How Workweek Is Fixing Newsletter Attribution with Adam Ryan, CEO of Workweek | Ep. 421

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0:21Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. And this podcast is a special one and i'll i'll tell you why in a second but i have adam ryan ceo of workweek and he we're going to talk about something that is just like breaking news in the marketing industry i think because i write a newsletter a lot of companies write a newsletter a lot of people sponsor a newsletter um and the problem with newsletters over the years and a lot of channels like newsletters it's just hard to get attribution from them it's hard to know like that newsletter that reader tied into that sale um it's hard to know that but a lot of marketers out there know that newsletters built trust over months they know that it's a channel that they need to invest in but like their crm is saying one thing but their gut is saying another thing but now i brought an adam to talk about what is changing in the next week, basically.

1:49I mean, this week, but it's going to be launching and it'll be in the market and it'll be exciting. So welcome to the podcast. Excited to be back. Always my favorite marketing podcast, day in and day out. And I'm so happy that we're able to connect to talk about the partner platform and what we're trying to do to help marketers have a little bit more success internally. Let me just kick this off. So a brand runs a newsletter sponsorship for six months. They think that the ICP are reading it and the ICP is reading it. A deal closes, but the CRM or their source of truth says nothing about that newsletter.

2:30In the current state, why does that happen? Because there's no attribution back to the CRM unless that user clicked on the ad, which The ad is already about 150 words normally, like in your great newsletter and others. So it's not necessarily like a click intended ad. But if they do click in and then they have to fill out a form and then they fill out the form and they can get track back to the newsletter. And though that does happen, the truth is most people don't do that. That doesn't mean the ad didn't work. But for that marketer, they have no other way to prove that that newsletter worked besides if that lead gen form gets filled out.

3:14And so that's the state of things today. And there's a lot of other issues around tracking attribution in newsletters. But for a marketer at a B2B vendor, SaaS company specifically, which is really who we're trying to solve for, that is the way that you can typically tie back newsletter attribution back to your CRM today. I mean, and today the current newsletters out there are reporting really on two things, which is clicks and opens. And I want to go a little bit into why those are a little bit of BS metrics and every platform reports on it differently. So you can kind of tell a weird story that's not true or a story that might be like overly inflated or underly inflated based on what you're using.

4:05Yeah. I mean, so, you know, email has been around for all the time. And today there's these major email platforms, you know, that across the board, marketing platforms like there's, you know, service providers like Beehive and Sailthrough and Zeta, you know, PostScript. There's so many email platforms. what most of them do is they've created their own algorithm on how opens and clicks should filter out the bots. So they don't give you the raw data necessarily. And they do that. And what we've seen over time is just being at the center of kind of newsletters for the last 10 years is that bot clicks have grown exponentially, more than 100 % in the last couple of years.

4:48from a raw click basis, about 98 % of clicks in an email now are bots. And what it's causing is if, you know, now people, some platforms aren't exactly motivated to share with people this problem because it is actually changing the performance. And so I was just telling someone, When, you know, at the hustle 10 years ago, our open, our unique open rate was like 18, 20, 22%. Our total open rate was like 40, 45%. And all of a sudden now all these newsletters have a 50 % plus open rate. And the reality is it's just not true. It's, it's that these opens are inflated and so are the clicks. And there's really no consistent way and no regulation around how to measure those.

5:39And so if you're a B2B marketer spending in newsletters and one of your publishers uses one ESP and another creator uses a different ESP, though you're comparing those open rates and click through rates as Apple's apples, they are not. And that is a huge issue for just baseline metrics. But also in the end, you know, if you're selling a piece of software to, you know, an e-com store with north of 10 million revenue, you don't care about all those clicks. Like you only have maybe six to 7 ,000 potential customers in the world. Why do you care about a thousand clicks when 900 of them weren't even in your customer profile?

6:17And so those are kind of like the two larger issues outstanding for marketers that they're dealing with with newsletter advertising. I want to also go into something that you talk about a lot, but I don't think people do this in most marketing orgs, which is like verified clicks, verified opens, like the verified metrics of what. And I know we, Workweek reports on that back to sponsors. A lot of most companies don't report the verified, but could you explain like what verified opens and clicks are and also like why is it important? I know you kind of just said about like who is actually clicking, who is actually opening matters, but how should people be thinking about measuring opens and clicks?

