AMA with Heather Campbell of Search Engine Journal
In this candid discussion, Heather Campbell shared how Search Engine Journal (SEJ) has evolved over its 20-year history. From once relying almost exclusively on Google’s organic traffic to now focusing on branding, newsletters, and data-driven experimentation, Heather delved into what makes SEJ stand out—and how they plan to keep driving audience engagement in a rapidly changing environment.
Part 1
Part 2
Transcript:
Heather Campbell
Great. So Search Engine Journal, we've been around for over 20 years. We talk about everything search from SEO appealing to technical search professionals to people who are doing paid and PPC content and social. And really our subscription business is based around our newsletter. We have a very engaged reader base. We are global, we have a global readership, so we touch all the different parts of the world for those who are really interested in learning how to better optimize their campaigns, again, whether that's organic or paid, and have more successful campaigns, especially with all the changes that are out there right now. I think we're all experiencing some pain and looking for ways that we can have more success with the marketing campaigns that are driving business outcomes.
Matt
Hmm, that's great. So search engine journal started when search was pretty nascent. It was a really dynamic market at that point in time as well, but now it's mature and we have a lot of new things to talk about. Tell me a little bit about how the last couple of decades have gone in terms of following an industry that initially was a bit like the wild west and then kind of settled out. How, how has that affected your business and your growth opportunities, the size of your audience and how you serve them?
Heather Campbell
So being an SEO publication, we talk a lot about SEO. So we were really good at SEO and getting in front of people who were searching for topics that we were talking about organically. And so a lot of our growth was really, we built an organic base. We relied on Google and the traffic that it could drive for us. Where that is shifted is into something that is certainly more content based.
Matt
I think what would be really interesting to know is was the subscription, the newsletter component, a part of Search Engine Journal at the very beginning, or is that something that you have built up over time? Because newsletter subscriptions are incredibly important right now. They are in their own right, a really burgeoning part of media generally, right? So I'm curious to understand how that part of your product experience became part of Search Engine Journal.
Heather Campbell
Yeah, so we've been around for over 20 years and when we first started, it was definitely just relying on Google and to drive traffic. Our subscription model...
I came in here four years ago and it was already built. However, it was not nurtured. So we had this nice list, we had a very robust list, but what we found that we didn't have the engagement that we thought.
So what we've really spent time is working on deliverability, cleaning our list, but really looking at the engaged people. So our subscription model is more of a newsletter at this point. I hate to say that because that diminishes it. It's not like you would think of a normal subscription. It's not monetized per se.
But what we do have is, you know, the reliance on our organic traffic was driving that for us. And what we've seen is with that decrease in organic, we have definitely had to shift the way that we're getting subscribers. So that growth has definitely decreased the growth that we've seen. And we're looking at diversifying now.
Matt
Yeah, really interesting. So you've had subscriptions, and it's a free subscription, as you noted, for quite a while. But it sounds like for the vast majority of the history of Search Engine Journal, the growth has come from search traffic and essentially benefiting from all the things that you're educating your own audience to do for their businesses. Is that right? And now you're adapting. Now you're recognizing that with all the changes that are happening in the search space now, that subscription list that you've had, all those subscribers that you've been gathering as part of the newsletter are where a lot of the value because there's more engagement, more intention with that audience. And if you've been doing this now for four years, quite honestly, you're a bit ahead of the game in terms of the development of the newsletter space. We're seeing so many publishers that have been around for a very, very long time just now leaning into those relationships and leaning into the opportunities that might exist around engaging people more on a one-to-one basis.
I'm curious, how are you from a, because you're in your position, you're not only responsible for growing the audience, which is visitors to search engine journal, but the subscribers to the newsletter, as well as the sales side of things in terms of the sales to advertisers. Is that right?
Gotcha. So it's really hand in hand, which is really nice. You have the opportunity to do the things that are going to grow the audience and create more value for your audience, but also the things that going to create more value for your advertisers. How does that work for you? How do you balance those two priorities?
Heather Campbell
It is, it's not something that we had looked at until really a couple years ago, really bringing together. So we've brought together sales and marketing and what we're looking at is what, who are the ICPs, the target audience that are important to our sponsors? because, you know, they are the ones that, that help keep our lights on. but even without them, it's the same target that we would be interested in in the first place. And so what we're looking to do is provide value. We're looking at ways that we can segment, that we can personalize, that we can get the right content in front of the right people. So having one newsletter to feed everybody isn't really where it's at anymore.
