose it? You're not going to lose it. People change each and every day.

So you need to ask them about what interests them and what they, how they, how you as a brand could add value to their life today. And then you need to immediately act on that. You can't sit on it. If you sit on it, it's stale.

It's stale in three months, it's stale in six months, it's certainly stale in two to three Years you have to go back and do you have to do better is really what you need to do.

So we were having a really frank and transparent conversation and ultimately we're going to be, you know, workshopping with them how handle the rest of the data. But there's definitely a fear out there that oh my God, if I lose all that stuff I've collected, right.

It's like going through your parents house after everyone goes off to college. Like you just, you don't need it all anymore. And it's again, it's the recency, the recency information that's incredibly critical for brands.

In this moment, 100%. So let me ask you a loaded question that we did not talk about, that I was going to ask you. I'm just curious. Okay. So different parallel universe.

Mickey gets hired today at some random brand as you know, director of marketing. And you enter this brand and the brand has zero relationship marketing going on. They have like just the most boring stuff going on.

What is like step one or two? Bank. Okay, we're gonna have to start a dialogue with our customers, with our prospects.

What does Mickey do to try to like get this going in the right direction now that you've just taken on this job?

So the first thing I would do is really just funnel mapping. So that's. You want to be a customer of the brand for a little while, right?

You want to understand what it feels like to be in market and have a first or a second interaction with that brand, what it means to go into a store, what messages are you receiving after you go into the store. You need to do your own research on this.

Even if you've developed the program yourself, you'd be surprised how many marketers forget that some triggered journey is set up or forget that they've got some offer out there that's pushing an SMS message, or forget that they have capabilities of being able to push something when somebody's within a geo fenced, you know, area. Right. Your closest Starbucks is here. And so you need to do that end to end mapping of the customer journey as a customer yourself.

And you need to just set your bias aside and just experience it, live it and breathe it. Then you put it.

You know, in the old days we would have printed everything out in a big conference room and stuck it all around, you know, where everybody walks through and absorbs it, sits with it, right. You don't react to it and then you start to talk about what is really authentic to us. Is this, does this feel authentic?

There may be times when you know, companies have done a lot of work on their brand. KFC comes to mind. They're doing some cool, super cool stuff right now, by the way. And I believe Paul was on your podcast. Is that right?

He's, he's an awesome one to go check out, but what they realized was that Colonel Sanders is, is kind of a cultural icon in a sense, and that they wanted to embrace that and have a lot of fun. And they just released their funko Colonel Sanders and they're kind of hitting a different demographic, but it feels very authentic to them.

And so they're having, they're having a lot of fun introducing what that looks and feels like as a customer and as you're going through that journey. So that would be my first recommendation, is to live and breathe as a customer.

Experience all the touch points, don't make judgment, invite others to experience it with you and then come back to the table and understand kind of where you're off and where you need to improve. And then the second step is digging into the data. And that's a whole other exercise. But that's step two.

I'm like, I'm like fired up. I want to go do all that. I feel like I'm in company. This is incredible. Yeah, this is great. Now I want to go to kfc. That's a whole other problem.

But speaking of fun, we have something coming up that Mickey's going to be at. So Guru Conference is coming up. That's the world's largest email event. It is free, it is virtual, and Mickey is going to be there speaking.

I want to make sure I get the session title right. It is going to be Unlock ROI how to Fix the Most Costly Mistake in Loyalty.

If you want to see Mickey speak, you got to go to grooveconference.com Mickey, we have an 80s theme this year for the. Did you like the 80s?

I. I was. Thankfully it was small in the 80s, so it was a brief splash in the pan. But I do have a 13 year old who like, is straight from the 90s.

All that stuff is coming back. And I keep telling her, I'm like, you understand I wore this or I did my hair that way. The two little braids in the front. Yeah.

On my desk getting ready. I have a bottle of Aqua Net. Oh, I'm ready. I am so ready.

The big jeans are back too. Which I'm. Which women are just like, thank God.

I can't keep up with the jeans. My wife will be like, oh no, those jeans are out of style. But if I hold on to them long enough. I feel like they come back eventually.

So I just have a lot of jeans in my closet.

Don't ask too many questions. We just like to shop.

No, no, no, no. I asked no questions. Well, this is amazing. First off, everybody can go download Marigold's relationship marketing trends, the brand rankings report.

It's incredible. It is free. You can go to jschwettleson.com Marigold, you got to come see Mickey at Guru Conference.

Mickey, any other parting words for humanity and you are coming back to talk reality tv. It's happening.

I know this wasn't enough time. I'm having so much fun, so thank you for having me.

All right, and everybody go follow Mickey on LinkedIn. We're going to put everything in the show notes and we'll see you soon.

Thank you.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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