7:02So the kind of belief that we had years ago and working is, you know, folks like yourself are appealing and attracting a certain type of reader or listener that are decision makers in companies. And we care about who those people are. And the reality is it's not about I'm not trying to play necessarily a how many game, which is traditionally how media and publishers play to like, look at all this scale we have. We always thought like, hey, if you write the best content, you're actually like appealing to a certain type of person. The who matters more than how many. And none of the reporting, though, ever matched that.

7:38It was always really about how many and open rates and click-through rates. And so what we've done and what we're excited to announce this week is the Workweek Partner Platform. It's been in beta for 18 months. And this week we're rolling it out publicly. And what it's done is, one, we will not count a click and show it to an advertiser unless we know who that person is. We don't necessarily give away any identification like email or first and last name, et cetera, on that. But we make sure that if this is just an unknown email subscriber that we don't know who they are, that is pretty much worthless to that marketer.

8:16And so we don't show it. And what that allowed us to do over time is to have, while this was in testing and beta, our clients started being like, hey, this is great. I wish I could get some of this information into our CRM at the account level. And then we started building that and testing it. And now today, if you advertise with Workweek and one of our many newsletters, including the Marketing Millennials, you will be able to get your clicks and opens at the account level into your CRM and really, for the first time, understand that attribution of, I like to call the dark sales cycle of it all, where your sales rep kind of takes credit for that sale, but that person clicked an ad maybe six months before they ever took that meeting or demo call.

9:06And that is not giving credit to marketers. And we're trying to fix that. Could you go into a little like the mechanics of how you were able to like do this? Like, I think like what I've seen with a lot of channels is there's two big channels out there that people have and it's Google and Meta. And like most people are measuring like their attribution models on like a either last click or they measuring it based on like the attribution cycle of what those platforms are doing. But most people's sales cycles are way longer, especially in B2B than what Meta is doing. Like it's not a seven day sales cycle.

9:46Most people have like a 28, a 30, a 60. If you're an enterprise, it's eight months. And newsletters are obviously like if you send once or twice, like once a week, it could be like a six months, like warmup of trust before someone decides to thumbs up. So could you explain a little bit about like how this is happening and like, yeah. Yeah, the core piece of this is you need identity. So on average, an email is a great identity tool. Typically you like at least can reach that person. You relatively know if they're, you know, if it's real, if they're opening and clicking things. But what's really challenging is when you try to attach a personal email to a work, to a company, a work profile.

10:34And we were able to do that work week and create an identity graph because of our professional networking platform in our communities. we're able to identify both that email of someone signing up for a newsletter, as well as through the applications that we have for the community to attach that to a company. And that allowed us to create an identity graph that today, 81 % of our newsletter subscribers, we can actually identify who they are and what company they work at. Most companies in this space are closer to 35%. So that's at the core of what was enabled. Then the next step of it, though, is the how is through our partner platform, able to actually attach these engagement signals, whether it's a unique open, multiple unique opens, an ad click, etc.

11:24into your CRM. And so to your point, newsletter advertising has been broken, especially for B2B. And if you are any vendor that has a sales cycle longer than 30 or 45 days, and when I say sales cycle, I'm not meaning what's in your CRM that your salesperson logs. I mean, when that person starts to become aware of the problem, what they're wanting, and then they reach out. And this is that part of the sales cycle that's been hidden. And newsletter advertising has not been able to support or show the impact during that time. And to your point, Meta and Google have really done a great job of taking credit on the last click or sometimes even the first click.

12:10and that has allowed those dollars and that confidence of those platforms for marketers to keep going back to them and what we're trying to do and what we're starting to see is that as we show these signals in the crm it's giving marketers insights into roi that they did not know and so a tangible example of that is if we took the old way of measurement for one of the customers that we we did this with if we took the old way of measurement which was hey they clicked on the ad and then they filled out a form and then that's how we get credit. Our ROI, our ROAS on that spend with that customer was about 0.3%.

12:47Pretty bad. Wasn't great. After looking at the additional signals in the CRM and enriching that, it was an 8X ROAS. And this is what happens when you have great content, trusted creators that actually are engaging good advertising that's 100 plus words that people actually have to read, advertising works. And what we really set out to do was start to prove that to marketers in a way that's completely transparent. I also wanted to take one step back because I think I want you to tell people like why newsletters because like obviously now there's AI, people are like using AI to like read news. There's a lot of channels out there.

