by Phil Gamache
Future-proofing the humans behind the tech. Follow Phil Gamache and Darrell Alfonso on their mission to help future-proof the humans behind the tech and have successful careers in the constantly expanding universe of martech.
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April 22, 2025
<p>What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Constantine Yurevich, CEO and Co-Founder at SegmentStream. </p><p><strong>Summary</strong>: Multi-touch attribution is a beautifully crafted illusion we all pretend to believe in while knowing deep down it's flawed. The work is mysterious, but is it important? The big ad platforms sell us sophisticated solutions they don't even trust for their own internal decisions. Is it time we accept marketing causation is a thing we can’t measure? Visitor behavior scoring is a really interesting alternative or extra ingredient to consider. Often thought of as a tool for lead management to help prioritize your SDR’s time, the team at SegmentStream started using the same scoring methodology, but with an attribution application. Enter synthetic conversions. Instead of just tracking conversions, track meaningful visits like time spent, pages explored, comparisons made. This allows you to connect upper-funnel campaigns to real behavior patterns rather than just looking at who converted in a single session. </p><p><strong>About Constantine/SegmentStream</strong></p><ul><li>SegmentStream was founded in 2018 in London</li><li>Feb 2022 raised a first funding round of 2.7M</li><li>SegmentStream is now trusted by more than 100 leading customers across the globe including L’Oreal, KitchenAid, Synthesia, Carshop, InstaHeadShots, and many others</li></ul><p><br><strong>The Messy Truth About B2B vs B2C Attribution Models</strong></p><p>Price tags and decision timeframes obliterate the B2B/B2C attribution divide faster than most marketers realize. Constantine shatters conventional wisdom by showing how his team leverages their own attribution tools to measure website engagement because enterprise software purchases rarely follow predictable patterns. "Trusting last click is impossible," he explains, "because it takes too much time before conversion happens."</p><p>You've likely noticed this pattern in your own marketing stack. A $2,000 direct-to-consumer exercise bike creates the same multi-touch, 60-day consideration journey as many supposedly "straightforward" B2B software purchases. Meanwhile, those $30/month SaaS tools targeting small businesses convert with the immediacy of consumer products. Constantine points out how this pricing reality creates measurement challenges that transcend business categories:</p><p>High-ticket B2C products demand extended 30-60 day consideration windows <br>SMB-focused B2B subscriptions ($20-30/month) behave like impulse purchases<br>Enterprise B2B sales cycles stretch beyond a year with critical offline components</p><p>The offline measurement void plagues marketers everywhere. Constantine admits many of his most valuable marketing activities resist quantification. "I write a lot of LinkedIn posts, newsletters, we do podcasts. Some of these activities are very hard to measure unless you explicitly ask someone, 'How did you hear about us?'" Your gut tightens reading this because you've felt this same tension between attribution models and marketing reality.</p><p>Scale transforms your attribution approach more dramatically than business classification ever could. Small operations handling 100 monthly leads can simply ask each prospect about their discovery journey. Large enterprises processing thousands of conversions require sophisticated multi-touch models regardless of whether they sell to businesses or consumers. Constantine explains this convergence clearly: "When we talk about larger B2B businesses with thousands of leads and purchases, it becomes more similar to B2C with a long sales cycle plus an offline component."</p><p>The unmeasurable brand-building activities require a leap of faith that makes data-driven marketers squirm. Constantine embraces this uncertainty with refreshing honesty: "When you post on LinkedIn, build your personal brand, share content—that's really hard to measure and I don't even want to go there." His team focuses on delivering value through content, trusting that results will materialize. "You just share your content and eventually you see how it plays off." This pragmatic acceptance of attribution limitations feels like cool water in the desert of measurement obsession.</p><p>Key takeaway: Match your attribution model to purchase complexity rather than business category. Implement multi-touch attribution with lead scoring for high-consideration purchases across both B2B and B2C, while accepting that valuable brand-building work often exists beyond the reach of your measurement tools.</p><p><strong>Why Marketing Attribution Still Matters Despite Its Flaws</strong></p><p>Attribution chaos continues to haunt marketers drowning in competing methodologies and high-priced solutions. Constantine blasts through the measurement fog with brutal practicality when tackling the Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) debate. While many have written MTA's obituary due to its diminishing visibility into customer journeys, his take might surprise you.</p><p>The attribution landscape brims with alternatives that look impressive in PowerPoint presentations but crumble under real business conditions:</p><p>Geo holdout testing sounds brilliant: Turn off ads in half your markets, keep them running in others, measure the difference. Simple! Except it'll cost you millions in lost revenue during testing. Constantine points out the brutal math: "For some businesses, this is like losing 1 million, $2 million during the test. Would you be willing to run a test that's gonna cost you $1 million?" These tests require a minimum 5% revenue contribution from the channel to even register effects, making them impractical for anything but your biggest channels.