Voiceover: 0:00

Welcome to Digitally Curious, a podcast to help you navigate the future of AI and beyond. Your host is world-renowned futurist and author of Digitally Curious, Andrew Grill. Every episode is filled with actionable advice about technology that will help enhance you and your business.

Andrew Grilll: 0:23

Today I'm excited to welcome a marketing leader with an impressive track record, carol Howley, cmo of email signature management company Exclaimer. Carol spent seven years at Skyscanner, where she played a key role in building the B2B arm, then spent time at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the leading Linux operating system. She is a passionate advocate for product marketing, branding and demand generation. Welcome, carol.

Carol Howley: 0:46

Hi, welcome. Thank you so much for having me on the show Now. You've had a fantastic marketing career.

Andrew Grilll: 0:51

Perhaps you could outline your journey to Exclaimer.

Carol Howley: 0:53

I'm currently the CMO at Exclaimer, so I feel like I've had a real privilege navigating the evolving landscape of technology and SaaS for really over the last 15, probably 20 years actually. So I've been an exclaimer for two years. So prior to that, I guess initially my first job was actually at a company called Best Western Hotels. So I worked in the international arm of Best Western and that really ignited my love of, I guess, data. I worked on kind of the B2B side but also on kind of a lot of the email activity. So we built a huge amount of data-inspired email variations and things. And from there I moved very briefly onto a B2C side which was my only kind of dabble really on the B2C side and realized I was very definitely made to B2B marketing and so I worked for a Visit Scotland arm where I did a lot of promotion for the festivals in Edinburgh. So I did a huge amount of inward investment for the city and within that I ended up coming across Skyscanner and pitched a route for Qatar. Actually that was being pitched for with Skyscanner and really loved the brand, the sort of activity and also the CEO who I met on the route kind of pitch.

Carol Howley: 1:54

So I applied to Skyscanner and finally got a job after trying really hard and initially started looking after their front page. So I looked after all, advertising, cross-sell, all the activity of effectively navigating people around the webpage and within that I realized that actually we didn't really kind of commercialize or monetize some of our relationships and there was a huge amount of activity we were starting to do, such as building an API, building white labels that people like you know, the New York Times and Rough Guides were using, also data when you think we had. You know, by the time I think I left, we had about 100 million people on our website every single month. So all those people are searching for, like future flights and different destinations and things. So we realized actually, you know, with all that data, we could start to kind of predict where people wanted to travel in the future. So we started kind of building a lot of predictions. So I kind of effectively had a bit of a moment and wrote down all my ideas to the CEO, sort of saying actually, if we monetize this and we professionally manage our brand, our relationships, our business activity, we can start to charge more to the airlines, but also we can start to have a professional managed relationship and retail all these activities. So they very much were like OK, we'll give you a chance and see where we end up.

Carol Howley: 3:02

So they gave me a couple of interns to start my team with and I built that out to sort of about 10, 15 people and took what we called a tribe lead role. Within that I was leading sort of a team of product engineers alongside kind of the product lead and also the tech lead and we just looked after the whole B2B arm of the business. We did amazing things like building Alexa skill Facebook chatbot, running developer marketing, amazing things like building Alexa skill Facebook chatbot, running developer marketing and very sort of techie side, which explains why I didn't do any of the fun stuff at Skyscanner. I did all the kind of under the hood and the icebergs of underneath the surface of the company and that was why for me it was more of a natural progression to going somewhere like Canonical where it is very deep sort of tech, amazing products. You know huge amount of advisory services globally for the, the products that they run. But you know for that sort of area obviously you know you wouldn't normally step from Skyscanner into kind of the the sort of dark depths of SaaS and IT um, but I absolutely loved working there.

Carol Howley: 3:54

It was an amazing role, really heavy kind of demand gen globally um. And from there I was approached about the role with, with um, with Exclaimer, and moved across there. So I interviewed with the investors and their sort of challenge to me was can you come on board, can you professionalize? This company had been around for 20 years. They didn't do demand gen. They didn't do kind of really anything. We had a great website, amazing paid activity, and that was all. We hadn't invested in a lot of those owned and earned and organic channels. So their challenge to me was like can you professionalize the team and really build up a sort of full modern demand gen activity? So that was the challenge I had and that's what I've been doing.

Andrew Grilll: 4:29

Really, the last few years. Exclaimer is a brand that I hadn't heard of until recently. Maybe you could tell us a bit more about what Exclaimer does and the problems that you solve.

