The Playbook: Digital Marketing – Inquiry

My name is Tim and I’d like to help grow your business faster than the market. I help restaurants and retail brands implement email marketing campaigns designed to scale user acquisition, engagement, and retention. 

I’ve held leadership and contributor roles in the hospitality, online gaming, personal finance, and on-demand industries. Through my diverse experience working with teams, I’ve learned how to approach ambiguous situations. When in doubt, I prefer to raise the bar.

Am I the right consultant for your business? Here are some questions to ask yourself.

• Is it taking you longer to get all your great ideas shipped and released? Are you having trouble connecting with your customers? I can you help up with process stuff.
• Are you thinking about entering a new market? I can you help you analyze trends, create sales playbooks, and lead technical requirements and communications across internal teams.
  
• Are you hitting snags and finding it difficult to connect with your customer base? I can you help you figure out what you should be doing next.
• Do you have the budget to hire a full-time Product Manager or a consultant from McKinsey, Accenture, or Bain & Company? Probably not. But you can afford to hire me for ~10 hours per week to build an MVP for your business. 

Here's why people enjoy working with me.

• I provide clients with a safer way to test innovative ideas.
• I help companies create and manage a backlog and conduct customer research.
• I teach clients how to solve their own problems.

I achieve this by helping others realize the answer they probably knew all along. I enforce that I am removable—when I leave, I want you to be able to do it on your own. 

I'm real! Here's where you can find some of my work:

• LinkedIn
• Medium 
• Quora 
• Portfolio 
• The Playbook

My goal is to help clients grow faster than the market by implementing sales and marketing systems. I do this by building a marketing funnel that attracts leads and implementing sales systems that convert leads into new business opportunities.

I teach clients how to connect, learn about, and develop relationships with their users to transform the online experience. I am recognized for my ability to get teams to do what they’re supposed to do; I ensure things run smoothly because I’m really good with follow-ups; I’ve advanced in each role because I seek mentorship from senior leaders and provide consistent communication back to stakeholders.

A high converting email funnel guides new marketing leads through a systematic, scalable sales system. A well-designed email marketing flow initiates conversation with leads, engages with stale prospects, and moves hesitant buyers from objection through closed won while reporting on user analytics and marketing sources. This creates a cohesive online user experience and gives control to sales teams as they manage complex, high-ticket sales pipelines.

Leaving a great first impression via email is critical during the early lifecycle. Once a user completes registration, email marketing transforms into marketing automation operations—triggered communication-based on micro-targeted behavior and user activity to retain, engage, and deliver customer value.

Email Marketing & Automation

1. Create and send email campaigns on your behalf

I provide clients with a hands-on white glove experience by managing the full spectrum of email marketing activities. This process includes creating the strategy, building the emails, importing the lists, clicking "send," and providing performance analytics.

I work with you to identify goals and to establish brand and content guidelines. You'll never have to deal with the complexities of marketing operations. I'll take full ownership of your email marketing activities and provide transparency, visibility, and insight into the entire process.

2. Provide you with a tool to manage email marketing & automation

I also provide clients with a more hands-off approach by providing access to my email marketing tools. Here, I help perform the initial setup – such as creating a few email templates – but for the most part, turn over responsibility to your marketing team to manage campaigns and reporting on a day-to-day basis.

You will have private access to my email marketing platform where you can create, manage, and review all email marketing activities.

I enjoy working with

There are two reasons why Restaurants, Retail Brands, and Social Influencers need email marketing & automation:

1. They don't have an email subscriber list.
2. They have a subscriber list, but they don't know what to do with it.

As a digital marketing expert, I can help you:

Set goals

I'll work with you to understand your business, where opportunities for growth are and what the goals of email marketing could be. For some, it could be to drive more sales from existing customers, while others may want to convert more leads into paying customers. By understanding your business and the opportunities it has, I can help you set email marketing goals that will help drive growth.

Identify email campaigns to send

Based on the goals we set and the nature of your business, I'll work with you to identify what campaigns you should be sending. For instance, a restaurant owner may be interested in driving more offline sales from existing customers so an email campaign with recipes and instructional content could be a great way to engage and educate customers. On the other hand, a clothing retailer is going to be better served by sending promotions and promotional campaigns to try to drive people to their website or brick and mortar location. By understanding your goals and business model, I can help you identify what campaigns you should be sending.

Plan the content to send

Sending emails requires content, and depending on your email marketing goals and wider business model, I can work with you to help identify the right content to send to in order to achieve your desired results from email marketing. Creating compelling content is a challenge for businesses of all sizes. I'm here to provide you with tools and guidance -- my goal is to help business owners hit send confidently.

In addition to email marketing services, I provide clients with email marketing tools and access to my email service provider. I'll provide you with a unique client login address and grant you access to manage your email subscriber lists, send campaigns, and view reports.

As a Digital Transformation Consultant, I have a lot of technical expertise.

I use my expertise to offer integration services in order to set your business up with the email service provider (ESP) of choice.

This could include:

• Creating an account with the chosen provider
• Gathering and uploading subscriber lists
• Adding subscribe forms to their website
• Integrating a CRM, eCommerce or accounting software to automatically send customer information to the email provider
• Recommend apps and integrations to help accomplish their goals

One of the benefits of email marketing is that businesses can deliver messages and offers to their subscribers complete with their branding, beautiful imagery, prominent calls to action and more.