<br>MMM promises statistical rigor: But demands absurd amounts of data covering everything from your competitors' moves to presidential elections and global conflicts. Good luck collecting that comprehensive dataset spanning 2-3 years, then validating whether the TV attribution your fancy model spits out actually reflects reality.</p><p>> "Mathematically, everything works fine, but when you apply it in reality, there is no way to test it. You just see some numbers and there is no way to test it."</p><p>For scrappy D2C brands, SaaS startups, and lead gen businesses, Constantine argues MTA still delivers more practical value than its supposedly superior alternatives. You won't achieve perfect attribution, but you can compare campaigns at the same funnel stage against each other. Your lower-funnel campaigns can be measured against other lower-funnel efforts. Mid-funnel initiatives can compete with similar tactics.</p><p>Constantine drops a bombshell observation that should make you question the industry's MMM evangelism: "If Google and Facebook so willingly open-source different MMM technologies and they really believe in this technology, why wouldn't they implement it into their own product?" These data behemoths with unparalleled user visibility still rely on variations of touch-based attribution internally. Something doesn't add up.</p><p>Key takeaway: Stop chasing perfect attribution unicorns. MTA delivers practical campaign comparisons within funnel stages despite its flaws. For most businesses, sophisticated alternatives cost more than they're worth in lost revenue during testing or impossible data requirements. Compare apples to apples (lower-funnel to lower-funnel campaigns) with MTA, test different creatives, and focus on relative performance improvement. The big platforms themselves don't fully trust their publicly promoted alternatives - why should you bet your marketing budget on them?</p><p><strong>Simplified MMM is a Measurement Fantasy You're Being Sold</strong></p><p>Marketing Mix Modeling has roared back into fashion as third-party cookies crumble and marketers scramble for measurement alternatives. Constantine cuts through the hype with brutal clarity. Traditional MMM demands...</p>
April 15, 2025
<p>What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ashley Faus, Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian. </p><p><strong>Summary</strong>: Marketing frameworks often fail because they ignore how humans actually behave. People don't follow neat, linear paths; they explore, double back, and leap ahead based on genuine interests. Drawing from her diverse experience across corporate communications and lifecycle leadership, Ashley exposes how artificial walls between marketing functions create dysfunction while offering a solution: an integrated ecosystem where audience insights, compelling content, and strategic distribution flow continuously between teams. Her approach identifies truly predictive behaviors and measures success through bold experiments rather than smaller tweaks. By respecting how people naturally learn and make decisions, Ashley's content structure creates pathways that connect conceptual, strategic, and tactical pieces, making your content genuinely valuable to visitors and dramatically more effective at converting those ready to purchase.</p><p><strong>About Ashley</strong></p><ul><li>Ashely started her career with generalist marketing roles at a bunch of different small companies before settling into a role in the commercial aviation industry</li><li>She took on a generalist Marketing role at a training firm where she got a taste of marketing operations including a Marketo integration and lots of email campaigns</li><li>She later had 2 content strategy and product marketing roles at network security companies</li><li>Today Ashley is Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio at Atlassian where she’s been for over 7 years</li><li>She’s been interviewed on more than 50 podcasts, her writing has been published on TIME, Forbes, MarketingProfs, she’s a well traveled speaker and she has an upcoming book coming out in May called ‘Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI’</li></ul><p><br><strong>Why You Should Look for a New Job Every 18 Months</strong></p><p>Ashley has spent over seven years at Atlassian, navigating through four distinct roles while the company itself transformed dramatically around her. This longevity stands out in an industry where most professionals change employers every 2-3 years. Through corporate communications, integrated media, product marketing, and now lifecycle marketing, she's crafted multiple careers without changing her email address.</p><p>> "I look for a new job every 18 months, so that I am prepared to make a move and solve for any gaps at that roughly two to two and a half year mark."</p><p>"I look for a new job every 18 months," Ashley explains, "so that I am prepared to make a move and solve for any gaps at that roughly two to two and a half year mark." This calculated strategy creates perpetual career momentum. You begin exploring opportunities six months before the typical stagnation point, positioning yourself to evolve professionally right when most people start feeling restless. The genius lies in the timing: plan your next move while you still love your current role, not after burnout or boredom sets in.</p><p>The company Ashley joined barely resembles today's Atlassian. "We actually have grown like five or six times, both from an employee standpoint and from a revenue standpoint as well," she notes. This parallel evolution of both person and organization created a unique synergy, allowing her to ride waves of company growth while pursuing her own skill development.