Carol Howley: 4:38

Exclaimer. As I said in around actually over 20 years, it was launched as an IT tool so we very much thought all of our history have been selling into the IT audience as an opportunity to really centralize your management of your email signatures to make sure you have effective, compliant, standardized email signatures with the right brand, the right information. There's no sales team promoting the Christmas activity in the middle of July because no one can be bothered to update their signatures. It also means you have all that company standard information you have to have for a compliant industry such as legal and healthcare. So it gives you that amazing kind of situation to effectively manage and represent your business. But also what we realize and what our investors realize that actually this is a huge opportunity for marketers to use that email signature.

Carol Howley: 5:21

When you think how much we rely on email in marketing, marketers to use that email signature. When you think how much we rely on email in marketing and to actually use that email signature as an opportunity to promote your content, promote your people. Also put in plugins and integrations that you could book your meetings so you know if you're sending a sales message. Why not give the person the opportunity to just automatically book in with you to share the latest content, share your webinars. All the details that you could do is all within your kind of your email signatures, so it's a way to kind of brand and navigate that, and we're also able to kind of run campaigns to people and make sure for customer success, for example, or even the HR. You can just send that really relevant information. So we have now over, I think, 60,000 organization in 150 companies using Exclaimer, and growing really fast actually. So it's a really really good, simple tool that leverages a channel that you own in your business that you don't actually really think about, but it gives you that always on promotional opportunity.

Andrew Grilll: 6:15

You're absolutely right. This email signature is some really valuable real estate. It's something we look at all the time. I know that mine's promoting my speaking my latest book. It's something that's persistent there. What are the really interesting use cases? You've seen where people have used the email signature and actually use it to leverage that and really make use of that really rich real estate that's at the bottom of every email.

Carol Howley: 6:36

So one thing that we saw was people actually starting to embed. For a B2B business, it's great to get reviews of your product and to get feedback so that you know you can continuously be improving, because for us, very much the customers at the heart of our growth. So we started using, like MPS surveys and also links to kind of survey platforms where people can review independently within our email. So that's massively boosted our ability to get reviews but also helped us kind of communicate and show that we're really listening to our customers. So you know a lot of companies are in within that are using us. They're doing this and also we saw it as an opportunity. And I guess the second area that's been really good is actually when you think for a lot of companies, you know we're having this wonderful challenge of having to do more with less and you know make things work and stretch our budgets further.

Carol Howley: 7:17

So we realized we were doing a huge amount of account-based marketing or you know more kind of targeted marketing to people we thought were more likely to buy and we were doing all this advertising. And then you know big mass email follow up. You know doing sales follow up, but actually the sales team, you know, if you don't then brand their emails with the exact same kind of message, it doesn't give that nice consistent flow and also missed opportunity to kind of make sure that that salesperson is sending something relevant. So what we did was start to use, from that advertising, that messaging, follow that journey all the way through and then you can start to send that messaging all the way through. So as you start to build that relationship, you're doing contracting and demos. You've always got that really nice kind of thread going through and an opportunity to sort of change up the content and target people in that way. So for us to bring it into an account-based marketing play is actually a really, really great idea too.

Andrew Grilll: 8:04

I bet you every marketer that's listening to this is going ah, I hadn't thought about the email signature, because in the past changing that has been a hassle and you've got to have consistency. And I bet if you said to everyone you've got to change your email signature, they're all going to say, oh, it's just a pain and the formatting is wrong. So tell me how Exclaimer makes that really simple and allows that consistency and also allows that ability to respond and be dynamic with marketing campaigns.

Carol Howley: 8:29

It's all centrally managed. So obviously you log into your platform. You can then pull different activities, you can pull different areas. So whatever you want to do, we have someone who manages it within my team. So it's very easy. You kind of almost drag and drop. You can kind of create your signature and then, depending on who you're sending to, for example with the sales team, you can connect up with your sales force and then you can sort of segment by lists and various things or have different signatures on options, so the employee can just sort of click into their email and then also select a signature or have one by default.

Carol Howley: 8:59

So you know, it kind of gives you that really good opportunity and I completely understand on the kind of like the change.

Carol Howley: 9:05

It is one of those like real pain points and my one of my first jobs at sky scan x does looking after the corporate brand when I just started the bb work was to change that signature just on our rebrand. We're literally rolling it out across 31 companies. We did it in a 24-hour period overnight, which was insane, wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but it's very good for consistency, um, but going around every single member of staff and sending those emails and saying please update your signature, please update your signature. It just I think it took us like six months to get everything updated, whereas if you have the central thing, you flick a switch and it's very easy, it's all done, and because it connects to your Active Directory or whatever kind of place that you store your information, then you can actually have everything automatically correct, with the right pronouns, the right information, the right phone numbers that people can reach you. So you know, it's just that, really, really easy thing, and I genuinely wish, when I was doing it, that I had the tool, because it was an absolute nightmare.

