Beyond Email Blasts: How MISUMI Optimizes Marketing AutomationBeyond Email Blasts: How MISUMI Optimizes Marketing Automation

Beyond Email Blasts: How MISUMI Optimizes Marketing Automation Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to the Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. Here are Carman Pirie and Jeff White. 

Jeff White: Welcome to the Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White. Joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: All is well, all is well, and you?

Jeff White: I’m doing great. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, look, and I couldn’t be more excited for today’s show. I think it’s it’s just really nice to be able to dive almost as deep as possible into the world of marketing automation for manufacturers to really unpack what a leading automation program looks like for manufacturing. And so I’m just really excited for today’s guest and to jump into it. 

Jeff White: Yeah, no, I am as well. And it’s always cool to see how people, depending on what the offering is, the different types of integrations and anyway it’s just all highly interesting. So I’m pretty stoked, but so joining us today is Carlicia Layosa.

Carlicia is the marketing automation manager at MISUMI USA. Welcome to the Kula Ring, Carlicia. 

Carlicia Layosa: Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here. 

Carman Pirie: Carlicia, we’re excited to have you and thank you for teasing us with that background of the Chicago skyline as well from your offices. We were complaining that it’s a gray, dreary East Coast day out here. It looks a little brighter in the greater Chicago area today, yeah, it’s lovely to have you on the show. Let’s kick things off by perhaps introducing our listeners to you and how you ended up at Misumi and maybe a little bit about what Misumi does too, if you wouldn’t mind. 

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah. So I actually started off at Misumi as an application engineer, and I’ve been at the company for about nine years now. There was a position opening up in the marketing department for product marketing, and I was very interested in it. I really enjoyed combining my creative side with my solution and problem-solving side. And so I joined marketing as a product marketing engineer. And then they brought me on to start developing and working in our automation platform, which is Marketo and from there I became also a campaign manager as well, which involves a lot of email planning and strategy development.

I have a degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in energy engineering. Make it make sense. I’m in marketing. I don’t know. Sometimes that happens, changing career paths. But I’m very happy to be working in marketing. And I’ve been in the marketing automation manager role for about three years now.

And a little bit about Misumi. So we are a manufacturer and distributor of a variety of mechanical and electrical components. And at our core is our configurability. And on our website, you can choose your shape. For example, a shaft, and you could choose the dimensions of your shaft, some dimensions up to a micron, and then you could choose your material surface treatment. It will give you a globally accepted part number that you can order from us from all of our subsidiaries and also a CAD model as well and pricing and delivery instantaneously. And we partner with over 300 different brands to round out our portfolio and become a one-stop shop for our customers.

Jeff White: That’s awesome. Before we get any further and deeply into the marketing automation side, what do you miss most about being an engineer? 

Carlicia Layosa: Oh, okay. So I do miss talking with our customers or about their applications and getting ideas and sharing have you tried this component to solve your issues? Sometimes it’s little things like they just need to change the surface treatment. And I do miss that. I do miss doing that creative and design assistance, so to speak guiding them in the right direction for their part. I do miss that, but that’s about it. I really love being in marketing. I just love being creative and I love problem solving too. 

Jeff White: Sounds like you bring that engineering mindset to that as well. 

Carman Pirie: And I think that I think back of some of the best guests we’ve had on the show have been engineers first and then came over to the dark side or the light side to the marketing side, nevertheless, and they’re applying the trade there. So it’s a fascinating background. Thank you for sharing it. Really cool company too. I have to imagine that just as you describe that service offering and the output of it the grist for the mill, if you will, for the marketing automation mill is considerable. There’s lots to work with there. 

Carlicia Layosa: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s like a hodgepodge of all kinds of cool things that we could do. Yeah, 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, well, let’s talk about how you guys dig into that hodgepodge a little bit, and begin to understand how you think about the challenge and opportunity of deploying marketing automation at this scale for this kind of company. Where do you start? 