What we're looking at is ways that we can take the list that we have. And it's not about the vanity metrics. It's not about how many people are in the list. It's about their engagement and how can we get the right content in front of the right people. And so when we look at the editorial content that we are creating, we're looking at telling more of a journey and running the readers through a journey. How do we meet them where they are?
How do we make sure that we're talking about, you know, for our sponsors, you know, we're really walking them through a funnel with our readers. How do we get them to understand the importance of, you know, awareness in middle of the funnel before they go straight for that bottom of the funnel sell and using the right type of content in each of those journeys and each of those stages to help them.
Matt
That's really fascinating. I love your description of the various needs that your audience might have, as well as the various needs that your advertisers might have as well. How do you keep your finger on the pulse of all of that? Are you doing any sort of research?
Heather Campbell
Absolutely. So, you know, luckily we're in a space where we're doing research all the time, where we're a team of marketers, our entire company is marketers and search professionals. So we've always been like, you know, what are people searching for? What are they looking to learn? What solutions, what pain, what pain are they looking to solve? Right. So ways that we've done that, you know, have been looking of course at different tools and platforms that tell us what people are searching for. AI has certainly helped with this, right? Because we can do more deeper dives and cross-reference and upload data that we have. No PII, just in case anyone's uploading data to AI. But we're really looking at ways that we can hone in on their interest.
Matt
Gotcha. So you're taking what I think probably a lot of SEO professionals are very familiar with is understanding the behaviors that are existing in the search context, in the tools that tell people what sort of queries are being asked, what the keyword strings might look like, the associations that people are making between the keywords they're using and the goals they're trying to achieve or their jobs to be done, so to speak. You're using that information and you're applying that to your own marketing strategies. And that is that manifesting in the content? Is it manifesting in the experiences in the site and the product? Is it manifesting in your own marketing and advertising dollars and investments?
Heather Campbell
Yeah, absolutely. mean, so we're blessed that we have enough content that we can do some testing with. And we can look at what is the intent, and when they're looking at an article, how deep are they reading into it? So we're looking at, the things that we're talking about, are they hitting the mark?
Beyond that, we have the newsletter. So what are they clicking into? What actions are they taking after that? If we find topics that they're not really interested in, we're using our own site search to understand maybe there's content that we don't have on here. So what are they searching for? Are they finding what they're looking for? And then of course, there's a social side of things, social listening, you know, some scraping and looking at, you know, what people, what are marketers, What are their pain points? What are they looking to solve?
Matt
What about surveys? Are you asking questions of your site and product users or your newsletter subscribers?
Heather Campbell
We do not as much as we would probably like, but that's where segmentation comes in. Being able to do more to smaller groups to get more refined results. We do our annual state of SEO surveys, so that helps us really understand and have a pulse on the industry and what's important to marketing leaders out there.
We do polls on social. I'm trying to think like, you know, so it's the little things as well that help give us insights. And, you know, what are other experts saying out there? We do, you know, we have a great contributor base, so we rely on them. Like, what are they seeing?
Matt
Gotcha. Right. And so all of this insight that you're gathering from search tools, from the research that you're doing, from your contributor base, all of that kind of comes together into, I would imagine some ideation around how you can either develop new editorial content or new product features or other things that are going to grow your audience. Right. How do you process that sort of discovery information and turn that into something that you're going to do to achieve your goals?
Heather Campbell
It depends on what the goals are, right? We're looking at a lot of the time it's intent plus action. Like what are they doing? So we can test with our own content, we can test with our newsletters and like recently we put out… We created two new products last year for our sponsors. So specifically tugging on the sponsor side that end up being for our readers. So two of them, we put two of them out. One took off really, really well. And one didn't go so great.
So what we're looking at is not just how our readers are responding to it, but then how are our sponsors, how does it performing for them? You know, maybe it's a lead gen piece. Are those the leads that we're sending converting for them on the other side?
We're using those indicators to help us refine and optimize. And if the product doesn't do well, if we find that it's not getting the readership, it's not getting the downloads or the views, it's something that we might just table and look at bringing something else in to replace. Whenever we're looking at something that's not performing as well, it's a matter of how much resources that we're putting into it and could we be doing something else.
Matt
Gotcha. Right. Yeah. That's, that's always a fascinating challenge, right? Because nobody has unlimited time, unlimited budget or unlimited team. always having to prioritize our efforts around the things that hopefully are going to have the greatest impact. I love your point about the metrics and I wonder, can you share, what are the metrics that you're focused on? Do you have, know, there's a lot of talk these days about how important it is for publishers to have a North star metric.