Andrew Grilll: 9:57

Now you mentioned that Sclam has been around for 20 years and you've been there two years. What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced in scaling Exclaimers, marketing programs, from where they've been to where they are now?

Carol Howley: 10:08

The biggest thing for me when I first started was that element of change management. So you know, obviously I was briefed when I took the role that it was going to be a huge amount of change that I needed to bring into the team and to the company. And I think you always underestimate how difficult change management is as a marketer or as anyone really. So you know, big thing was kind of coming in speaking to people, getting obviously the lay of the land and then building out that plan, getting buy-in from our investors and sort of really getting going with that plan. But actually you know, within that for me and that professionalization involved a huge amount of kind of getting new people on board. We launched about nine new channels in the first year I was there. People on board we launched about nine new channels in the first year I was there. So you know, building out all that capability, you know shoring up our foundations as a team operationally was a massive amount of work and such a huge challenge. And bringing people on board with that is hard because people don't love change, let's be honest. So you know it's kind of like explaining getting them on board. You know there was a lot of change in people and process and a lot of learning. So you do have to get people who really want to kind of buy into that journey, because I think scaling a SaaS business is fun if you like that kind of work and if you don't, it's probably the worst place in the world to work. So you know, thankfully for me, it's definitely something I absolutely love. So our initial problem really was that kind of change management, just like running launching so much fun but an awful lot of difficulty. And then I think the other sort of areas is around our balance between brand and lead generation. So our biggest challenge, I find, is you know, everyone sits there batman's just released a survey, actually at their last conference, where it's showing that the percentage that companies are investing in marketing spend is declining. So it it was around 13, 14% pre-COVID on average and it's now declined to about 8% as companies saw profits.

Carol Howley: 11:49

So when you have that, your automatic default is like I have to go on the instant. You get pressure as well from your CEO and CFO, who maybe don't understand the alignment between the long-term strategic element of building your brand, bringing people into market, raising awareness as opposed to the instant. Let's get the MQLs through the door Because eventually, even if you go with paid it plateaus and unless you have something behind it to help you bring more people into market, a trusted brand that people see you online, they're like, oh, I will buy from them because I trust them, because I know they're established or they're working or I like their marketing and I like the way they behave and they do things. So we have this continuous ask for an inflow of high quality leads to drive revenue and then the balance between strategic brand marketing, demand generation of actually raising awareness, greasing the wheels of the sales process, I suppose and opening the door before you can actually then just go buy our product. So it's a huge balance for us to play the long game while constantly being pressured to play the short game which has, you know, it's kind of like limited returns in the long term. So I think that's the one thing, and then that leads you to, I guess, sell the marketing alignment, which is always a massive challenge and I think it's always the famous cat and dog sort of war pictures.

Carol Howley: 12:58

But you know, we have to work really, really hard to align with the sales team, to get them on board and vice versa. You have to work really, really hard to align with the sales team, to get them on board and vice versa. You know it's not enough these days to just pass leads over to sales that the customer doesn't care. If you know, it's no longer our problem and unfortunately in marketing it's always your problem. So you know we want to kind of pass things over. We want to make sure that we work together. We have in our team, like joint planning, shared KPIs, we're integrating all our systems so we've got the same access to data and dashboards and really focused on what's the best customer experience and the best way to make revenue. That may mean some of us have to do a bit more than we think we should do or we have to work together and it's really kind of trying to get that wheel working together. So they've been probably my biggest challenges the past few years.

Andrew Grilll: 13:40

So buyer behavior has certainly changed and I'm wondering how, since your time at Skyscanner, you've seen a change and how are you, as an organization, adapting to that?

Carol Howley: 13:49

also competing with everything that a person could spend their budget on. So it's not like you're kind of competing just against the people right next to you. So the vibe has changed, but also, I think, because of that activity and you know as leaning on things like lead generation and form fills and capturing data and using data to sort of chase people down and call them and stalk them and turn up at the house in the sort of sales process that we've all modeled in B2B businesses and, strangely enough, people don't like handing over their email address and then being stalked by salespeople and marketers and emailed every five minutes. So I think, as a result of that, what we've seen is a huge amount of buyers kind of stepping back, going incognito, doing their own research, not giving up their email address for anything, because they know exactly what will happen. So we've seen buyer behavior actually see, you know, get them going through to like 70, 80% of the way through their buying journey before they even interact with the sales team. So it's actually people are doing their research on third party sites. On second party sites, you know information anywhere they can find that involves them doing the research.

