Zapier • 1st October 2024

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Which is best? [2025]

If you take a digital stroll through the websites of Klaviyo and Mailchimp, you'll notice something right away: each brand targets a vastly different audience. (Mailchimp's omnipresent monkey logo is one giveaway.) Klaviyo's website is jet black and talks about uniform data and omnichannel promotions; Mailchimp's homepage talks about clicks, sales, and customer loyalty.

Dock • 30th September 2024

White-Glove Onboarding Guide: 5 ways to scale your process

If the term “white-glove service” brings to mind an English butler, you’re spot on.A century ago (before being co-opted by the business world), white-glove service described the refined level of care and attention provided by butlers and other posh service providers.SaaS providers, inspired by this elite association, tend to assume that a white-glove onboarding experience requires over-investing in long meetings, 1:1 walkthroughs with CSMs, and other forms of resource-intensive hand-holding.But...

Zapier • 27th September 2024

What is a two-sided marketplace? [Definition + examples] | Zapier

Airbnb and Uber—two massively successful marketplace apps—have spawned countless imitators, from Plowz ("Uber for snow plows") to Swimply ("the Airbnb of swimming pools"). All of these are two-sided marketplaces, a platform that connects buyers and sellers.

For entrepreneurs, the marketplace model is appealing because of its scale and profitability. But for every Uber (now worth $160 billion dollars) there are countless examples like GearCommons, an outdoor gear rental marketplace that shut dow...

Zapier • 24th September 2024

Everything you need to know about Google Chat | Zapier

Google Workspace is a one-stop shop for business productivity apps, but for a long time, Google didn't really offer customers any kind of team communication tool. Sure, there was Hangouts in Gmail, but that was a consumer tool that only really offered direct messages and video chat. Using it for any kind of group communication was chaos. As a result, many companies that pay for Google Workspace also pay for a separate workplace chat app like Slack.

The CMO • 10th September 2024

Marketing Resource Management: A Complete Guide

Why bother about marketing resource management? Because marketing campaigns can be absolute chaos. Remember everything you juggled in your last campaign: resources, budgeting, external vendors, processes, digital assets, and timelines (Oh, and if it was a global multi-location campaign, go ahead and multiply the degree of difficulty by the number of campaign locations). Marketing resource management (MRM) is an attempt to control this chaos by organizing your marketing team’s resources more holi...

Zapier • 5th September 2024

Reddit marketing: How to get it right—and wrong | Zapier

Reddit has been a staple of internet culture for two decades, spawning countless memes and offering wildly popular niche communities. (Reddit's subreddit for sneakers has five million members.) But compared with industry giants like Google and Facebook, Reddit has long been an afterthought for marketers.

Then, in 2024, two things happened: Reddit became a publicly traded company—raising its profile—and its monthly visitors tripled, thanks largely to a change in Google's algorithm prioritizing t...

Zapier • 3rd September 2024

Framer vs. Webflow: Which is best? [2024]

As a web designer in the mid-2010s, I used what everyone recommended at the time: WordPress. While it's a great tool, I found myself spending hours trying to fix spacing issues, reconcile bugs created by incompatible plugins, and troubleshoot server errors. (There's nothing quite as terrifying as WordPress's "White Screen of Death.") Because of this, I deeply understand the pain points that website building apps were created to solve. Most of those apps, though, are aimed at beginners and small...

The CMO • 12th August 2024

Write a Marketing Automation RFP: The Complete Guide

If you take away the stress of the marketing automation RFP process, a lot of marketing leaders love to talk about how they’ve boosted efficiency and profitability using marketing automation. And it can be a lot - getting stakeholder buy-in, securing a budget, talking to vendors, reviewing proposals. It all adds up to months of work and significant back-and-forth with vendors. (Not to mention the incredible amount of paperwork involved).  So some bypass this critical part of the process. And th...