13:33Like why is Newsletter like one of the most like, like one of the best channels to market on? But now, until now, it was one of the hardest to prove. So people were just like, saw it as more as like, I'm buying with a creator instead of buying with a network or a channel. There's like the fundamental aspects of it's an opted in channel, right? So unlike social and others where people are just getting an algorithm served to them, these people have already opted in, they've already raised their hand. Naturally, that brings more engagement, more trust. The second part of it, which not everyone does, but we do, and I believe the best creators tend to do this, is they have really good ads.

14:13Those ads look and sound like the creator. They actually tell a story. Sometimes it's a really technical explanation of a feature. Sometimes it's all about what problem are you experiencing and solutions, But it's not just a crappy banner ad that doesn't really reflect any story. And the combination of that just alone, the opted in aspect and with a trusted voice and then ad that tells a real story. This is like the mecca of marketing, B2B marketing. It's sponsored content with people that actually are where they're reading it. They trust it. And the only issue that's ever existed with that is that you don't know who is opening or clicking necessarily unless they give you that information.

15:00And so that was the last piece of the puzzle to kind of close the loop on the channel. And but the success is largely due to those two things. And and it's been proven now, I think, over the last 10 years by the growth of that. And now we're just trying to make it even easier to continue the scale of spend in the newsletter as a channel. And the crazy part about this, I think, is that technically you're doing something that is transparent, but also could be a little risky because opens and clicks, other newsletters are sharing opens and clicks. They're not going to be showing verified things. So the numbers could look way more inflated on the other side of things.

15:45So why take a risk of just showing verified people? One, it's nice to be honest. I think waking up and every day and I believe that we are honest about what we do. We, you know, not reporting a click if we don't know who they are. Like that is, that is a place that, you know, you're doing the best thing for your customers. And I think that's at the core of what we wanted to do always. And then the other part of this, though, is incentive alignment. Like sooner or later, all bad advertising gets found, but not all good advertising gets found. And what we wanted to do is put the incentives around that.

16:27Like, I believe that the creators that Workweek has the very best advertising because they have the most trust. And so we flipped that incentive by believing that we had the best advertising. And if we didn't, then we'd have to fix it. And that's fine. That's part of the problem. But I more so believed that we needed to find good advertising because we had it already. And that's, I think, where the industry is going as well, is really enabling creators who have great trust, who have a great audience that controls a lot of budget, that their ads actually work. today they're getting treated the same way as anybody else and that shows up in the cpms that they can charge this shows up in the renewal rates that they have and ultimately it doesn't help creators capture the value that they've actually created and that's that's what we wanted to go solve and i think that's um that's what we've always wanted to do is change the way that b2b creators work and monetize and and this is just the next step of that i think on another level too it helps you flex in a muscle which you can keep kind of like not flex all the time when you do clicks and open which is like grow the growth aspect and finding the right people whether it's organic or paid growth like newsletters today could just pump in 20 000 correct randos into their news that are at a low cost per acquisition.

17:59They can get clicks not saying that's their buyers or they can buy a list or they could do anything to bump those numbers out. So I think that's one thing too, is it forces at least WorkWe to make sure the growth is the correct growth, not the wrong growth. And that also builds more trust with the buyer or a sponsor because you know that this person needs to come in and they are your customer so you have to also serve them while the creator serves their audience yeah I tell the story um I have been selling newsletter ads for 10 years uh and longer and my dad is a supportive dad and uh recognizes like back in the day he's like how can I help I'm like yeah we're just worried about ad clicks.

18:51And that's in 2016, 15. That's what I was saying. And for years, he clicked all the ads and all the newsletters we sold. And for context, my dad is a retiree and his free time, he judges barbecue competitions. I'm not sure if he can tell you what SaaS even means. Definitely is not a buyer of any tools like that. But he always clicked the ad to support his son. And until we launched the partner platform, we included my dad in all that click reporting. And so does everyone else in the industry. And as much as I appreciate his support, the reality is, is like that is not helping anyone. It's not making us make better decisions about who we're getting on the list, about who we're getting engaged, allow the content to be at the forefront.

19:40but it's also not helping marketers like create benchmarks and baselines. And this is pervasive across the entire industry. And it was just time to politely start to not count my dad in those clicks and only count the buyers that you care about. And that is really what this is all about. And I think the newsletters as a channel have exploded. There's platforms that are adding thousands of newsletters a day like Substack and Beehive. And to your point, people have realized that they can funnel in a bunch of money into marketing to get newsletter subscribers. And so this is a natural progression of the maturity of the channel that we need to really support marketers by giving them more transparency as the entire channel becomes a little more murky.

