Emily Popson is the Vice President of Growth Marketing at CallRail, where she leads demand generation, website optimization, customer marketing, and content marketing teams. Having previously been a small business owner herself, Popson is passionate about making modern marketing analytics tools accessible to even the smallest teams and companies.
Can you share more about your professional journey and how your experiences led you to your current role as Vice President of Growth Marketing at CallRail?
Over the last 15 years, my professional journey has been primarily focused on working with SaaS companies with a focus on all aspects of growth marketing – from demand generation to customer marketing, conversion rate optimization to graphic design and more.
Most of my experience has been in the marketing technology space (serving small and medium-sized businesses, hospitality, and nonprofits) and in roles in the virtualized IT backup and monitoring software industries.
While this past career experience has largely shaped the professional I am today, my passion is truly what led me to CallRail. As someone who built and ran their own small business, I saw a unique opportunity with CallRail to take the expertise I’d built working in growth marketing and B2B revenue leadership and use it to help support small business owners. I understand the challenges that small business owners face and it brings me joy that I’m able to help our customers market and grow their businesses with confidence by connecting them with purpose-built solutions.
As the Vice President of Growth Marketing, what are your primary responsibilities and goals? How do you approach driving revenue growth and demand generation?
I oversee our robust growth marketing team with the functions comprising this team including: Content & Copy, Website Strategy & Production, Demand Generation, and Customer Marketing. Together, we’re responsible for driving revenue growth for the business. We do this by attracting, acquiring, educating, converting, and expanding current and future customers along every stage of their journey. One of my biggest responsibilities is equipping these teams to leverage the art and the science of each functional area to maximize revenue impact on the business.
While our growth marketing team works together as a unit, each function also has its own unique set of goals that help contribute toward our collective goal of driving growth for the business. These include:
- Content & Copy: Efficient and impactful content production for every stage of the buyer’s journey, increased strategic use of AI to improve efficiency and impact, content influence on new revenue generation.
- Website Strategy & Production: Enhancing site experience, SEO performance, and increasing conversion rate from new user to free trial.
- Demand Generation: Increased category and brand awareness, demand capture via free trial volume generated monthly, quality trial generation as measured by conversion rate from trials to customers, increasing customer mix from strategic verticals of focus, marketing acquisition cost (MAC) efficiency, achieving monthly targets for new MRR.
- Customer Marketing: Driving customer engagement, customer product usage and adoption, collecting and utilizing the voice of the customer across the business, driving free trials for add on products, achieving cross-sell and upsell new revenue targets monthly.
I approach revenue growth and demand generation by taking a unified approach to our marketing efforts. While our team has different functions with different sets of goals and responsibilities, each of these goals feed into one another to help drive us toward our growth goal.
How have you seen the marketing industry evolve during your career, particularly in terms of growth marketing and demand generation?
Reflecting on what the industry looked like when I started my career compared to what it has transformed into today, I’d say the biggest change the marketing landscape has experienced is the emergence of so many new possibilities—from new channels and tactics to how we approach segmentation and targeting.
It’s exciting to see this evolution unravel. The space has seen an emergence in things like Connected TV marketing (CTV), which delivers video ads to viewers via a streaming service when they’re watching content, and the rise of influencers, which have changed the approach marketers are taking to get their message out there.
The way the industry engages with customers is so different from what it once was. Now, it’s easier than ever to engage with customers directly – from within your product to social media – and this type of direct engagement has been a game changer for voice of customer (VOC) collection. Marketers can engage with their customers instantaneously and this more real-time engagement is driving more seamless VOC, which allows marketers to get feedback on their messaging, products or services – should customers have an issue, this allows marketers to address things quickly and efficiently.
In a world increasingly driven by data, the marketing industry is no stranger to the power that comes from data and the AI explosion. With increased data availability, marketers are equipped with new personalization capabilities – allowing them to take extremely personalized approaches for target audiences and existing customers. When it comes to AI, the industry is using the tech to transform how we approach everything from SEO to content creation and copy writing to buyer’s journey insights and website conversion optimization to UX research and behavior analysis.
While this evolution has generally been a positive one, the industry is also experiencing a lot of noise. With what feels like endless new technologies popping up, there’s this “shiny object syndrome” that can creep in and really distract from great marketing. While each industry always wants to be an early adopter of these emerging technologies, now more than ever marketers need to ensure they have the tools and processes in place to keep true to their objectives. Marketers must have a clear mission and trust that if they have the right tools, processes, people, and data in place – they’ll be properly powered to connect their solutions with their audiences.