Carol Howley: 15:03

I know I'm probably one of the worst people because obviously I work in marketing and I know exactly what will happen. But I do my research by going into an amazing slack group or whatsapp chat that I have with other cmos and then I always just sort of ask you know, I'm thinking of this tooling, who's using what? What do you think's best, what's great for your market? Then I get a good view from them. I'll go on to g2, capterra, trust, trustradius, whichever sort of platform at that time that I can see the best results, read some of the reviews, see that that company is responding to those reviews and then I'll go and buy. I'll literally reach out and be like hi, I'm interested in you. I'm comparing you between X and Y maybe, and pretty much the first company that responds, with a salesperson that actually listens to me and understands my problems, then I'll probably buy it. And we've seen actually that over 80, 90% of sales. If you can get there within five minutes and you actually have listened to what the person's telling you, you've got an amazing chance to make like 400% more likely to make a sale.

Carol Howley: 15:57

So you know people are coming with. I want this, I'm ready, speak to me now, understand me and listen. And unless, unless you do that, that expectation is so high and the next person will do. You know what you're not doing, so you know it's amazing to to sort of see that huge change into like personalization experiences and a greater focus.

Carol Howley: 16:14

Really, then they're like you know, how will you make my business better? So they really want to focus on ROI and, you know, scrutinize the deals. We've seen lots more in a buying committee, even though we're quite a cheap tool, to be honest, like we're very cheap to purchase, but you know, in comparison to some huge enterprise tools. But actually you know we're having like up to 10 people on the buying committee and the it people, the marketing people, then there's like finance and all kinds of other people bringing in, and so you've got to be able to understand how to talk to all these different buyers and explain the ROI and the effect of your solution as well. So I think it's definitely a more complicated environment for sellers and marketers in the next.

Andrew Grilll: 16:51

So we know that B2B is a very different beast to B2C, but you talked about an interesting thing there in your own buying journey, you actually used influencers without knowing it. These are your other CMOs, your fellows that actually influenced the decision. They're not paid influencers or Instagram influencers. But I'm wondering how you see the B2B influencer thought leadership space change. It's kind of a loaded question because I've started doing more and more of that People would have seen. I've done some things with Intel, with Vodafone, with Dell. These are brands that are trusting me to give advice and opinion on their products and services and obviously I have reach and I have some level of thought leadership, I suppose. But talk to me about how traditional influence marketing and also your own informal influencer group actually is something you're using in your own marketing or your colleagues are using their marketing in the B2B space.

Carol Howley: 17:39

If you join community groups and things that you can start to kind of strategically engage directly with some decision makers and also with other organizations. So I think, because it's more careful consideration of the journey, you know people actually look at those multiple stakeholders. They want to broaden the information sources that they have and so, leveraging your influences, you can really enhance your credibility, reach this wider network and also influence them about perceptions and activities. So the channels in b2b are typically centered around kind of thought leaders rather than those additional influencers. I think in b2c you know it's very celebrity. People know who they are, you know it's easy to kind of spot, whereas the influencers in b2b are very much kind of you know they're educated, they know they've got experience, they've got a track record.

Carol Howley: 18:21

So people will be very kind of critical if you don't have that level of experience or expertise such as yourself that you can actually bring to that advice and that conversation. So you know it's very different. It's not always sort of a paid for thing and it's often kind of very related to other companies and brands and kind of links really nicely into kind of the area of partnership, marketing and having a bit of a near-bound strategy. We call it. That means you kind of leverage and reach within that industry and within trusted and recommended areas. That enables you to kind of leverage that opportunity. So I think for us that's the biggest area that we would use it and also how it kind of really works into our mix.

Andrew Grilll: 18:57

There are so many marketing channels out there now it's almost confusing, and I'm sure it's confusing for a marketer. So is there one particular marketing channel that works best for you?

Carol Howley: 19:04

So we do have some like higher performing marketing channels. Sometimes marketing gets a bad reputation because it is hard to explain the kind of like the mathematical channels, the elements of like trust and reputation and relationship, and how all of that kind of plays in together to kind of, I guess, optimize your business kind of reputation, your opportunity for sales, and each channel plays kind of a different role. A really good statistic I think it was Gartner again that quoted I think it's 300% higher results if you integrate your marketing campaigns, which means across multiple channels. So more than four channels gives you that opportunity to drive much higher results because you're reaching people not only multiple times but you're also kind of reaching people in different areas and the places where they'd go. So our kind of idea is that we wrap people in the same messaging so that they see things you know over and over again.