Do you have one and if so, how are you pursuing that?
Heather Campbell
Our North Star metric has got to be retention. I think that that should be what a lot of companies, especially B2B, are focused on. Of course, we're tracking, you know, the company goals and we're looking at newsletter open rates and click through rates. Those are all important. But what we're looking at is we want growth in a very specific place, not just growth in general. We're looking at growth for very specific ICPs. So we're looking for reach and retention. It's not about getting just the right people in the door or not getting just people in the door, but the right people in the door. So, you know, like we talked about we don't have a monetization strategy, but if we did, we would absolutely be looking at like revenue per subscriber and, you know, lifetime value recurring revenue models. But for us, we're really tracking what happens after that click. If we're promoting a webinar which feeds our subscriber list per se, you know, it's not just enough to say that webinar user attended or registered.
We want to know did they attend and did they stay afterwards because maybe there's more likelihood that they're going to engage with other products, you know, in the future. So we're really looking at not just the typical analytics rates that you can see, right? We're looking beyond that. What is the action that they're taking and making sure that we're building the right audience that we need for not just us, but for our sponsors as well.
Matt
I love that focus on retention as the primary objective. And I think, you know, very often folks would love to say that that's their primary intention as well. But then there is that sense that we can't retain somebody we haven't yet acquired. Right. And there's this this conflict that exists, which I see oftentimes just leads towards a gravitational pull towards more and more acquisition and a bit of a neglect on that retention side.
How do you fight against that? How do you keep everybody focused on retention when it's just so easy to say, but we need to acquire more?
Heather Campbell
That’s where a really good CRM or automation comes into play, right? And one of the things that I took away from when I did the workshop with you all a couple years ago is the importance of onboarding and then building that automation to really retain. And if you can set up the automation…
I don't want to say set it and forget it because you never want to do that. But if you have the right segmentation and you have the right automation set up, it can let you spend more time on the acquisition side. But setting up that foundation, you know, you can get all the new users that you want. If you don't have the right onboarding and the right mechanisms to keep them, you're going to lose them, which means that those acquisition efforts are then just a wash.
So, and then it's harder to get them to come back a second time, right? So really, it's tough. It's tough to find the balance because it's easy to say to leadership or to show the numbers that are like, hey, this is how many new subscribers we got, you know, it's a little bit more difficult to say, hey, we set up these retention, you know, but if you can show the churn or the... the decrease in churn, right? That's the ultimate goal. So it's about making sure that you're talking to leadership and whoever's putting the budget and the resources into this about, it's not just what we can see right now, but it's also what comes out on the other side. So looking at those churn numbers and understanding that needs to be a big part of it.
Matt
Yeah, that's great. know, building the foundation and building the infrastructure that's going to catch your new acquisitions and keep your new acquisitions doing that before you started the acquisition flywheel or invested very heavily in the acquisition flywheel is only going to make that much more valuable. It's going to make it that much more effective over the long term, right? When you're looking at the metrics that go beyond just the point of acquisition. And that's such a struggle that we often see because the effort in retention, as you just pointed out, can't necessarily demonstrate its ROI in the short term. It really is a long term ROI effort.
So your point about making that case to leadership, how do you go about doing that? What is the sort of the metrics that you're most interested in demonstrating value and then using that as a storyline for getting the green light on new projects or new investments, whatever it might be?
Heather Campbell
It's about region retention and it's about showing the numbers to leadership. You know, tracking with business goals. You know, what are the business goals and then aligning your efforts in a manner that leadership is gonna understand them and putting them back, know, make your feedback loop almost, you know, bringing that back to the company goals in a manner that they're gonna understand that, right? If you're talking about things in the short term or just your marketing silo, you have to be able to bring that up to a leadership level and talk to them about the importance of retaining.
We actually just went through this exercise where we put our Q1 company goals together and we were like, you know, X percent growth on, you know, US subscribers looking for a very specific set between me and our CEO, we were talking about this and growth was actually different to both of us. And we were looking at these numbers a little differently and the way that I was looking at that included churn and the way that she was looking at it, she's like, just straight numbers off the top. And I was like, but that only shows part of the picture and talking through it and getting leadership to understand some of the nuances perhaps is really what can help get them in your court.
