“As marketing becomes more automated, how do you ensure that the human element — empathy, understanding, and connection — isn’t lost? Can you give an example of a campaign where this was key?”
Nemanja Zivkovic asked me this on his podcast earlier this week, and I had a simple answer for him: You can’t do empathy at scale.
Sponsor: HockeyStack
Attribution. If you want to stir the hornet’s nest with the marketers + GTM leaders at your organization, just bring this topic up in your next meeting. Why is it so divisive? Because so many use it to assign credit to channels and departments + this leads to internal arguments over who should get credit for that 5-6 figure deal that contained hundreds of touchpoints along the way.
Enter: HockeyStack. Hockeystack is not just an attribution tool; it's specifically designed to show the holistic funnel instead of department-level analytics. It is fully customizable, and it's the only product that allows you to build literally any report you need without any code.
So when I told them I didn’t care about using attribution to assign credit to a channel, but that I wanted to understand how channels + departments interplay with one another in order to structure our GTM moving forward in a way that increases the likelihood of us being more successful and they said, “Yeah, we can do that,” you know that caught my eye.
Keeping the human element
Let’s start with the first part of the question Nemanja asked - “As marketing becomes more automated, how do you ensure that the human element — empathy, understanding, and connection — isn’t lost?”
I’ll unpack the empathy part in a little bit, but at a high-level, as automation rises in marketing, being able to keep the human element means continuing to balance with non-automated (read: manual) activities.
But Sam, I’m automating things to send time so I can do MORE! If I’m taking that new time gained and spending them on manual activities, why bother with the automation in the first place?
Great question Sam, I’m so glad you asked. Simple answer - because this is where the relationships are truly made. Enter: the smudge test.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever received a note in the mail that looked like it was handwritten…only to find out that it was a typed font that “looks” handwritten. How did you feel after that? Probably changed the value you placed on receiving that note.
This is what I call the “smudge test.”
Any time I get a note in the mail from an organization that looks like it’s handwritten, I lick my thumb and smudge it across a word on the paper.
If it doesn’t smudge, it’s typed out in “handwritten” font and the exact same note was probably sent to hundreds or thousands of others like me.
But if it does smudge, that means someone took the time to write this out to me. Even if it’s based on a template, there’s still value in that they recognize I, the prospect/customer, was worth the effort. And in turn, I value that they recognize me and have a newfound (or deepened) loyalty to that company.
And this is exactly why every week, I take the time to personally write out a few notes to new customers.
Hurricane Helene + demonstrating empathy
Earlier this week, a Customer Success team member of ours who lives in North Carolina came to our leadership team asking if we could send a note from our company to our customers who live in the areas impacted by Helene.
We had a little back + forth on how we could best do this, and I shared the below points as two key pieces to doing this. If we could not do the below properly, I said it was off the table.
Why am I so adamant about this? Because empathy is FELT. Empathy is a uniquely human emotion that is given + received at the individual level. An organization can hold empathy as a value, but it can really only come across at the individual level.
So for this, we equipped + empowered our team to reach out to any customers + prospects that they felt compelled to extend a hand to, with the understanding that this would only be allowed at a 1:1 level. No mail merges. No large BCC’d sends. No multiple-recipient emails. Just genuine, 1:1 communications asking things like:
How are you doing?
Are you and your loved ones okay?
Is there anything I can personally do to help and support you?
There’s no “end goal” for the business
This isn’t done secretly hoping it’ll get PR coverage
This is done because this is the only way to truly demonstrate empathy
One LinkedIn post I bookmarked this week
For those of you who know me, you know I love to get tactical. Get in the weeds. Learn through first principles. And this post was a reminder that threw me back to when I would spend hours per day in ad platforms. What’s working. What isn’t. Audience refinements. Content measurement. Budget tweaking. The list goes on and on.
But why I loved this post from Rowen is because it’s one of those things that when you read, you want to facepalm yourself because of the brilliance in its simplicity. He shares something that we all innately know/feel, but because we love to try and overcomplicate things (like funnels), we pass on it because it’s not complex enough.
For years, blogs + practical advice content pieces were the cornerstone of our demand creation execution. Or to throw it back to the newsletter a few weeks ago, to make sure we’re marketing the problem, not the solution, since buying psychology has us associating companies with the problem(s) they solve. And that’s exactly what Rowen points out with his recommendation here in better utilizing blog posts for retargeting audiences.
See you next Saturday,
Sam