Carol Howley: 19:54

And part of the reason for that is that it takes over kind of a thousand touch points for a company to find a person, to find out about company, to actually end up buying, you know, on average.

Carol Howley: 20:07

So some people go instantly and then other people will take all these kind of multiple circuitous routes and they'll see you at an event and they'll see an ad, or they'll receive an email, or someone will say, oh, I've just bought this, did you know it's actually quite good.

Carol Howley: 20:14

Or they'll see you on a podcast and you know, hear you talking. And so diversifying your marketing efforts means that you reach people in different areas, whether it's like search engine, social media, email, the outreach. So we try and kind of retain an element of consistent messaging, reinforcing our brand, and kind of really encounter people multiple times so that it brings them through in the journey to invest in a really good content engine. You have to do paid advertising, but you have to scale beyond paid search across different areas such as display, social, all of these side of things, and also start to leverage opportunities from other areas, as we were just discussing around review sites, influencers, community, the news, pr, podcasts. So really starting to do those table stakes elements and then leverage everything else that you could do to sort of start to, I guess, hit people in multiple ways and also tell your story in different formats.

Andrew Grilll: 21:07

So we can't do a podcast in 2024 without mentioning the A word AI. I'd love to know how AI is being adopted within your marketing team and processes.

Carol Howley: 21:16

It's funny, in the last year, you know, ai, from what it was over a year ago to now, has just been this explosion, I think there's, like now, thousands of tools being launched every single day. They were saying in terms of like having AI, or claiming to have AI, as some of the tools do. So for us, very much, adopting AI into our process has been hugely important for that kind of sustainable growth. And but what I can? What I initially said to my team when you know know, we had a bit of, I guess, pushback by people like, what if it takes my job? What if I'm replaced by all this kind of thing? And I was actually yes, you will be, but you won't be replaced by AI. You'll be replaced by someone who's understood how to use it, how to leverage it, how to use it in an intelligent way that enables us to scale faster. So we're investing in AI tools wherever possible to scale our operations, to automate tasks, to do routine things, to personalize at scale, to analyze data as well. So one thing that we did in the last week was pull out all of our reviews, obviously completely anonymize them and make sure there was nothing there that would relate to us. Run them through AI, pull out the key trends like what's happening, what should we do, what are some great product ideas so you can do. If we did that, we'd spend a whole week doing that analysis normally and it's taken us about 20 minutes to kind of do that whole thing. So for us, the massive opportunity with AI is to like absolutely speed everything up. Another thing we've got is you know, if campaigns aren't running well enough, then we automatically switch budget and we switch money into kind of the new ones, whereas before that would be someone monitoring, working out percentages and it just gives you it in the dashboard. So that's a great opportunity.

Carol Howley: 22:47

And also using tools for writing. So obviously you can use chat, gpt. We've actually got jasper um, which is an amazing tool for us. There's other other opportunities, but we are using jasper um and it helps us create these really amazing tailored content and experiences that we can then use in our marketing to scale.

Carol Howley: 23:04

And we've actually taught our tone of voice for our brands. They really really scarily taught my tone of voice, so every now and then they were like this is in your tone of voice and I'm like really, it actually is a little bit like me, it's a bit horrible. So it's really good to help us with that content creation at speed, because sometimes you're sapping like I know I want to write about this but I've got no idea how to start, and it's that amazing thing, just sort of say you know, here's what I'm trying to say and it just gives you such great inspiration. So you know, it's a really massive transformative shift in how we develop our products and also how we can connect with customers at scale and make it kind of personalizing quick as well. So for us it's just been amazing and super exciting.

Andrew Grilll: 23:42

Now you mentioned Jasper. That's a tool that I've also recommended to people in my book for marketers. That seems to lend itself well to the marketing discipline. But are there any other tips that you've seen that you can give our listeners about how to best use AI, the sort of key?

Carol Howley: 23:55

ones that I've said is around kind of content creation, which obviously, jasper, we've also used Wr in the past, both fantastic tools. Um, you know, we've we've mainly used a lot of things for writing.

Carol Howley: 24:06

So we actually dabble in sort of things like claude and chap gpt as well. We have license for those. Microsoft co-pilot is really brilliant as well, for you know writing your emails and also kind of it comes in and tells you know how your tone is and if it's kind of appropriate or if you want to ask questions of how you should write and introduce that tonality into your emails. We've used it within our sales process, which is really helpful. So we've taught a sort of chatbot to understand our company, our data, and also to kind of understand some problems that people might be encountering from a customer perspective problems with the tool or questions they may ask so that we can very quickly, even if someone's not online in the middle of the night, answer questions that people may have on the other side of the world, without necessarily employing people to be available just in case someone needs help. So you know, having that kind of ability to have sort of very easily easy to find, because often you sat there in an FAQ trying to work out the right thing, whereas if you can kind of have someone sort of, I guess, curate that search, it's fantastic.