Matt
Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And when you have a balance, sorry, when you have a business that balances a, you know, a site experience where people can come in to visit your content and consume your content, you're to have large numbers potentially there versus those that actually subscribe and read the newsletter and stick around for a long period of time. So growth in one area doesn't necessarily equate to growth in the other area, nor does it represent value to the business overall. You really have to get on the same page with leadership in terms of which measurement of growth is going to create the value that this business needs ongoing.
So this leads us, I think, nicely to the question of what the heck is happening in search right now, right? Because if we're seeing that AI is now having some role in the way people use search generally, how is that affecting your ability to capture these audiences, to continue to bring in new folks to the site or to the newsletter?
Heather Campbell
Yeah, I think, you know, like many other publishers, we've experienced a decline in organic traffic. It has definitely impacted our subscriber growth. It's interesting that it didn't decrease as much like our subscriber, you know, decreased and decreased as much as the traffic loss, you know, which tells us maybe some of the traffic that we lost wasn't exactly like our core, core stuff that was talking really to those ICPs. So until ChatGPT and AI are able to replace that organic traffic, we're really looking if that day even comes. It's really forced us to re-examine our own SEO strategy and to diversify beyond Google. It's the same thing that we tell our readers.
Diversify your marketing strategies and we're in that same boat. So we're doing some new things this year. We're looking at ways that, you know, different ways other than Google organic to bring in readers, which is like maybe focusing a little more on social, which is a place that historically we've just kind of been like, well, we don't talk like a community to our readers, we’re very much like, we give information. So social has kind of been one of those things like, how do we interact? How do we use it as not something that's just like reiterating the news? And so these are places that we're looking for getting our name out there, building our brand, and getting in front of some of these marketers that don't know who we are. They're not in the search realm yet, right? Or it's what we're finding is there's this gap in knowledge about how to really bring search into your business objectives, into your marketing plan.
It's often been treated as like the redheaded stepchild. Can I say that? We're both redheads. Can I say that? The redheaded stepchildren, right, Matt? So it's a place that I don't think all marketers or even some business leaders, like those marketing leaders, really understand how search fits into the overall ecosystem of marketing. And that's one of the places that we're looking to let people know.
Matt
That's really fascinating. I think what I'm hearing is that... Search is a mature space, right? It's been around for a very, very long time. And to a great degree, it's just been widely accepted today as a necessary component of your effort, especially in the publishing space, right? It was definitely a cornerstone component of building an audience, attracting folks that you can either sell a subscription to, or in your case, subscribe to for free, but then monetize through your advertisers because you have that audience there available to them.
And now we're seeing that all of the infrastructure that we've built up making this a cornerstone channel for growth is starting to be questioned, right? Like people are starting to wonder, is this going to be, I guess it's two things. Is this going to continue to be the cornerstone that we thought it was? Or is it less of a cornerstone than we realized? Maybe, maybe some of the traffic, maybe some of the visitors that we were sourcing through search, weren't as valuable as we now need them to be and we have to adapt to focus more on the valuable audiences versus the scale of the audience.
Heather Campbell
Absolutely, absolutely. It is for sure about, you know, the quality over the quantity. It's about what you're putting in front of them and who you're able to attract with it.
Matt
Now I think that's kind of always been, in my experience, search, we've always been able to say this is a higher quality audience than an advertised to audience, right? That we're purchasing or that we're renting because these folks have an intention that we're capitalizing on, where if we're meeting their intention, we're meeting their needs and clearly they're higher quality to us.
I guess the challenge now is how do we actually get in front of those people when Google isn't necessarily sending them your way any longer, right? And they're answering their needs right at that point of the SERP with a zero click solution. This is all evolving so quickly. How are you approaching the evolution of your teams’, objectives and the way they kind of ideate and plan for the future. Cause I would imagine there's going to be a lot of, you know, lot of questions within your own internal team about where we take things going forward.
Heather Campbell
Absolutely. Transparency and really being nimble. Giving them the bandwidth to...Be nimble, have grit, right? Build with data. And in this constant evolution, it takes constant evolution to keep up. So we're doing things in sprints as opposed to planning for an entire year, which is what we used to do. So we're doing smaller campaigns in order to... you know, try to impact change and then finding things that work and trying to scale those. I think from the leader level and really, you know, it's about making sure that your team knows that we're all in the same space and that they can absolutely like bring ideas to the table so if they have something new and not doing things in the same in the same way.