The CMO • 7th August 2024

18 Marketing Automation Features Your Software Should Have

With thousands of marketing automation features and software options, it’s no wonder some companies experience “analysis paralysis” and decide to stick with what they know best.  However, considering that marketing automation is such a vast topic—from email to landing pages to lead scoring—it’s understandable how easy it is for marketers to get overwhelmed when thinking of the must-have features when looking to invest in marketing software. In this article, I’ll cover the 18 marketing automatio...

Zapier • 2nd August 2024

A complete guide to TikTok Ads

TikTok's evolution from a synchronized dance phenomenon to a diverse platform hosting trendsetting niche communities has turned it into an advertising powerhouse: in 2023, it reported $10.1 billion in ad revenue, trailing only Facebook and Instagram.

If all this momentum has you wanting to jump aboard the TikTok Ads train, copying and pasting ad campaigns from Facebook or Instagram won't get you far. For your TikTok Ads to succeed, you'll need to take time to understand what makes TikTok unique...

Zapier • 29th July 2024

Wix vs. Squarespace: Which is best? [2024]

Web design isn't what it used to be. In 2003, I spent weeks hand-coding an HTML website. (With a physical copy of HTML for Dummies next to my keyboard, of course.) In 2016, I spent days designing a client's website in WordPress. Last weekend, I spent 60 seconds .css-12hxxzz-Link{all:unset;box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;cursor:pointer;-webkit-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out;transition:all 300ms ease-in-out;outline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-fill-co...

The CMO • 23rd July 2024

Enterprise Marketing Automation: The Complete Guide [2024]

Enterprise marketing automation used to be about one thing: email. Over the years, its scope has broadened, first to social media and later to omnichannel personalization. But now, with AI-powered technologies like predictive analytics and sophisticated chatbots, enterprise marketing automation is only becoming more essential—and more disruptive. In this article, I’ll explore what sets enterprise marketing automation platforms apart from automation tools for smaller businesses. I’ll also explai...

The CMO • 12th July 2024

11 Benefits of Marketing Automation Backed By Data

The benefits of marketing automation, from saving time to boosting profits, have grown by the day as marketing technology continues to advance. And it's not surprising when you consider that the earliest marketing automation software hit the market in 1992. And in 30+ years, we now have 76% of companies using marketing automation, and there are thousands of martech tools to choose from (HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing). This article explores 11 data-backed marketing automation benefits, from...

The CMO • 8th July 2024

11 Marketing Software Trends for 2024 and Why They Matter

Why bother about a marketing software trend? The iPhone was released in 2007. But as at 2016, mobile-friendly websites were still being touted as a “marketing software trend.” This lag—between introducing a new technology and its adoption—is common in the marketing world. There’s a certain logic: you don’t want to invest millions of dollars in a trend that fizzles out. (I’m looking at you, metaverse marketing). Still, no one wants their brand to show up last to the party. Late adoption means b...

The CMO • 27th June 2024

Marketing Automation Market Size: Major Players & Insights

For a look at how the marketing automation industry has changed over time, I fired up the Wayback Machine, a database of old versions of websites, and dug through the internet archives. In 2001, here’s how Eloqua—creator of what’s now considered to be the first true marketing automation tool—described its product: a “web based sales application for lead generation.” In 2003, it was a “complete solution that leverages the Internet to acquire new customers.” (Accurate, but a bit vague). It wasn’t...

The CMO • 26th June 2024

Marketing Automation History and Timeline Through The Years

Let me transport you back in time to marketing software’s earliest days: before Salesforce, before Marketo, and even (gasp!) before HubSpot. If you were organizing an enterprise marketing campaign in 1992, there’s one piece of software you’d turn to as you fired up Windows 3.1 on your Compaq computer: Unica. With features including marketing campaign management and lead management, it was a pioneer. We’ve come a long way since then. What we refer to today as “marketing automation” originally foc...