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah. If I were to go back to when we first started our automation. We first onboarded it, I think I would have looked at our data more closely and what we have available and how it connects to our ERP and all of that. And I would have looked at our behaviours on our website deeper because looking at that, you can infer. And also understand what your key buying factors are and understand the journey to purchase. And then within that journey, you’re creating, whether it’s like one-off campaigns or trigger-based campaigns based on those activities. So for example, I mentioned we have CAD downloads, right? That was one of our kind of, when we brought on Marketo, we looked at how do we bring this data into Marketo? And we ended up building a custom solution, working with our IT team to make that flow through an API into Marketo and connect like who downloaded what. And then create a campaign, based on their product categories that they downloaded. So there’s like that there’s just so much 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. So you said if you had to if you were doing it over again, you’d maybe have taken a harder look at the start, at the data that you had available and how it connected to the various platforms. Is that because you found that it took a little? You took it a little longer than you may have expected to get, begin to get value out of the marketing automation tool simply because you were.

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah, absolutely. It was a bit of a learning curve. Cause at first we were just, it was so new automation, when we first got it. And so we were just email blasting, which is not necessarily a best practice. But we started off, I think we started off with emailing our blog out just to a general audience, to everybody basically. We found success in that but once we started personalizing more, creating segmented audiences based on key buying factors and creating segmentations like engineers in this industry. We give them like, medical industry is one of our biggest segments. So we created content around that and we emailed them once they registered for an account or if they’ve visited certain pages and things like that, creating that journey to give them content that’s relevant and timely.

I’m sure you hear that all the time, timely. And I think another thing I would have done if we were to go back is implement a process to optimize our emails, which is AB testing basically. I wish that we had somehow, curbed it embedded in that process like it always has to be done. Every email has to be tested. Every subject line has to be tested and optimized. We do that now, but it’s a much smaller scale. 

Carman Pirie: That’s interesting too because I’m curious about, I think a lot of organizations have that feeling or certainly the people that have been responsible for implementing the program, they’re like, man if I had to do that over again, there are some keys.

Yeah, there are some T’s I would have crossed. There are some I’s I would have dotted. However, almost the flip side of that, it feels like to me is. If you sometimes you may get a little you might let that process of getting your data house in order to take too long if you don’t have the platform sitting there waiting to be used, like in some ways that little bit of tech debt of bringing, maybe bringing on the platform too early or whatever, sometimes what it takes to incent an organization to do the hard work that needs to be done to get the data in order.

So I guess I’m wondering, do you think that early messiness was necessary to get you over the hump? 

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah, actually that’s a really good point. I think if I didn’t have that messiness, I wouldn’t have used my engineering brain and did all this problem-solving and discovered, Oh, this data is from here, or whatever. And I wouldn’t have known the process is as good or like an understanding where things flow and just discovering, Oh, this is sinking here interesting. And I think we always learn from messiness, right? And mistakes. And it’s sometimes it’s like hindsight is 20/20 all the time. 

Jeff White: It’s not mistakes. It’s iteration. 

Carlicia Layosa: Yes. It’s versions. Yeah revisions. Yes. 

Jeff White: Yeah. No, we’re just getting better at it. The segmentation front is really interesting because I think that’s where the true power of marketing automation is, like you were saying, it’s not as valuable if it’s just not customized and all that. How deep does that go? Because you have so much data and because of that integration with your ERP you’re able to get right down to the product level or even sub-product level I would assume in terms of knowing what people are interested in how far do you go with that? 

Carlicia Layosa: Honestly depends. Think in our, in a B2B world customers are expecting B2C personalization, and sometimes it just starts with using their first name in a personalized email. We’re constantly leveraging account managers and product managers by using their email addresses and getting back to what you’re saying, and what you’re asking about how deep it goes.

There’s also that fine line of being more or less creepy. Not too creepy, right? Because we’ve had issues where, like we’re saying where you downloaded this exact part. We don’t want to go that far. We have used it where you’re interested in this category. Maybe you’d be interested in complementary products that go with that. So like a shaft, you’d want to get a bearing or a collar or something like that. We have used that. If we did an event or something like that, sometimes we will use the company name. We hope to partner with the company, but that makes sense, right? You’ve met them at a trade show. It’s like getting deeper depending on the messaging you’re sending out. And your segmentation and in your email campaign. 

Carman Pirie: I’m wondering how you know you’re crossing that creepy barrier, is there a, is there a guiding principle there, a rule that you can give us, 

Carlicia Layosa: I think the number one thing is not to say. Hey, I saw you downloaded this exact part. I saw you quote this. Quoting maybe is okay, but I think when you say I noticed you haven’t purchased with us in 2, 5 weeks, something too specific like that. It should just be like, hey, we haven’t heard from you in a while. Let’s not be too specific in things like that in our email campaigns. 

