[Interview] Dan Tyre on Top Inbound Marketing Strategies for eCommerce

Dan Tyre is a serial entrepreneur that became the #6 employee at Hubspot. He has a wealth of knowledge on inbound marketing and has worked with many brands over the years.

In this awesome interview, Dan distilled 42 years of experience into some of the best inbound marketing tips for eCommerce brands to scale their sales and marketing efforts.

Here’s the full video of the interview if you want to listen to it, and the transcript is below.

Dan Tyre’s Story

I'm an entrepreneur. I've done five startups in the last 42 years. My first one went to a billion and a half dollars. The second one I started in my dining room and was essentially an agency that grew to $30 million. My third one went bankrupt. My fourth one was bought out by Microsoft and HubSpot is my fifth.

I'm experienced in company growth and customer acquisition. I spent a lot of time selling and managing in 2007, I was employee number six at HubSpot. It was a five-person company in Cambridge. And now, HubSpot is the leading customer relationship management platform for scaling businesses and has been named a top place to work by Glassdoor fortunate in the Boston globe, eight offices across the world.

I've also written a book on digital marketing called the Inbound Organization, which contains leadership principles to help your company scale better currently a director at HubSpot working full time. And I'm happy to help people who are trying to figure out this world of inbound eCommerce.



Pro tip: don't be hating on outbound, it's still super powerful. Check out our guide on outbound marketing.

What is Inbound Marketing for eCommerce?

It's a great question. And a lot of people kind of get inbound, but even in 2022, 15 years into the inbound revolution, many people are still unclear of how it relates to eCommerce businesses.

A simple way to think about it is through the management principles that I wrote about in my book. It means that you're treating people like human beings. You’re helping them not selling to them.

That’s the whole idea of these podcasts and these videos to help your prospects and customers do a better job. It means that focus beats bandwidth. It means that you're solving problems for the customer. That means you understand your customer deeply and provide the right information to the right person at the right time.

And in 2022, we focus very much on the underlying data. Those are the correlations of the foundation of inbound marketing. Now how this applies to your website - that's inbound marketing.



5 Top Inbound Strategies for eCommerce

Ecommerce has exploded. eCommerce sales grew by 44% in 2020 alone. That's insane. And it falls into a variety of different areas.

1. SEO & SEM

Most e-commerce companies want to increase visitors to their websites. That’s SEO and SEM.

2. Conversion Rate Optimization

Second, there’s the understanding of how to get the right people to your website so that they can see your product and services. That’s conversion rate optimization (CRO). We've got to make sure that more of the people who find your website, stay there. And that means lots of calls to action, landing pages, and free stuff.

3. Offer free stuff

HubSpot’s research says that people love free stuff. Dan Tyre’s research says that the reason you love free stuff is that you think you're getting a better deal than your friend. And you think you're being treated differently.

4. Increase your AOV

eCommerce brands need to make sure they increase the average order value through cross-selling and upselling. That's making sure that you have a variety of different options, that you're providing the right information to the right person at the right time.

5. Increase the Lifetime Value

Lastly, increasing lifetime value. That means ensuring that your customers are getting what they want. It’s also about minimizing any friction in the shopping process.



Data is Critical for inbound marketing

Working with data sounds easy, but it's not. It's hard.

First of all, just identifying your ideal customer profile and your persona takes time and effort. Number two, you have to create content to attract people, to get people there. Number three, you have to manage all of this information. And in 2022, if you don't have automated tools to do that, you're at a huge disadvantage.

You need to understand the conversion rates by country, by the sales team, by product, by the order value in the cart.

In 2014, right before the global pandemic, before all the social unrest, you would measure a data point and it'd be a year later before you be able to act on it. Now it's minutes and hours. Now marketing moves very, very quickly. You need to move quickly to optimize and get the best results.

The final thing is - A/B testing. Now we have multi-variant testing. And brands get super excited about that because that gives them the ability to test all of these different scenarios to ensure that they’re doing the right stuff.

Dan’s biggest tip for eCommerce owners and marketers

So I'm a big community guy.

In the last 12 months what we’ve seen is that event-based marketing has become community-based marketing. A community is a group of like-minded people that support your brand and are all working towards the same goals.

Make sure that you're welcoming to the new people in the community. You can sometimes get so tied up with things, that you forget that it could be slightly intimidating when people come into your community. So you want to be very welcoming, recognize them, make sure that it's easy for them to get their questions answered.

You could even make a special place for people who are new to the program so that they don't feel strange asking basic questions. And ensure that your community stays vibrant by providing the right information to the right segment at the right time.

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