Zapier • 24th June 2024

Google Chat vs. Slack: Which is best? [2024]

When Slack launched in 2014, it promised a better way of working: fewer emails, async communication, and easier remote collaboration. (Did you know that Slack stands for "Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge"?) It generated serious buzz, quickly gaining millions of users and inspiring competitors like Microsoft Teams.

All this was motivation for Google to join the party, too. It repurposed one of its existing consumer apps, Google Hangouts, for business use. Eventually, the app was...

Zapier • 17th June 2024

Klaviyo vs. tinyEmail: Which is best? [2024]

If you're looking for a David-and-Goliath story in the world of email marketing, tinyEmail-and-Klaviyo might be as close as you'll get. (Although—spoiler alert—Goliath might win this round.) While both are eCommerce-focused email marketing apps that integrate tightly with .css-12hxxzz-Link{all:unset;box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;cursor:pointer;-webkit-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out;transition:all 300ms ease-in-out;outline-offset:1px;-webkit-t...

Zapier • 12th June 2024

How to use Chatbase to build an AI chatbot | Zapier

Back in 2017—before the age of accessible AI tools—I launched a primitive Facebook Messenger chatbot. It used a manual "decision tree" structure, which took hours to set up and presented users with a handful of preset questions and answers. It wasn't particularly useful, but since chatbots were on the list of "the next big things in marketing," we launched it anyway. Users mostly ignored it (as they should have).

Enter the age of AI: models from OpenAI and others have been advancing rapidly (an...

Zapier • 3rd June 2024

How to use Feathery for better no-code forms and workflows

There's no shortage of .css-12hxxzz-Link{all:unset;box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;cursor:pointer;-webkit-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out;transition:all 300ms ease-in-out;outline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-fill-color:currentColor;outline:1px solid transparent;}.css-12hxxzz-Link[data-color='ocean']{color:var(--zds-text-link, #3d4592);}.css-12hxxzz-Link[data-color='ocean']:hover{outline-color:var(--zds-text-link-hover, #2b2358);}.css-12hxxzz-Link[dat...

Zapier • 17th May 2024

How to use Browse AI to scrape data from any website

Like many people early in their careers, one of my first office jobs involved pulling together company data for a lead database. It was painfully manual, involving lots of scrolling, copying, and pasting (plus a fair dose of distraction—I remember sneaking peeks at a PDF of Harry Potter on another browser tab). But today's interns can rest a little easier: there's now a slew of tools that can automate this process.

.css-12hxxzz-Link{all:unset;box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-text-decoration:underl...

Zapier • 1st May 2024

11 native advertising examples to learn from | Zapier

Consumers have an uneasy relationship with ads. Ads are annoying, no question. But at the same time, people love free stuff—and advertising either subsidizes content or makes it entirely free. Generally, the more intrusive an ad is, the less it's tolerated by viewers.

Native ads are an attempt to have it both ways: they're designed to reduce the intrusiveness of ads while continuing to subsidize content. And some forms of native advertising, like sponsored content, also allow advertisers to bor...

Zapier • 23rd April 2024

Jotform vs. Typeform: Which is best? [2024]

Back when I was scrolling through my first website in the mid-'90s—I'm almost certain it was SpaceJam.com—web forms were still in their nascent stage. Websites were treated more as one-way communication devices, like newspapers.

Forms changed all that. At first, forms were clunky HTML elements that you had to pinch-and-zoom to interact with on small screens. Eventually, Jotform, Typeform, and other came along to improve the user experience and boost conversions.

Jotform and Typeform are both h

Zapier • 22nd April 2024

17 testimonial advertising examples to inspire your next campaign

My all-time favorite testimonial ad campaign is from Surreal, a breakfast cereal company. If you were in London in 2023, you might have seen billboards proclaiming "Serena Williams* eats our cereal." Then came the hilarious disclaimer: "*She is a student from London and we paid her to eat it but the point still stands."

The best testimonial ads are deeply tailored to their target audience: they can be tongue-in-cheek, like Surreal's fake Serena endorsement, or entirely serious. While plenty of