Inside Intercom Hana Abaza, Head of Marketing at Shopify Plus

Written on February 14, 2018

I really enjoyed listening to this episode. I've worked with the Shopify platform a few times in the past, and have experienced their marketing as a user and a developer. It was fascinating listening to some of the tactics they've used on the Plus product to grow.

These are the notes I took:

A key part of their success is the relationship between the sales and marketing teams. They have solid processes in place to ensure that both teams are pulling towards the same metric, which helps with decision making and prioritisation of tasks.

A key outcome of this is know what content to create. The marketing team write BOFU content to challenge objections from potential customers, which are relayed to them by the sales team.

The funnel is not linear - people don’t pass through in a linear fashion. Funnel stages help us as marketers to visualise the funnel, and to build it. Think about this from a customer's perspective. People can go up and down stages of the funnel, and different things can trigger a conversion to the nexts stage. Think about how to reengage with funnel subscribers, and experiment with different methods. Think customer first.

The marketing ops role is key when scaling a team to make sure everything’s working as expected, and making sure the right infrastructure is in place.

My key takeaways to apply to GatherContent

We need to reassess how the automation works - we need to ensure that all the different communication methods are working with each other to create a cohesive message, and don't bombard the customer.

Marketing doesn’t start when the product/feature launches. We could be doing more around our new features.