</p><p>Her initial role came with an unexpected twist. Despite being hired for corporate communications, PR represented one of her weaker skill areas. During interviews, the hiring manager focused more on her versatility across content strategy, email marketing, and social media. Genuine curiosity opened doors that formal applications never could. "Because I was nosy and stuck my nose in other people's business," she admits candidly, "they were like, 'should you come sit with us?'" These informal interactions led to her integrated media role, which connected previously siloed functions:</p><ul><li>Press relations</li><li>Owned channels like email and social</li><li>Thought leadership content</li><li>Brand marketing campaigns</li></ul><p><br>Ashley applies this proactive mindset when managing her team. She challenges them with pointed questions about their future: "Who do you want to be when you grow up? Are you growing up in the next year? In the next five years?" This framing transforms vague aspirations into concrete timelines. "That breakdown of how to get to where you want to be in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years starts with the next 12 months or 24 months," she explains.</p><p>The social media team placement at Atlassian illustrates how organizations evolve their understanding of marketing channels. "At the time, our social media person sat on the email team because the mindset was that this is a broadcast channel," Ashley recalls. Both she and her interviewer recognized the flawed logic in treating social platforms as one-way communication tools, creating immediate rapport around a shared marketing philosophy.</p><p>Key takeaway: Schedule dedicated job hunting time every 18 months, even when fully satisfied with your current position. This practice maintains your market value, expands your professional network, and positions you to make strategic moves at the two-year mark when growth typically plateaus. The next perfect role might exist within your current company if you actively seek it out.</p><p><strong>The Overlap Between Lifecycle, Content and Product Marketing</strong></p><p>Marketing departments love creating artificial walls between functions. Product marketing owns messaging. Content creates assets. Lifecycle handles channels. We've all seen the org charts with their neat little boxes. Ashley brings refreshing clarity to this organizational fallacy, particularly for companies using product-led growth strategies where traditional marketing borders simply cannot hold.</p><p>The organizational divide shifts dramatically depending on your go-to-market motion. "In larger companies using product-led growth versus a sales-led motion, there's a lot more blurring of the lines," Ashley explains. SEO strategy, trial signups, and in-product upgrade experiences often migrate to product marketing in PLG companies, even at enterprise scale. This reveals a fascinating truth many marketers miss: your core GTM motion fundamentally reshapes role boundaries more than company size does.</p><p>> “I don't understand how you're gonna write content with no insights from the market, the competition, and the audience. I don't understand how you're gonna distribute content with no understanding of the channel mix and the quirks of the different channel."</p><p>Ashley's decade of experience across multiple marketing functions gives her rare perspective on their interdependence. Ten years ago, she led marketing strategy at Duarte when marketing automation platforms were just becoming table stakes. "I actually had to do the RFP, choose between Marketo, Pardot, or Silverpop," she recalls. This hands-on experience taught her how lifecycle marketing (channels, nurture campaigns, cross-sell strategies) and content marketing (creating assets for those channels) form an inseparable partnership:</p><ul><li>Content marketing typically focuses on creating assets</li><li>Lifecycle marketing typically focuses on channel strategy</li><li>Both become meaningless without the other's expertise</li></ul><p><br>At large companies like Atlassian, specialization creates absurd scenarios where a single email might involve five different people: one writing copy, another creating visuals, someone handling lead scoring, another doing audience segmentation, and finally someone building and testing the actual email. While this level of specialization brings depth, it risks bre...</p>
April 8, 2025
<p>What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ruari Baker, Co-Founder and CEO of Allegrow. </p><p><strong>Summary</strong>: Your fancy AI personalization messaging strategy doesn’t mean anything if you don’t also have a strategy for email deliverability. Ruari busts long-standing myths about HTML vs plain text, why open rates died with Apple's 2021 privacy changes, and why the spam complaints visible in your marketing platform represent a fraction of reality. You'll walk away with 3 deliverability tactics that will help you reach the inbox and stay there: implement multi-subdomains to isolate high-risk traffic, adopt contact risk scoring that transcends basic validation and start using Google Postmaster to see your actual reputation metrics. Escape the promo tab without sacrificing design, resurrect damaged domains, and find out why traditional seed testing is worthless. If you depend on email, this might be the best 40 minutes you’ll spend this month. </p><p><strong>About Ruari</strong></p><ul><li>Ruari started entrepreneurship early (at 18 years old) and joined a startup accelerator where he received mentorship from top tech founders in the UK as well as his first investment</li><li>He co-founded Direct Software, a GDPR-first marketing automation solution where he gained a deep understanding of email deliverability</li><li>Today, Ruari is Co-Founder and CEO of Allegrow, an email deliverability platform to help emails reach the primary inbox, not the spam folder</li></ul><p><br><strong>Plain Text Emails Will Always Outperform HTML Emails When it Comes to Inbox Placement</strong></p><p>The HTML vs text email question hangs over every marketer's campaign planning session like a dark cloud. Ruari slices through this persistent debate with razor-sharp clarity. Context dictates winners here, not blanket rules. For outbound sales, plain text creates an authenticity that HTML instantly kills. Think about it—you craft personal emails without fancy formatting. The second your recipient spots that polished design, their brain categorizes your message as "marketing material," and your personalization efforts crumble.