Paras Chopra

Paras has been an entrepreneur in the marketing space for last 7 years. He has grown his company to 150 people with a strong marketing team. In short, he’s embedded in the marketing domain and has kept up with what works and what doesn’t work.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Paras’ success

 Using an automatic but authentic email from the CEO asking for feedback

Result if you follow the steps in Paras’ session

Utilize a new marketing channel that can be more effective than email marketing

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

I thought it would be useful for your viewing audience to learn how we grew or from only me working, the first version was just built by me. And I was doing sales, marketing, support, everything by myself to now where we have been 15 people $15 million run rate. And in that journey, I’ve learned quite a number of things with regards to marketing automation, because this was not possible if I had not relied on a number of things.

So rather than talking about you know, our products or talking about how to use those products, I wanted to simply talk about how I grew being effective, using different marketing automation techniques. And that’s the context. That’s why I suggested you the particular topic.

Alright, fantastic. So, in terms of your experience, and maybe we just dive straight in, what are some of the automatic, you know, emails that have worked for you and that haven’t worked for you in the past?

Yes. So from day one, I think even from marketing automation, it’s sort of not like a magic bullet you can apply and it will work every time. I think the context really has to come from why are you doing and what you want to achieve from it.

The software that you use for marketing automation are the techniques you use. I think there are only 10 or 20% of whole equation, but the other 80% of the equation is your personal philosophy towards the business and customers.

And my personal philosophy was to get really close to customers and have a very feedback oriented communication with customers. So I never sort of sold the product directly in terms of marketing automation.

For example, I never automated marketing emails and saying buy this product or this is the product feature or XYZ. But my whole approach to marketing automation was to open a communication channel by asking customers, hey, you signed up for the product, you signed up for a free trial for VWO, how do I improve the product?

And also I felt a personal touch was needed there. So rather than say, a customer use the product, how can we improve, so rather than stressing on we, I had a very simply email written like, I am SEO Official Website Optimizer and I think I was that one on time, I was also writing and doing this for the first time. And I might be making a few mistakes. So let me know, how would you use VWO? Or do you have five minutes to jump on a call?

And I felt that that sort of communication opened up. When a customer would reply to such an email, that was a much more genuine communication versus saying we want to buy Visual Website Optimizer.