I feel like we're all kind of just in this realm of like, try it and see what happens, right? Search is definitely different. One of the things that we're talking about is focusing a lot more on branding. So that way, you know, working on the awareness component. Y
Matt
There's so much in there that I find really interesting. I'd love to talk about the branding side of things and then get back into the sprints as well because.
You know, the reality of it is as much as we want to believe that there are people out there who have all the answers, the truth is everybody's just trying to figure it out. You know, from my perspective, I get the opportunity to talk to lots of different folks, all of course, looking to grow subscription businesses, but all coming at it with different products in different categories, different markets that they're trying to serve and different specific challenges that in one industry might be solved. That might be seem to be solved in another industry is a brand new problem.
And the reality is we're all just trying to figure it out. We're all just trying to capitalize on where we are now and what we know now and how we can incrementally move things forward. And your point about branding is always so interesting to me in this consideration because that is a tool. When I started my career, branding was like the largest lever to drive growth. And it has slowly been chipped away by the performance marketing industry and the accountability of the digital age of which I've been a part of entirely, contributed entirely to that.
But now I see we're coming back to a space where, as you just pointed out, branding is increasingly valuable once again. And there's always been a tie between branding and search, I'd have to add, too, right? They've always been somewhat connected because if you want to get ahead of someone's intentions and put yourself into their sort of consideration set or into their awareness, you can't do it only by being on the back end of that. You have to be at the front end of that. So how are you thinking about branding? Where are you headed with that?
Heather Campbell
I think if you look at where SEJ is and the things that we've talked about historically and the places that we need to go, we do need to sit back and look at like really who are we and what are we talking about now because it shifted. We've been pretty focused on technical SEO and really teaching people how to do the mechanics of it. And now it's really more about, you know, the content building a brand. So what we need to do then is let people know what we do, what we're talking about, and what they can come to us for. And that's going to be an entire you know, probably the rest of this year focused on what that really looks like for us. That's going to be doing things differently. That's going to be, you know, not relying on Google organic and keywords to drive people to our site. It's going to be going out and finding the people, whether that's on social, whether that's events, you know, it's getting, I think, our leaders out there our experts, know, the ones that have the information, but it's about really building our brand, you know, and that's going to take campaigns, awareness, and it's going to be fun. I'm actually really excited about it.
Matt
That's great. Is that the sprints that you're talking about? Do you have sprints planned that are along those lines?
Heather Campbell
So this is new conversations that we're having around the branding. The sprints are really more designed around like quarterly corporate goals and then some very specific goals underneath that roll up under that to help us achieve those goals. Those are the sprints that I'm talking more about, where can we get like, I don't wanna say quick wins because they're not always. They're not always about the immediacy of it, but actually starting to build foundations for longer term growth as well.
Matt
Interesting. Is there a sprint you can tell us about?
Heather Campbell
We are working and this is actually kind of part of the branding. I guess the branding, know, the sprints are kind of part of it, but you know, really looking at like our editorial strategy and what we're talking about. And so one of the sprints that we're working on first and second quarter is shifting our content calendar from what we have been historically. That's a 20-year-old, that ship has been moving in this very specific direction of where, so that's one of the sprints that we're doing. The other one is really around product. We're picking specific products. The last one was just increasing clicks on sponsored articles, things that are little but that can make a big difference.
Matt
Sure, yeah. They make a huge difference with little metrics as long as they're all pointed towards the larger metrics that you highlighted there, right? And making sure that though you may be optimizing on something like clicks, at the end of the day, those clicks are contributing to the creation of value, right? Yeah, it's very interesting.
How long do you put into these sprint efforts, both in terms of the amount of effort that you put into building something new, as well as the amount of time that you put into determining whether or not it was a success.
Heather Campbell
You know, it's that favorite SEO answer, it all depends, right? It depends on like what the project is and how long it's gonna last. What our success is. Like when we sit down to do a project, the first thing we ask is what does success look like? And that's what everything after that kind of hinges on. Right now we're doing some really cool experiments. Some experiments can run for a week and we get enough data. Some of them, you know, we're still waiting to gain enough data. So we're looking at those.
Matt
That's actually great. I'd love to talk more about your experiments. How are you identifying when an experiment may be necessary? And how are you ideating what that experiment might look like and then ultimately deploying it?