How is CallRail leveraging AI to enhance its products and services? Can you provide examples of how AI is being used to improve call tracking and attribution?
At CallRail, we’ve been using AI for almost a decade to provide small businesses with Conversation Intelligence, which unlocks insights from customer conversations to better optimize marketing campaigns and convert more leads.
As AI continues to revolutionize industries, the technology has empowered us to unlock new frontiers in understanding and optimizing the buyer’s journey. In the last couple of years, we’ve leveraged AI to unlock even more insights from businesses’ conversations that allow them to fuel better marketing, better connection with their customers, better conversion, and overall, more business growth.
I’m particularly proud and excited about our AI-powered self-reported attribution (SRA). Whether a business asks its leads, “How did you hear about us?” or the leads offer the answers unprompted, SRA uses AI to understand, extract, categorize, and report on the attribution insight alongside a business’ software-based attribution data.
How does combining self-reported and software-based attribution provide a more comprehensive view for marketers?
This approach is revolutionary and the next frontier of attribution, I believe. Businesses not utilizing self-reported attribution alongside their software-based attribution are using dated and limited practices.
While software-based attribution, like we offer in CallRail’s Call Tracking and Form Tracking solutions, solves for platform bias and increases visibility into both online and offline touchpoints – it isn’t without its own set of limitations. Software-based attribution struggles to overcome opacity caused by dark social, word-of-mouth referrals, or human bias for convenience. It can also struggle to capture the influence of brand marketing maneuvers fully. It has been notoriously challenging to measure the impact that these levers have on a business – but this previously hidden data can now be unlocked with CallRail’s self-report attribution.
Businesses can pair CallRail’s patent-pending self-report attribution data with data from their software-based attribution to eliminate blind spots and enable more confident and accurate marketing decision-making. Marketers will no longer wonder what drove leads to them; they’ll always be able to know how their business got on each lead’s radar and what marketing converted them to ultimately reach out.
Think about it like this: you’re a landscaping company working with a marketing agency for a rebrand and marketing strategy overhaul. As part of the new strategy, your agency designs eye-catching new yard signs for use while on the job. As a result, prospective customers that notice your great work are also taking note of your yard signs and brand. The prospects search for your business and call the number on your Google Business Profile (GBP). You receive a spike in qualified leads and dozens of calls from GBP and on those calls they mention seeing your signs in their neighborhood. But you’ve only received a few calls from your yard sign call tracking number. Using just software-based attribution or just self-reported attribution alone would lead you to:
- Software-based attribution: Only using this, you’d attribute this revenue increase to Google Business Profile and you’d never know how influential your new branding and yard signs had been in this journey.
- Self-reported attribution: Using this method alone, you’d attribute the revenue to the yard signs. You’d lack insight into the role and importance of a well-maintained GBP.
By only having data from one or the other available, a business may make strategy or investment decisions based on limited insight. Together, the software-based and self-reported insights give a clearer understanding of the buyer’s journey, providing visibility into the influence these “invisible” factors can have.
This approach helps to bridge the gap between traditional attribution methods and AI-driven insights. Self-reported attribution empowers marketers to make even more informed decisions and confidently navigate the complexities of today’s marketing landscape.
What emerging trends do you see in AI and marketing technology, and how is CallRail positioning itself to stay ahead in this space?
As the space gets noisier and more crowded, we will continue to see strong user demands and preferences for purposeful AI solutions. This appetite will further catapult CallRail ahead.
CallRail is leading the charge here with our explicit commitment to developing solutions that solve real problems for businesses and doing so in accessible ways. We also work with the best partners in the space and leverage the best models available for the purposes of the businesses we serve.
The marketing technology landscape has experienced many seasons of excitement around new capabilities which, in the short term, resulted in a boom of jumbled martech stacks full of disparate vendors, followed by platforms that consolidate capabilities for easier and more cost-effective access. CallRail is focused on serving our market in as many ways as we are able to do best in a single platform.
With AI, similar to any marketing technology, value will come from the user’s ability to leverage AI output – be it data, insights, actions – more broadly. CallRail’s rich ecosystem of strategic tech partnerships will continue to allow businesses to leverage the data, insights and actions we provide across their tech stack.
How do CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence® and Convert Assist products use AI to provide deeper insights into customer interactions and help businesses optimize their marketing efforts?