Carol Howley: 25:06

And we've also used sort of AI to train some of our sales people so you can do some amazing sales training where it actually gives some feedback on. You missed this point, or you should have said this, and you know actually, if you're selling the company. You weren't quite right in this description, because you can teach, obviously, ai all of the elements, so having a sort of ability to use it to train our salespeople is really good. And also we've been experimenting with Midjourney, which is amazing for creating images, and it's incredible the images you can create and we don't use as much as we possibly should. And we've also been investigating, like video creation too. So we do a lot of onsite videos that we usually shoot, but looking how we can actually scale that a bit faster if we did use AI to help us as well.

Andrew Grilll: 25:45

It's fascinating how things have changed. I'm just thinking about your discussion about the chatbot. Probably three or four years ago, when I was looking at playing with chatbots, you had to give it a tree and a structure, and only if this happened then this would happen Now, as you say, you can teach it its tone of voice. You can tell it what to say and not say. I think this will revolutionize things For marketers. Listening to this. They need to play with it. Maybe they're not ready to deploy the chatbot yet, but they should actually be experimenting, see what it can and can't do. I think a lot of people, myself included, have had that aha moment. It's like you mean it can do this. Have you had an aha moment with these new technologies and tools?

Carol Howley: 26:17

Yeah, definitely, I think, for me. I was listening to an amazing podcast a while ago. It's by the CMO of HubSpot and he was talking about actually and I was finding I was doing some prompting and learning myself and teaching myself. But he was like, actually AI is as good as what you tell it because obviously it's a learned model. So he was kind of very much talking about you know, it's only as good as your prompts, which made me kind of.

Carol Howley: 26:41

I went on a course run by our investors, insight Partners, and they ran a course on Gen AI that they kind of effectively walked you through the quality of the prompts SaaS company and this is our key audiences and you can feed in some of your audience data and then it gives AI that picture because you can't expect it to automatically, I guess, read your mind and know that you want to talk to a marketing audience in a professional voice about this and your product does X, y and Z and all of this information.

Carol Howley: 27:19

So if you remember to kind of feed it in or, you know, obviously teach it through a model that you paid money for, then you've got that ability to actually, you know, use it in the best possible way. So I think because the whole element of AI is it's as good as what you tell it and it's as good as you are in using it. So I think that's the biggest learning sort of aha moment for me was how much better, how much better content I could create and activities I could do when I actually learned how to explain myself properly.

Andrew Grilll: 27:47

I suppose you mentioned that AI is not reading our mind. I think we're not far off, because if it knows everything about us, it can infer maybe better than our spouse can as to what we're thinking. So wouldn't it be amazing if, as a marketer, you could know what your customer was thinking, or vice versa?

Carol Howley: 28:05

Yeah, definitely, and I think you know some of the things. I was at a conference this couple of weeks ago actually, where they did a demo of, you know, a trained AI model who would be almost like your solutions engineer on a call. So the AI joined. I think they were called OneMind and the AI joined and was there like knew all the technical data, all of the information, everything you know, and it was interacting with people and it's definitely creepy, but I do think that will. You know. Obviously, if you spend time, it'll increasingly understand what you want and what you need and how you do it and you know it is fascinating to sort of see how that kind of I guess, ai has sort of synthesize people and talent.

Andrew Grilll: 28:42

It's amazing. Well, it leads me to my next question synthesize talent, audio and video cloning. I have an audio clone. I have a video clone with a company called Veed that have done a video clone for me so I can now appear in multiple places and actually I played my video clone on stage 15 to 20 minutes into me being in front of an audience and they've gone. Oh, my goodness, that is a carbon copy of you. This is really scary scary or not? Where do you see audio video cloning working and marketing programs going forward and how important you think it is to label ai generated content?