20:27And also for marketers, a lot of marketers out there are running account-based marketing. They have account lists. And one of the metrics that they're reporting for channels is penetration of accounts, who's been seeing in accounts. So could you explain a little bit of the ABM side of it, like connecting to your CRM and connecting the partner platform, how would that enhance reporting back so they can defend newsletters as a channel? Sure. So ABM platforms have largely been built on probabilistic identity graphs, meaning cookies and other signals that they basically use an algorithm and guess who those people are.

21:13Over time, that's become harder and harder and harder to do because of security and privacy and Apple changes. And inevitably, it means that data is more inaccurate. And what we have done due to the nature of what we've been able to build over the last few years, we have our own event registration platform. We have our own community platform. We've been able to create a deterministic graph because we actually know who these users are from their email and then the application that they have and tie that forward. And so that's the first piece of this is like we are not guessing who they are. We know who they are, which immediately is a difference from traditional ABM platforms that realistically the way that they've operated and worked is outdated and needs to be updated.

22:01It's more like 2015-16 era than 2026. And so that's the first aspect is like having a deterministic graph. The second, which is more around the CRM, is the most B2B marketers are generally very eager to get lead generation. And I would argue as someone who has had many of those conversations, it's not that the marketer actually wants leads for the sales team to call or email. It's that they want credit. It's that if we get a lead, I can put it in the CRM and now that marketing person gets credit for that lead. And that helps them win their budget the next time over. And what we've been able to do and see with the results is when we compare pre and post results of the partner platform, marketers are getting 5 % or 10 % of the credit that they really deserve.

23:03And ultimately, so is Workweek, right? We would get credit for, we would touch sometimes 40 % of all closed one accounts before an opportunity is opened with our ad campaigns, and we get credit for like 3 % or 4%. And so that made the marketer look bad. It made sales look better, which is the classic issue that we all know exists. And really today, the new version of ABM is how do you not need to do this with just leads, but other signals that can tie back to the account? And the only way that you can really do that is to make sure you know who those people are. Nobody designs bad marketing ops on purpose.

23:41You just wake up two years in and all your approvals are on email, your assets are in three apps, your Slack is a maze, and your Mondays are like one long status meeting. Wrike is how you dig yourself out. It's a smart work management platform with visual collaboration, AI that catches deadline risks before they even happen, and the structure to let you focus on the real work. Integrates with everything, aligns everyone. used by teams at Lyft, Ogilvy, NVIDIA. Go to ryke.com slash TMM to see how. One thing I want to ask you is there are a group of marketers who ran newsletter ads. It failed because of the situation you're saying.

24:27Like it could have touched 40 % of the accounts, but it didn't because there was no reporting there and it was just clicks and opens. um what do you say to those marketers who need to like go back and fight for budget to go back and try newsletters again because it actually is a channel that is valuable to invest in well one if they've ever worked with workweek we're happy to reconstruct that campaign for them uh and run that so they can have that information in their crm and run that report uh and we've uh started to do that more and more in beta. And it's really helped a lot of marketers have a better story to be able to defend the ad dollars that they want.

25:12And I think the other thing that I believe is great marketers know what works. They don't need a report to tell them that. They have the instincts, they have the pattern recognition. And this is really where this idea came from was we were talking to our marketers and like, I know this works. Like I believe in this channel. I believe in this creator, but my CFO has like cut my budget. Like they, I can't prove that this works at all. And I believe those marketers. And that's, if you're one of those people, you need to go back to the channel. Uh, you know, today, uh, most, most newsletters are a little bit behind of what we're doing.

25:53Our goal is to kind of like make a rising tide lifts all boats here and help the entire industry grow and give you more confidence. But if you worked with us, come back and let us run this, reconstruct that reporting for you for no cost and see how it works. And I think ultimately you'll see that those campaigns, if your gut told you they were right, they're going to work. And that's the only way to do that is by actually putting the data into your CRM. It's crazy because I think I'm a big component of that attribution destroyed a lot of great marketing um i really believe that because i think that a lot of marketers default to like google branded search meta because they have the measurability of things and they can prove it and it's a logical thing it's like the nobody um got fired for buying ibm type thing like nobody got fired for running google because they yeah google could measure it um but if you went with like an I think we're in a new era where people follow people and they get recommendations from friends, creators, influencers.