To help make creating these email campaigns easy for end users, I provide access to one of my email tools, Campaign Monitor, to enable the creation of branded templates that end users can simply drag-and-drop content into.

Clients can easily edit email templates through simple drop-and-drop features.

For each client, I develop HTML templates by hand. I also provide access to a library or pre-made templates based on the scope of your email needs.

I'll take your campaign ideas and content and turn them into beautiful, on-brand email campaigns ready to be sent to subscribers. I'll send you test campaigns for free to get your approval before sending it out to your subscribers.

These days, the best businesses are moving beyond sending one-off email campaigns and are using marketing automation to create powerfully automated customer journeys that send the right campaign to the right person at right time.

Marketing automation requires deep insight for setting a trigger, defining the rules, and creating the content.

There are so many customer journeys your business can create. A customer journey is an email sequence that is triggered by a specific event and guides the user towards a single destination. It's kind of like a quest.

Customer journeys we can create:

• Welcome Emails: Set up an automated email that welcomes new customers or subscribers when they join a list.
• Reminder Emails: Set up automated emails that get sent to customers to remind them of upcoming important dates, like service due dates for their car, or that their payment plan is expiring.
• VIP Offer Emails: You can set up emails that automatically send a series of special offers to your clients best customers once they’ve reached VIP status by reaching a certain spending threshold, or another trigger you define.
• Lead Nurturing Emails: Set up a series of automated emails that get sent to people who make an inquiry about your products or services, educating them on why they need what your business offers and increasing the chance they’ll become paying customers.
• Event Reminder Emails: Set up a series of automated emails in the days leading up to a specific event being organized by your business, reminding attendees that the event is coming up and increasing the chances they’ll attend.

A note from Tim

As a first-generation Asian American and product of refugees from Laos, I pursued a global education in San Francisco and Madrid to understand the complexities of culture, community, and communication to apply throughout my career working at software companies in the technology industry.

How I serve as a leader, prioritize critical business issues, and approach ambiguous situations reflects the lessons I’ve learned through shared experiences. As a Product Leader, I apply these rules regardless of whether I am building new teams, delivering new product releases, or negotiating partnerships agreements. I believe that knowledge is most powerful when learning is a shared experience. This is what drives my curiosity of customer-obsession and interest in what makes a great partnership work to develop culture, community, interpersonal communication. 

I help clients maximize revenue across sales and marketing owned online channels. I focus on how and whom clients sell their products and services, the channels they communicate through, and the procedures and software in place that guide daily operations.  I deliver by leading the execution, testing, and analysis for acquisition, activation, retention, and engagement initiatives during the user's early lifecycle. I use my experience in technology and work with clients to analyze data, teaching them how to identify, acquire and develop their most valuable customer.

I’ve held leadership and contributor roles in the hospitality, online gaming, personal finance, and on-demand industries. Through my diverse experience working with teams, I’ve learned how to approach ambiguous situations. When in doubt, I prefer to raise the bar.

• I provide clients with a safer way to test innovative ideas.
• I help companies create and manage a backlog and conduct customer research.
• I teach clients how to solve their own problems.
• I achieve this by helping others realize the answer they probably knew all along.
• I enforce that I am removable—when I leave, I want you to be able to do it on your own.

Examples of my work include

• Owning product vision for consumers to authenticate and authorize credit profile data to access a free monthly credit score (free-user acquisition).
• Transforming Consumer Rental Application Process through the database integration between Trulia Rentals (Zillow Group) and Credit Sesame.
• Directing engagement strategy for Consumer Fraud Protection through the Implementation of TransUnion’s Enhanced Credit Monitoring alerts.
• Driving monetization, engagement, and retention roadmap for email across financial partner verticals for a 6+MM user database.
• Generating $3.5MM in new revenue opportunities for independent, mid-market, and enterprise restaurant brands. 

What I do

• I take a fully cross-functional approach combined with deep knowledge and industry expertise to help clients build the capabilities they need for profitable growth.
• I bring deep customer insight and marketing and sales experience to effective implementation and go-to-market strategies.
• I partner with key stakeholders to develop and implement large-scale transformations and form mutually-sustainable partnerships that drive bottom-line growth.

I can deliver the most value by

• Executing large-scale projects across domains and cultures by adapting communication for technical documentation, interpersonal team-building, and client-facing partnerships.
• Enhancing technology and product roadmaps by continuously learning new technologies, immersing myself on the front-lines of B2B and B2C sales owned channels, testing and validating hypotheses, and creating playbooks on best practices.
• Deconstructing complex business issues, learning system architecture, and prioritizing experiments to implement data-driven Go-to-Market initiatives under lean and agile principles.

Here's how I do it

Communication

• Building mutually-sustainable relationships with customers, companies, and clients through interpersonal communication and digital interactions. 
• Empowering clients and customers to achieve their business, personal and financial goals through product, service and technology adoption.
• Practicing lean and agile principles to drive innovation and form high-performing and highly collaborative self-organizing teams. 

Culture

• Establishing guiding principles as a framework for cross-functional collaboration.
• Creating open feedback loops with multiple access points
• Actively listen and enforce meritocracy.

Here's where I bring a lot of value

Specialties: Email Marketing & Marketing Operations, Funnel Optimization (Acquisition-Activation), Product Monetization, Revenue (Strategic Partnerships & Alliances), User Engagement, and Product Vision.