Carol Howley: 29:15

in terms of on the marketing and using it. I think it's amazing for like, especially for us, for different languages. We operate in multiple countries, so being able to have you know that kind of clone, being able to instantly sort of translate or, you know, do what you need in that language, is fantastic. Have dialect, different dialects and also kind of adapt to demographic profiles and you know there's no need for kind of multiple people to be brought into things. You actually you can just literally replicate things or clone yourself to a degree. And I think it also reduces the costs with content production. I know that we've saved thousands and thousands of pounds in translation in production. You know all those costs associated with the traditional content element and hiring, talent and logistics and you know it's just speeded up everything we can do and decreased our costs enormously. So it's really interesting. And then in terms of like labeling and sort of I guess saying whether or not it's really interesting, and then in terms of like labeling and and sort of I guess saying whether or not it's ai and and we've certainly come up against that discussion in in our kind of business and we're like you know, effectively it's anything that you produce that's through ai is kind of copied or taken or replicated the information somewhere. But then I guess that information, by putting it out there, you're making it publicly available. So I so I guess what's your.

Carol Howley: 30:23

One of the interesting things and I'm sure we'll see more and more cases is like what is proprietary ownership of thought leadership? If you are publishing it and making it available, you know someone's, you publish things like you know, I'm reading a book at the minute and I'm probably taking ideas on board that I'll, you know, reiterate to other people. And you know, in a sense AI is doing that, but with a lot more kind of capability for remembering than myself, for example. I think it's more you know, more accurate remembering and also synthesizing at speed. So I don't know at what point and I certainly don't want to be the person making the decision, but you know there is an element of like copywriting and sort of rights and you know, do you distribute other people? But then if you are putting it on the, what right do you have per se? So yeah, I don't necessarily have the answer, but I think it's a fascinating debate that we need to be having as well.

Andrew Grilll: 31:12

So what should marketers be focusing on preparing for in the age of AI?

Carol Howley: 31:16

So I think the biggest thing AI is going to do is when you think about what we've just been talking about, with that huge proliferation of content, that ability to create content. There's already more than enough bad content out there, let's be honest. It's hard enough to find something on the internet. So I think for sort of search and awareness building, ai is going to be a massive complication for people as it becomes harder and harder to find the right information and also people will then start, I guess, using ai to curate the information available to them. So you'll be living in more of a bubble, so it'll be harder and harder as well to reach new people across mediums. So for us, what we've kind of started to do with that more channel element is kind of start to have more and more chances to to speak to people across different mediums, different formats. Because if, for example, ai is curating your search and only serving things it thinks you want to hear, we may not be within that kind of bubble of what people are sort of being told they want to hear. We're also competing against hundreds of millions other brands creating really fast, quick content. So I think for you know, that kind of awareness driving, it's going to be massively complicated and it's already having massive impacts in terms of search, what google will be doing, how their age is evolving in terms of how they display results and also in terms of, like you know, do they trust the, the actual website of the brand people aren't necessarily within their buyer journey, going there until the end or do they trust other sources? So then you need to think about how do you kind of be present on all the other sites that you could be to make sure that you reach people.

Carol Howley: 32:39

So I think the biggest area in that sort of top of funnel search is going to be where we see huge disruption and complication.

Carol Howley: 32:49

We've also got that coupled with kind of cookie-less advertising and sort of Web3 coming in. So I think for marketers it's going to be a lot of fun over the next sort of few years to navigate that process. I think AI will have a huge impact, as we've discussed, in terms of that conversion element. So at the point that they come into your ecosystem, being able to serve personalized, relevant web pages based on where they're coming from, being able to of adapt your emails very, very quickly without human intervention, to kind of speak to people in the right tone of voice and the right relevant information. You know change campaigns and activities and, you know, make all of that happen really seamlessly. So the the opportunity for conversion and really investing in that conversion is is incredible because of the personalization and the speed you can work. So I think you know they're the kind of two areas that will have the biggest impact and be able to kind of have the biggest challenge on one side, and improvement on the other side.

Andrew Grilll: 33:38

So you mentioned cookie-less advertising. So how does that change the way you market your product and how important does first-party data become for you and your clients?

Carol Howley: 33:47

I think it's a real shift in how we approach targeting and data collection, like we won't be able to use that third party data as much as before, so we have to kind of rely on the first party, which is the information you can collect directly from the customer, so them actually saying, yes, you can definitely market to me, versus being able to kind of market to them without necessarily all the permissions based on their behaviors or things.

Carol Howley: 34:08

So in order to navigate that, I think you have to develop those direct relationships. You have to, you know, really optimize your channels so that you can reach people and make sure they're performing really well, such as your website, you know, being present in search results, being, you know, leaked to by other companies, other companies, other media, you know, doing more and more and kind of diverse by the mediums of your marketing. You can do a lot more through sort of email marketing, but to your own base. I think you need to really expand across those other areas. That you know means that you can ask for people to opt into your ecosystem a lot more and also sort of be more present in other areas. And also you're going to have to encourage people to share their information and have a really good updated preferences. Sites offer great experiences, discounts, content, things that will actually make people want to engage with you, retain that relationship and sort of keep you in their books as such.