27:02They talk to people. The way people research is way different. The way people consume content is way different. And B2B, I think e-commerce is getting a little bit better there because they have incrementality testing. They have better attribution miles. they're still not there but b2b is like google branded search there's like everybody says we got to run google branded search but everybody knows a branded search is someone hasn't known your brand before or like something that's so yeah all that to say is like how do you think that so if someone has an attribution model how do you recommend them like adding this into the attribution model to make sure that like it's not only those two big dogs that are like let's be honest like they they spend a lot of money to make a wallet ward garden and reporting so you spend more on them so um how do you say to marketers like this is how you should add this into your attribution reporting i know because everybody has to have some sort of reporting um but i'm still yeah so there's there's different weights that you can do uh that we've worked with different folks you know a click is obviously can be pretty heavily weighted in an attribution and then also on the incrementality side like you can start to pattern match and recognize of what's happening through these algorithms of like hey there are numerous deals where we are seeing the average engagement uptick you know 35 days before that sales rep opened that opportunity and we're starting to find patterns like that as well and ultimately you know we are not the only channel we will not take credit for all the things that we do.

28:41I think on average, we've seen, you know, if you include all the touch points that we have across opens and clicks, I mean, we've seen north of like a 30X ROAS. That's ridiculous. We know we're not doing that. We are honest about that. And, but it is a signal, right? There's something positive there. So once you kind of can create your own weighted of like that open or that click or how many opens or, you know, what we've seen is particularly like if more than three people in a company have started to engage with an ad, win rate in the CRM goes up like 30 or 40%. And so there's opportunities to kind of like understand that channel and that success.

29:24It's new. This is all relatively new, but it's really taking a common sense approach of what should you weight those ads and then also finding ways to identify how it impacts the pipeline downstream and i have a i have a fun story with that one it was like we had to the point of accountability one of the partners in our beta came back uh with we drove basically zero net new we had zero impact on any net new uh on net new clients and customers and that was the first one we've ever had like that uh no none none of the opens and none of the clicks uh over of with the weighted kind of averages that were created showed any impact of net new dollars and i was like this is bad um and they were spending like multiple six figures and when we were like looking at it it's like well what what could have happened and so we actually then looked at the ad copy and uh one of the creators was like, hey, this ad copy was so technical.

30:31It was nothing to do about like the problems they were having. It was like, this is like a technical feature of this tool. And they just didn't really like the ad and didn't get a lot of engagement generally. And we could just kind of tell it was very, very niche and technical. And we found that of the clients that they had closed lost and then came back as a win as a win back all of those clients clicked that ad uh it was it was a it was essentially a win back ad but no one would ever known that um until you connected those dots all the way through and i think that's what this is uh you know what we're starting to see as a as a channel as a newsletter and how you do attribution is also like what are you trying to do are you trying to do win back campaigns are you trying to get net new are you trying to accelerate a sales cycle of an existing customer, you know, expand current customer spend, your copy and the way you work with creators should also adjust for that and ultimately have a way to attribute that downstream.

31:35And so with that customer, they renewed. And then we created new copy around like net new customers versus just doing essentially a win back campaign. But it kind of shows how you can get lost in the sauce of thinking something totally failed when reality it just it was it needed to be attributed to something that that actually solved a different problem yeah i've always said from being in marketing ops is like so many people go to blame the channel first and it's really like before you blame any channel i've seen is like you got to look at the ad you got to look at the creative you got to look at the landing page you got to look at who who you're targeting you got to look at the messaging you have to look at like 20 different things before you quit on a channel and a lot of people quit because of a number um and they never go back and they could be having a huge success on that channel because a lot of people what they do is they take meta copy and they put it in a newsletter or they take newsletter copy and they put it somewhere else and every channel is you're supposed to run it differently and especially a creator driven channel where like if you wanted to succeed on a creator's newsletter you have to make it sure it sounds a little bit like the creator and in their voice and in their tone and flow well in a newsletter.

32:50And if you're not, if you're just going to write it, how you think it's going to be written, I'm guaranteed your creator knows their audience better than you think you know your audience, because I'm not going to say that a lot of some marketers know their audience more, but creators have been writing for the audience for a long time and they know their audience. Yeah. Well, particularly in B2B, right? Like, I mean, what, what we believe is, is practitioner experience and that those folks like yourself creating content, the reason why that works is like you're a representation of their customer base.