</p><p>> “You can't just simply say 'always plain text, that's better.' The reality is there are still good business reasons for using Rich HTML, and that's why it is such a popular way to send emails from a marketing perspective.”</p><p>Email providers have learned to associate complex formatting with promotional content that users often ignore. Your deliverability suffers accordingly. Yet HTML emails persist for good reason:</p><p>Large subscriber lists benefit from HTML's clickthrough tracking capabilities<br>E-commerce companies generate higher engagement when customers see products directly<br>Visual brands communicate their identity more effectively through designed templates<br>Data-heavy messages become more scannable with proper formatting and hierarchy</p><p>The winning strategy lives somewhere in the messy middle. "If you're using HTML for legitimate marketing emails to an opted-in list, implement these practices to maintain deliverability," Ruari advises. Clean your entire list monthly—remove invalid contacts, keep bounce rates low, and eliminate potential spam trap subscriptions. This simple 30-day hygiene ritual dramatically improves your sender reputation with both ESPs and inbox systems.</p><p>HTML devotees should strategically incorporate plain text messages at key points in the subscriber journey. These unadorned communications slip past promotion folder algorithms, landing you in the primary inbox. This placement success creates a virtuous cycle, improving future message placement—even for your HTML campaigns. You must also implement a sunset policy for engagement maintenance. When subscribers show zero activity over your predetermined period, place them into a final-attempt workflow. No response? Remove them proactively. This keeps your engagement metrics healthy, the exact data points email providers scrutinize when judging your sending quality.</p><p>"I once worked with an e-commerce client who switched half their abandoned cart emails to plain text," Ruari shares. "Their revenue per email jumped 22% because more messages reached the primary inbox." The results speak volumes about matching format to objective rather than defaulting to what looks prettiest in your marketing dashboard.</p><p>Key takeaway: Match email format to specific objectives. Use plain text for sales outreach and relationship-building. Deploy HTML strategically for e-commerce and visual campaigns. Maintain ruthless list hygiene by removing invalid contacts monthly, sending occasional plain text messages regardless of your primary format, and cutting unengaged subscribers after final reactivation attempts. Your deliverability—and ultimately your results—depend on this discipline.</p><p><strong>Create a Sunset Policy Based on Your Specific Industry Engagement Patterns</strong></p><p>Your email list contains a ticking time bomb of disengaged contacts that silently damage your sender reputation with every campaign. When asked about the right timeframe for removing inactive subscribers, Ruari offers a refreshingly nuanced take that shatters the "six-month rule" most marketers blindly follow. The optimal sunset policy timing depends entirely on your industry and baseline engagement metrics. Smart marketers look to identify and remove the bottom quartile or decile of subscribers based on engagement patterns specific to their audience.</p><p>High-engagement industries demand different standards than low-engagement sectors. Imagine running email marketing for a compliance software company—a field few people find "sexy." Your engagement metrics naturally run lower than consumer brands, but those rare engagement spikes matter tremendously. When someone suddenly engages with your SOC 2 audit content after months of silence, that signals a critical buying window. Cutting them off after six months of inactivity would sacrifice valuable revenue opportunities unique to your industry cycle.</p><p>You must establish internal benchmarks that reflect your specific business reality. Study your engagement patterns over 12-18 months. Look for natural dropoff points. Analyze which inactive subscribers eventually reactivate and what triggers that behavior. Create segments based on these findings, then craft sunset workflows that reflect the actual customer journey in your space. For some businesses, 90 days makes sense. For others, 12 months barely captures their sales cycle.</p><p>> “At least having some sunset policy in place would already put you leaps and bounds ahead of the majority of your peers.”</p><p>The mere existence of a sunset policy puts you "leaps and bounds ahead of the majority of your peers," Ruari points out. Most marketers obsessively protect their list size, treating subscriber counts as a vanity metric rather than focusing on engagement quality. They hoard inactive emails like digital dragons, destroying deliverability in the process. Your sunset policy doesn't need to be perfect—it simply needs to exist and run consistently. Start by removing obvious dead weight: bounced addresses, spam complaints, and truly inactive accounts. Then refine your approach as you gather more data about your specific audience patterns.</p><p>Key takeaway: Create a sunset policy based on your specific industry engagement patterns rather than arbitrary timeframes. Identify your bottom-performing subscriber segment (by quartile or decile) and implement an automated workflow to either re-engage or remove them. Even an imperfect sunset policy executed consistently will dramatically improve your deliverability metrics and campaign effectiveness compared to never removing inactive subscribers.</p><p><strong>How to Escape Google Promotions Tab Prison Without Sacrificing Design</strong></p><p>You send a gorgeous HTML email campai...</p>
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