Andrew Grilll: 35:00

So leading question how can an email signature help in this regard?

Carol Howley: 35:04

I think email signatures do become increasingly valuable because it's the emails that you send as a person or as your business, to people that you have already interacted with. So it's all the contacts or all the people that you're directly reaching out with. So you're not necessarily in that kind of situation where, with mass promotional emails, you have to very much be mindful of things like GDPR and spamming people. You know it's past that point, someone's already there. So you have 100% deliverability of the messaging that you're sending because it's in that signature. It's not like an add-on or, you know, sending an image or an attachment that say it's part of your email. And I know that I send like too many emails probably about 50 a day and I receive probably about 500. And you know if they're not kind of properly branded and they're not standing out and people do generate a lot of trust from that kind of relationship, so you can dynamically update them.

Carol Howley: 35:53

You can make sure that it's really, really relevant to that sort of recipient. You can promote your marketing, as we said, present your brand very professionally. You can also personalize it by the person who's receiving it. So it does give you that ability to actually get the message across. When you think about the number of people you'll actually see you're advertising and you're paying for that opportunity. So the ROI on actually using an email signature we do have an ROI calculator on our website so people can actually put in. You know what, if I did on advertising what they do, what my reach be, and we usually see between six and eight percent click through on our signatures, so people are actually clicking. You can obviously see all that analytics within your dashboards as well, so you know which of those people are doing what. So you can actually start to build a really good picture through those signatures to see and just make sure your messages are received.

Andrew Grilll: 36:40

I think so we're almost out of time, but we're up to my favorite part of the show the quickfire round, where we learn more about our guests. Iphone or Android iPhone round, where we learn more about our guests iPhone or Android iPhone, window or aisle?

Carol Howley: 36:50

Definitely the window. I love looking out the window In the room or in the metaverse. I spend a lot of time in both of those places, so for me I'd love to say outside, because the second that I'm not at work, I'm out the door. Your biggest hope for this year and next. We've been investing loads in my marketing team and I'd love us to get to the point where we're really able to invest in everyone's careers and give them a great opportunity to start learning. I wish that AI could do all of my Dishes, I think.

Andrew Grilll: 37:13

The app you use most on your phone.

Carol Howley: 37:15

I think it probably is LinkedIn at the minute, the best advice you've ever received. You can choose to feel frustrated, you can choose to feel angry or you can choose to say that can you solve it? Yes or no. And if you can't, do you worry about it because it's not going to change? And if you can, let's go and do something about it. What are you reading at the moment? I'm reading two books, because I can never manage to focus on just one thing. I'm reading Mind the Inclusion Gap and also the Courage to Be Disliked. Final quick fire question how do you?

Andrew Grilll: 37:39

want to be remembered.

Carol Howley: 37:40

I think, for sticking to my values. I think it's really important to do so. You know, I care a lot about people. I care a lot about how people should be treated and how the best way to behave and all of that side of things.

Andrew Grilll: 37:55

And do your best to be a really nice, genuine authentic person, and so I think I'd like to be remanded for that. So my view is that our email signature is a unique piece of marketing real estate. So what three things should brands be doing to capitalize on this?

Carol Howley: 38:04

So I mean, obviously, invest in a managed email signature tool is it's a really good, so you know, making sure that you do that and then bringing in things like we've seen having photos in your emails massive impact for people because it's like that's a real person, you know they're genuine person, they exist, and so actually having photos in your email signatures and the correct information means that they can contact you and then utilizing you know it to promote something relevant. I think when you can speak to people in a way that's timely, relevant and provides really good, valuable information is the best way to kind of like not only to market to them but actually kind of build a relationship. So what we're really about is building our brand is all about building connections, building trust and enabling that other business or that person to develop or to grow those relationships, know those relationships and that trust by the sort of method of communication.

Andrew Grilll: 38:52

Carol, a fascinating discussion. How can we find out more about you and your product?

Carol Howley: 38:57

www. exclaimer. com and also on LinkedIn. You know my name is Carol Howley, our company's Exclaimer, so the company page and mine are on LinkedIn, so very active on there as well, carol, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Voiceover: 39:09

Thank you for listening to Digitally Curious. Andrew's new book Digitally Curious is available to order at digitallycuriousai. You can find out more about Andrew and how he helps corporates become more digitally curious with keynote speeches and C-suite workshops at digitallycuriousai. Until next time, we invite you to stay digitally curious.