Carman Pirie: There’s a little nuance there. I think what you’re saying is if it’s something that you for instance, if you were involved in quoting something three weeks ago, so it’s an act of getting a quotation, we’re saying, I worked on this quotation for you three weeks ago, probably doesn’t sound that creepy. But we say, we noticed you viewed these 20 pages on our website as you were exploring. This thing that kind of suggests that there’s, we’re watching what’s going on here. There are cameras in the store and we know where you’ve been. Yeah, I guess that’s an interesting way to think about where that line is.

Jeff White: Should be like a red light in Marketo to let you know when you’re crossing. 

Carlicia Layosa: Oh, yeah. And that’s where I am. I’m the red light. 

Carman Pirie: Carlicia, as you’ve built out this program and have evolved the program over the last number of years, Is there, are there guiding principles, rules of thumb, things that you live by as you’ve been bringing this together that we maybe should be letting our listeners know about as well? What are some of the guideposts along the way to getting this done right? 

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned data all the time. I think understanding what you can track on your website and what you can, what data you can import into your automation tool, into your automation platform, creating specific engagement campaigns, or even nurture campaigns for onboarding, retaining, re-engagement, also, building out an email calendar and making that visible to your stakeholders so they can understand what’s in the queue or what’s planned and also include every single email that you’re sending out, whether it’s a blast, nurture, a newsletter, include everything in your calendar and make that visible to the company, I think, honestly, we have ours on a SharePoint website to utilize as much personalization as possible. We found that when we started doing more personal emails that come from like a product manager or a salesperson, we got a lot more engagement from that and a lot of click-to-open rates and our open rates increased from those.

Carman Pirie: One of the, it’s hard to have a conversation about marketing towards the end of 2024, the start of 2025 without AI being a big part of it. And I’ve, part of me been thinking a lot about how marketing automation is a bit of the gateway to AI in marketing and sales, not in terms of if we’re looking to truly leverage AI to put some elements of our marketing and sales apparatus on autopilot. That’s going to happen first probably largely via automation and then automation is going to be augmented, if you will, by AI. What are you seeing? Are you seeing that kind of continuum or is this just maybe it’s too foggy out here on the East Coast today? 

Carlicia Layosa: I actually, in the automation, in like email automation, especially in Marketo, I haven’t seen that yet. The only thing that we have that’s used is predictive content. Where it’s actually a marketo AI. This was before even AI became popular. So it’s like Marketo’s own algorithm where you can import different content into an email and it changes dynamically based on behaviours in that email as well on our website to it feeds out like a little ad about our content, and then it changes dynamically. That’s the extent of my experience with AI and email. I haven’t seen anything yet. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I was more thinking about in terms of skating and where the puck is going, if you will. Yeah, I appreciate that it’s not there yet, but I’ve just seen it as a necessary precursor. Like I can’t imagine that there’s any truly AI-enabled marketing and sales engine in 2026 that didn’t start by being a pretty nicely automated engine in 2025 if that makes sense. I don’t know. What do you think, Jeff? Does that not make sense at all? 

Jeff White: No, I think it absolutely does. I think there you know, there’s no question that anything that is automated now is only going to become smarter going forward. And things that it can begin to learn from and build upon and hopefully make our jobs easier as marketers, especially in the automation space. 

Carman Pirie: Exactly. look since we, we’ve said the dreaded Acronym. It is something that obviously gets talked about is what’s what’s around the corner. So we can put that aside and say, Carlicia, what are you excited about in 2025? What has you, what is it in the world of marketing automation that you think is going to dramatically change, shift a challenge you’re going to have to deal with or an opportunity that you think there is out there to seize?

Carlicia Layosa: That’s a really good question. I think in my world, I’m looking forward to the continuation of our company being still this entrepreneurial spirit. We’ve been around for so long 30 30-something years, and there’s always that encouragement to be entrepreneurial and think of new things to do. I’ve always imagined our marketing automation to be a little bit more behavior-based.