Heather Campbell
I love experiments. I think right now we're in the, how do we decide what needs experiment and what is kind of like optimizations, right? I think, you know, small things, little tiny tweaks could just be optimizations, right? But if you're looking at... like maybe we have an email that we're sending out and we're in two different camps. Somebody is like more technical, and somebody is like, no, make it more conversational. And so what we're doing, that is a perfect case for like one more testing.
Editorial content, subject or headlines, you know, what is causing people to click when in the newsletter, you know, those are definitely tests that we can, we can run against each other. We can see, you know, are people resonating more with one than the other. Whereas some of the things that we kind of do every day and we've, we've had enough, you know, maybe we've done a lot of subject line testing, we're never going to be done you know, we have a pretty good idea that if we put, you know, invite in front of a webinar, we get better, you know, open rates. So, and better click-throughs because they know what to expect on the back end. It's really just a matter of understanding, you know, what our goals are for that test. And is it something that we can gain more insights and make more data-driven decisions by running it through an actual test as opposed to just like, you know, changing it on the site and seeing what happens. So those tests are really designed to give us more information than if we're just making optimizations. So we're kind of like in test everything if it's going to be significant, you know, a significant amount of input or output from the other side.
Matt
Right. Yeah. It's always nice to know that a test will give you learnings, even if it doesn't give you wins. Right. So there's good reasons to test at all times, but then that kind of leads you back down that path of we could test so much and yet we have limited resources. So how do you prioritize your testing? What is it that's like giving you some clarity around this being the right thing to test now versus later, or this being the right thing to test versus simply just implementing as a straight up change because your confidence is there that it'll work better. How are you looking at that?
Heather Campbell
It goes back to those sprints, it goes back to like, are the company objectives that we're looking at like this quarter? You know, breaking that down departmentally and then looking at like what tests can we run to impact change and to, for example, know, increase subscribers. Right now we have three different tests running on the site, not concurrently, but we just got out of two. We have the third one running. And to your point, it's a matter of…
We're not after the wins necessarily right now. We're just in a state of crawl, walk, run, getting people comfortable with testing who might not be. Because it is a difference. We need to write two landing pages. We need to write two emails. We need to do double work and so looking at the resources that go into that, we're making sure that they support the company goals that we're after for that quarter or that half, whatever that might look like. And that's how we're making our decisions. If it's something that is incredibly resource heavy and my IT team is like, you know, this is going to take us, you know, two weeks to build and we really would take a look at it or whatever that timeframe is and make sure that the insights that we're trying to get out of it are gonna be worth that input. And a lot of times, that setup and that initial resources that go into it, they can be used for something else. So it's not like a one and done a lot of times. So that's the other thing we're looking at is if this is something that we put time into, are we going to be able to utilize it again?
Matt
That's a great way to look at it, for sure, because this is not an investment that has a shelf life necessarily, right? If it works or if the learning applies to something else, you can gain that ROI. You can gain the value of the effort for quite a long period of time. It's interesting to hear you talk about the number of experiments you're running. How many do you typically run in a quarter?
Heather Campbell
So I will tell you that we are really just starting this here in December is when we kicked off this testing. So I'm looking forward. We're trying to bake it into our culture is what we're doing as a independent publisher. You know, we're a little bit of a lean team. So it's not like we've had robust tools to go out and do these types of things before, but it's something that we're we see the value in and you know we're wondering what we have been doing better all this time so when we're so to answer your question right now we have like two running not a lot our goal though is by i think we decided by the end of the summer so end of q2 you know starting to q3 we're really looking at all departments running. And so we don't want, know, as with all testing, you don't want to run too many that might be impacting other tests, right? But at the same time, we want our teams to adopt a culture that if they're like, hmm, I wonder which one would do better, instead of just guessing, they're now able to go, hey, let's run a test on this and let's see what actually performs. So, you know, the goal is to have all departments running them by the end of the summer. You know, and then my goal is really within marketing, I would love them all to just be like within products, know, we're doing them, you know, because we could run maybe three different ones at a time or doing two on email. So, you know, the number, I guess, depends on your bandwidth and really what you have at your disposal to be able to test.
Matt
Mm, yeah, absolutely. That's incredible that you're building that culture of optimization and empowering everybody within the organization to be curious about how a test might unfold. That then leads you though to the challenge of ensuring that your testing methodologies are consistent, right? And that everybody can trust the results that you're getting or the learnings that you're getting. How are you managing the fostering and the development of that culture of experimentation in such a way that it's reliable and scalable?