Our suite of AI solutions allows businesses to analyze conversations for deeper insights into leads and customers so they can attract, convert, and optimize with confidence.At a glance, our solutions provide insights that help businesses attract more leads, like attribution insights and keyword spotting to inform their channel mix, marketing investments, and content strategy.
We also provide the insights businesses need to convert more of those leads into customers. To identify qualities of a conversation, and automatically qualify, score, tag, or assign a value to their leads. Another capability, call coaching, allows businesses to automatically coach their teams on how to improve each conversation – providing real-time improvements to help your business run seamlessly. Our offerings also allow businesses to create AI-generated action plans and follow up messages so that despite how busy their teams are, they’re able to consistently keep leads engaged and moving forward.
CallRail’s AI capabilities, like our multi-conversation insight, reports help marketers optimize their business. By aggregating insights across all calls from a specific channel, businesses not only can identify opportunities for where they can optimize their marketing, but also help to pinpoint any messaging confusion, spot commonly asked questions and average sentiment. For businesses investing in marketing, these insights help to maximize spend while also providing optimal return on investment faster.
In what ways do you think CallRail’s AI capabilities give it a competitive advantage in the market?
CallRail has been using AI to help businesses solve problems and grow confidently since 2016. We’re not new to this, so while other companies are working to solve the initial AI pain points, we already have the partners, people, and processes in place.
Building an AI strategy can be a difficult process – especially for those starting out whose focus is on trying to figure out how and where AI will fit into their solutions. We already have this strategy in place and for us, our focus is on keeping closely aligned to the clearly defined “AI North Star” that we use to guide us.
We do this by testing, iterating, and collecting feedback. This is done formally through our CallRail Labs program. In just one year, CallRail Labs has released 12 features, helping to bring intentional AI-powered products to our customers.
CallRail’s solutions are designed with purpose in mind—they solve real-world problems without creating new ones for our customers. A key differentiator of our solutions is the pairing of AI insights alongside rich attribution—our self-reported attribution is patent-pending, and our multi-conversation insights reports are the first of their kind, aggregated AI insights for quicker action.
By harnessing our deep expertise in attribution, conversation intelligence, and the SMB market – paired with our rich and broad partner ecosystem – our solutions power confident marketing and enable growth for the businesses we serve.
What advice would you give to marketers looking to integrate AI into their strategies?
My biggest piece of advice is to be bold in testing and intentional in implementation. Spend the time to really think about how you can use AI to create space, capacity, and opportunity and test, test, test.
Take tasks like content and copy, for example—use AI to jump-start content and copy, and use it to create different versions of your copy that are specialized for each of your channels.
For marketers who don’t have the time for deep exploration or analysis, AI can help you to quickly uncover data-driven insights, empowering you to take action faster. For those kicking the can down the road on their SEO strategy, a conversation intelligence product can surface common topics used by your leads and customers; these can be great starting points for SEO content production. These same AI-surfaced insights can help you spot opportunities for new marketing ideas or even new service offerings.
Don’t have the time to be QAing sales and service calls? Conversational AI like CallRail’s Convert Assist can provide positive and critical feedback on your behalf after every call, helping keep your business running, improving and growing.
If your marketing is really starting to perform, but bandwidth is limited on the sales and service side, use AI to create efficiencies in their work flows. Convert Assist can also write follow-up messages for team members following every conversation ensuring every lead you generate receives a great experience and the best chance to convert.
What are your future goals for CallRail and its growth marketing initiatives in the next few years?
Looking ahead, there are a few growth marketing initiatives we’re tracking towards. Top of mind for me right now are expansion of strategic influencer deployment and impact in key verticals and evolving our site and in-app experience optimization efforts.
Additional core focuses for us over the next few years include:
- Prioritizing ongoing rapid experimentation: Growth marketing impacts not only new user growth, but also growth through our existing users, and protecting our growth by preventing churn. Using new tools – especially those powered by AI – to better understand user behavior and identify opportunities for revenue driving or churn reducing optimizations will be a priority team wide.
- Protecting and expanding SEO: Amidst landscape changes – from AI Overviews to insights from the Google leak – maintaining SEO strength and advantage is critical. We’ll do so via strategic adjustments, AI assistance and ongoing investments.
This is just a glimpse into what lay ahead. Our growth marketing team will continuously focus on the assessment and evolvement of our attribution practices. As seriously as we take our attribution products that we provide our customers, we also walk the walk internally. By paying significant attention to our buyer’s journey, we’ll use our own insights to keep pace with their preferences – we understand that this journey is ever-evolving alongside the evolving marketing landscape.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit CallRail.
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