I would love to implement more trigger campaigns and better collaboration with some of our product teams, which I’m actually seeing and I’m excited to collaborate with them. We have really great product managers who just really love what they do and love to collaborate with us. Cause we just have so much product to share with our customers and new customers. Looking forward to building out these extensive campaigns to make our company grow more and reach new audiences Yeah, that’s like in my world. I think in overall automation, email will never die. I got that on a sticker from a vendor once. It’ll never die. And I live by that. And I think, if anything, I would, I’d love to have a team of automation specialists that own certain aspects are certain business units and those campaigns and just work together and own our messaging via email. 

Carman Pirie: That is an ambitious agenda.

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah, a little bit of baby steps though. Baby steps. Yes.

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting to me because I think embedded in your comment there was really a realization that, especially new newly acquired customers, there’s so much to tell them about so much to educate them about. There’s so many different things that they can actually buy from you. And it just seems embedded in all that is a real realization that even for ones that have been around with you for a long time, there’s an awful lot of growth. That can be had in simply nurturing those relationships and being more intentional about it.

And I bet there’s scarcely a manufacturer listening to this podcast today that couldn’t say that same thing. 

Carlicia Layosa: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. 

Carman Pirie: It it really is, it’s easy for marketers to get bogged down or to be very focused on awareness building and and new prospect acquisition. But the gold that’s there in customer nurturing is massive. Yeah. 

Jeff White: And things that are triggered off of current customer behaviour, like there, there are so many different ways that you could look at that and so many different ways that you can approach it in so many different ways that people will react and interact with what you provide that, the learning that you’ll have there will be so great that you won’t be able to respond to all of them, but do you think you’ll start to see categories of behaviour where people are in terms of how they interact with upsell opportunities or learning about adjacent products or things like that is that where you think the most opportunity is there from the customer behaviour side of things?

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah, absolutely. We have a couple of software solutions that. Recently launched this year, and a lot of the nurturing is trigger-based because they have to fill out a form to get the software. And so we get a lot of sometimes replies to those emails thank you. Looking forward to using this.

The software has saved me time. So getting that instant feedback, that instant voice of the customer without putting out a survey or something like that, is going to be valuable and help us continue developing that product or whatever software that we’re launching, whatever the flavour of the day is. And so like having, it’s like instantaneous feedback. It’s like you immediately send something after they’ve done a behavior and then they give us feedback that’s a lot of maybe months of work trimmed down to maybe two or three weeks. So you’re saving time and getting that instantaneous feedback. Yeah, maybe it’s one or two customers, but it’s better than no customer, right? Sometimes, and then we’ll get on our industry segment website, we’ll get form fill-outs from that. And then our segment managers follow up right away. So it’s like knowing that interest right away, it’s putting them through the funnel at a faster rate than a slower engagement program would. 

Carman Pirie: It’ll be interesting to see how those behaviours change over time as well or how the program needs to evolve? Just to stay up-to-date and stay current. And it’s an interesting part of where you’re at in the evolution of this program, clearly showing that it’s been up and running. It’s been driving some success. It’s, it touches an awful lot of different aspects of the organization. But then there’s that care and feeding and evolution. I find sometimes in organizations people who aren’t involved in it, think of these things as a bit set it and forget it. Like they think that it can, oh, like we got that campaign and that works, so we know we can use that playbook and hit rinse and repeat and do it again. How much of that have you found to be true versus this constant iteration is what’s required because the whole landscape’s always changing?

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah, so 1 campaign that, as you said, we set it and forget it is our, we have an abandoned cart campaign for online orders. That has been set it and forget it. And it has always been our top 3 highest performing campaigns along with our onboarding nurture. Again, though if you want to reevaluate, reiterate, that’s when you bring in A B testing for that type of stuff.

If you’re worried that the content is getting stale. All right, let’s test it. With old versus new and a new audience and a new segment. Let’s test it. Yeah, there’s always going to be your tried and true campaigns and then your trigger-based campaigns and it all depends on your overall goals. Whatever campaign you’re running. Sometimes our product managers are just like, we just want eyeballs on it. That’s all we want. I’m like, okay, send it out. Good to go. But others want okay, I need a form filled out. I want to do LinkedIn, like all these connecting things. And so that’s where you start building out your process a little bit more. You start testing, you segment your audience more. 

Jeff White: I think you have access to something not all manufacturers have. Online e-commerce. So they can’t do the tried and true wonderfully productive abandoned cart emails. Do you have any advice for folks whose kind of time to purchase is longer around how they might use automation to encourage quicker purchase or things like that, that, aren’t available to them in an abandoned cart type situation?