Heather Campbell
So we have a very transparent culture at SEJ. We have Slack and Slack channels for all of the cool things that we do, but we do have an experiments channel. And so every time an experiment is conceived, we put it up there and we let people know, this is what we're thinking about. Once we get it developed, once it launches, we let people know about it, we get them excited. And we tell them, hey, this is not about win or lose. This is more about learning to the point that you brought up earlier and building a culture of data-driven decision-making. What we're doing is we're putting this in Slack. We have an Asana form that people can drop their ideas. So if they have something that they want to test and then we're looking at those on a regular basis. At this point, we're looking at the monthly to see like what do other people want to test?
We're getting them excited when the results come in, we're sharing the results and we're talking about them on all hands. So we do a monthly all hands, we're talking about them then. So we're very vocal about what we're doing. We're also telling them about the crawl walk run, about like, hey, this is coming your way. We're piddling in here. We have a new platform that is allowing us to track everything and getting people comfortable with what we're doing and then we're just gonna let everybody else kind of have at it.
Matt
That's great. That's great. So you have one platform that you're doing all of your experimentation through?
Heather Campbell
Well, everything that's not email-based. So most of our email stuff we're doing within our ESP makes it easy. And then for the website stuff, we're using something called Growth Book. It does take some technical setups. So our IT team is handling the technical aspects of it. But it is something that anybody can get in and they can look at the results at any time. They're clear, it's easy to read. So yeah, just one platform right now.
Matt
Having everything centralized obviously makes it easier for people to become familiar with it, to know that it's been implemented properly. It's not a new implementation. Oftentimes, it's also really helpful in that you're tracking, ideally, the same metrics with the experiments when those metrics apply, right? So you might have a certain metric for a retention experiment. You would want that metric to be the measure of success primarily for all of your retention experiments, not necessarily something that's just like an ad hoc effort every single time. That's great. That's a great efficiency for sure. When did you implement Growth Book?
Heather Campbell
December, January.
Matt
All right, yeah, so this is all brand new. It's fantastic. And so far, this culture of experimentation is yielding some great results?
Heather Campbell
It is, we've ran a couple, we're on our third. The second, I will tell you, if you wanna talk about surprises, the second one that we did.
Pop-ups are not everybody's favorite. We have definitely heard our fair share of, you know, I hate pop-ups. I will tell people if you hate pop-ups, stop converting on them. We would stop putting it up because they convert so well. But our, like I said, we're taking turns picking ideas for testing. And the last test that we ran was our head of IT, he wanted to run a pop-up that had the form embedded on it. You know, so I'm like, no way. People want to go to the landing page. They want to learn about it. And no, we saw really high conversions on these pop-up forms. I couldn't believe it. We didn't have any details other than the title on these forms. And people were like just converting left and right. Now, what was interesting and kind of not surprising, we definitely saw entire form fills from returning users. They know who we are, they know the caliber of, these are webinar pop-ups specifically, they know the caliber of webinars that we're putting out.
They were like, yeah, no problem. I'll sign up based on the title of the new users. They were the ones that we ended up testing another version that did direct them to the landing page where they could get more information. So that's the next thing that we're going to be looking at there. But I was really surprised. I'm like, people aren't going to fill out a form in a pop-up. And they did. They proved me wrong. And we saw good increases from it. So it just goes to show that just because it doesn't you know, it's not best practices to put this big thing, you know, this big pop-up up there. And I was like, no way would we deal with a bunch of smart marketers, you know, they're, going to get this and they're, they're, you know, they're not going to be happy with it. They're going to feel it's in truth. That wasn't the case. I was absolutely wrong. And that's when testing is so important.
Matt
That's great. What a great story. And I think the insight about the pop-up serving existing audience members is more of a, of an expansion experience, right? So it sounds like there was existing audience members that you were subscribing or registering to a webinar and they knew the quality of the content, the quality of the brand, all of those things. So for them, the ease of the conversion was critical. But for those new audience members, they needed a little bit more. So sending them to the landing page actually got higher conversion rates on the new folks. It's a really interesting segmentation just simply along the lines of the customer journey, recognizing where people are and meeting them where they are, as people often say. That's a great example. Excellent.
All right, Heather. Well, that's pretty much our time for today. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat. It was so interesting to hear about your experience and the development of your own culture of experimentation.
Heather Campbell
Thanks, Matt, thanks for having me. I can't wait to see how this turns out. I'm glad I got to share some knowledge with your readers and yeah, thanks for having me.