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting because we also have. Customers that have a long buying process too. And in that case, so like maybe our industry segments, so that’s understanding your data, your key buying factors and developing content around that. And so for example, our blog email is one of our highest-performing emails and it’s just a blast and it’s got content. It’s straight to the point and it has spotlight products on there. But for the long term, it’s, what we found is providing them content throughout their journey. A good example is when they register, you’re watching out, okay, so they register at this point, and then you’re watching that behaviour, you’re seeing what pages they’re visiting, what if they’re downloading CAD connecting, if they’ve quoted, sometimes they’ll quote and then they won’t purchase for a very long time. So it’s under, I think it’s just understanding the buying cycle of your customer. What they’re experiencing along the way 

Jeff White: Another deeper segmentation option there too.

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah, absolutely 

Jeff White: Time to purchase. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I would think that you could look at that and say, okay we have a segment of people that tend to take a longer time to purchase seem to spend more time in the research phase maybe seem to need more information before they move over to the next step.

Carlicia Layosa: I think what’s the benefit? Awesome thing about working from assuming is that we have solutions from every stage of your design process. So we have in CAD library, which is an application resource to help you understand how our products can be used in applications. We have our CAD models for prototyping. We have software to help you design out in the design phase. Pricing and lead time are easily available on our website. Great. And then to finish out actual assembly and things like that. We have a solution where you can actually upload your own 3D models and we’ll give you a part number to order. So I think working from assumption makes it easy to have a solution for every phase of the design cycle and the purchase cycle. And then you on our website, you can. Keep like your bill of materials and you can order upload your Misumi bill of materials and keep that on your account. So it’s like full circle always there. We’re basically with you every step of the way. 

Carman Pirie: That sparks a question for me. I’m curious about when you have a product that you can talk about for every stage in that design cycle and you’re nurturing along every stage of that design cycle, how much do you, I’m just, I’m wondering how much do we talk about the product in that nurturing? Because I guess that one of the things in marketing automation and these types of nurturing programs, is there’s an educational component. There is often a desire to try to not be too salesy. But then, frankly, I think sometimes when people get a little too educationally and they’re not being specific to a product or to a solution, it can seem like they wander or, they’re the value that they’re adding isn’t as obvious. A roundabout way of asking the question, Carlicia I’m wondering, As you think through that automation how do you think about the balance of referring to the product referring to the solution promoting the solution versus trying to be aware of where the customer is in their journey and not be too salesy and just try to be nurturing. Do you find that there’s a balance that you strike there? Just interested in your thoughts on that. 

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah, that’s definitely kind of difficult to like really understand because our customer’s journey is like never linear. And I think creating, I don’t know, like a segmentation that works for each phase. And I think what’s hard is connecting the dots and making sure. We’re sending the message at the right time, but, yeah, the balance is definitely hard. I don’t have a clear answer to that. Because I’m still figuring it out in my career and ourshow it all works. I’m assuming, but I think if you implement things like, lead scoring and just seeing scoring on different behaviours that’ll help you get a better understanding. You can see the journey of their behaviours and adding those points and those are actually behaviours you want to see not necessarily like just any behaviours. Yeah, that’s a tough question. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah my instinct is that in some way, because most manufacturers sell to other manufacturers, like they’re often selling to other engineers. Yeah. And so they’re solutions-oriented folks. They understand that products offer solutions so speaking specifically to what a product can actually deliver. As a way of focusing the conversation is probably more embraced than maybe it is in other categories. Yeah. Yeah, just a bit of a thought experiment as I was, going through this. Yeah, I wonder, but yeah. 

Yeah, this has been a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed exploring the nuances of marketing automation and basically the anatomy of a leading marketing automation program with you today. It’s been wonderful to have you on the show. 

Carlicia Layosa: Thanks for having me. I had a blast. A lot of really great questions that now I want to go back and think about myself for our automation. Yeah. 

Jeff White: Give you things to think about over there. 

Carlicia Layosa: Yeah. Over the holiday break. Yeah. 

Jeff White: Thanks for joining us, Carlicia. 

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Kula Ring with Carman Pirie and Jeff White. Don’t miss a single manufacturing marketing insight. Subscribe now at kulapartners.com/thekularing. That’s K U L A partners dot com slash the Kula Ring.