How to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, and email to dramatically increase sales

Originally published in Authority Magazine

Marketing a product or service today is easier than ever before in history. Using platforms like Facebook ads or Google ads, a company can market their product directly to people who perfectly fit the ideal client demographic, at a very low cost. Digital Marketing tools, Pay per Click ads, and email marketing can help a company dramatically increase sales. At the same time, many companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools often see disappointing results.

In this interview series called "How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales", we are talking to marketers, advertisers, brand consultants, & digital marketing gurus who can share practical ideas from their experience about how to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, & email. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lydia Fern.

Lydia Fern is VP of Product at Bonsai, the first-party marketing platform that automates profitable growth. She leads the development of privacy-first features that help B2C companies measure true marketing impact through media mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, and incrementality testing. With nearly four years at Bonsai and a background in engineering and aerospace, Lydia translates complex data science into actionable strategies that help marketers move beyond vanity metrics to drive real revenue growth.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to "get to know you" a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your 'backstory' and how you got started?

I was a manufacturing engineer for many years, and I loved getting to see the tangible output of my work. After working on several projects that involved unifying data from several disparate sources to help operations teams make decisions, I realized how satisfying this type of work was, and I began to pursue a career in data analytics. I was given an opportunity to join Bonsai, which was a small marketing analytics company at the time, where I could do the same work, but just helping marketing teams make decisions instead of manufacturing teams. And, as we transformed Bonsai from a consulting firm to a fully automated platform, I found that I once more get to see the tangible output of my work — not as a physical item I can touch, but as insights on a screen, and more importantly, business outcomes for our customers.

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or 'takeaways' you learned from that?

In one of my first marketing-mix modeling readouts, when I was still learning the ins and outs of digital media, I made a recommendation to increase spend on brand paid search campaigns to drive more incremental new customers, because they showed a strong iROI. My teammates patiently explained to me that spending more on brand search terms wouldn't magically cause more people to search for those terms. I'm constantly reminded how important (and challenging) it is to combine deep practitioner expertise with sophisticated data analytics — the art and science of marketing. One without the other leaves so much success on the table.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

While I was still working as a mechanical engineer, my leader Mike Remke consistently gave me opportunities to hone my data visualization and storytelling skills — and when he started Bonsai with Matt Butler, Mike advocated for me to join the team even though I had no experience in marketing, data engineering, or working at a startup of any kind. I am indebted to Mike — not just for giving me the chance to work a dream job at an amazing company, but also for being one of the most empathetic and encouraging leaders I've ever worked for. Today, as Bonsai's Co-Founder and CTO, Mike continues to create that same culture of opportunity and growth for our entire team.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Bonsai is the first-party marketing platform that automates profitable growth — and I think delivering proven automated growth is exactly what makes us stand out! Through partnering with Bonsai and using our predictive buying algorithms to run their paid search portfolio, JSX drove +35 percentage point growth in new customers, +37 percentage point growth in flights booked, +4 percentage point growth in LTV, ultimately driving a 16% lift in media ROI. At Bonsai, we are passionate about giving marketers the tools they need to transform their businesses, earn trust with their CFOs, and re-shape the marketing function out of a cost center mindset, into an undeniable value driver.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

How about one trait applied three ways? For me, curiosity has been a huge driver for success — curiosity about how things work, why things are the way they are, and what people are really thinking and feeling.

When I was still early in my career, being curious about the way things worked drove me to get into the weeds on processes that many leaders considered below their pay grade (and rightfully so). This curiosity made me a subject matter expert on tedious but critical processes, which won me credibility in important rooms.

Being curious about why things are the way they are — for me, this means uncovering and challenging the status quo.

Curiosity in conversation with other people — there have been countless times in conversations with teammates and customers where I've been tempted to respond to something they say with defensiveness. I've found that choosing to respond with curiosity uncovers pain points and builds rapport.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We are! One that comes to mind is a new product feature which will allow marketers to automatically make mass-optimizations to tROAS (target return on ad spend) and budget settings for all their paid search campaigns, every day. Too often, paid search campaigns are spot-on with ad copy, keywords, and targeting, and yet they still underperform, run out of money halfway through the day, and leave valuable clicks on the table. We want to provide a tool that solves for this and saves practitioners from spending hours every day making manual adjustments to all the campaigns in their portfolio.

Digital marketing

Ok super. Now let's jump to the main questions of our interview. As we mentioned in the beginning, sometimes companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools like PPC campaigns often see disappointing results. In your opinion, what are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when they first start out with digital marketing? If you can, please share an example for each.

I believe the number one mistake companies make when starting out with digital marketing is bidding on conversions. Conversion tracking used to be the foolproof way to grow your business. But, with the acute increase in digital commerce adoption and digital advertising spend over the last two decades, conversions have become drastically less incremental and more expensive. Every ad platform — Google, Meta, TikTok — claims 100% credit for the same sale, which means conversion tracking is measuring overlap, not true incremental value. They're also a relatively sparse dataset — if your website has a conversion rate of 1%, that means that for every one conversion you're bidding on, there are 99 clicks that could potentially hold valuable information to influence your bidding. Companies should instead invest in curating their own first-party data into their ads platforms to inform bidding.

If you could break down a very successful digital marketing campaign into a "blueprint", what would that blueprint look like? Please share some stories or examples of your ideas.

Ad copy, creative, targeting, keywords — these all matter immensely to the success of a marketing campaign. However, I'd argue there are two things that matter even more: bids and budgets. In simplest terms, my blueprint for a successful digital marketing campaign is one that bids for clicks and impressions based on the actual incremental value of those clicks and impressions, and that does not employ any budget capping.

Pay per click marketing (PPC)

Let's talk about Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) for a bit. In your opinion which PPC platform produces the best results to increase sales?

I believe any PPC ad platform can increase sales, if it's fed the right training data. Google's Smart Bidding, for example — Google Smart Bidding is an extremely sophisticated & good bidding engine, and Google knows more about each ad clicker/potential ad clicker than anything/anyone else on the Internet — it just doesn't know which ones are valuable and which aren't. If you can give Google Smart Bidding that information, you have the most predictive dataset feeding the best bidding engine. Instead of training on conversion signals, digital marketing teams should train bidding engines using their own first-party business data.

Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?

To run a highly successful PPC campaign, you need to understand this rule of fundamental bid theory: The most important element of success is your bid.

• When user demand volume changes, keep bids the same. (Do nothing)
• When advertiser competition increases, decrease bids. (Go opposite)
• When customer conversion rate increases, increase bids. (Chase!)

This approach focuses your energy on what you can control — the value signal you send to the bidding engine — rather than reacting to market noise.

Email marketing

Let's now talk about email marketing for a bit. In your opinion, what are the 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful email marketing campaign that increases sales?

I would recommend using a unified customer journey and multi-touch attribution model to get valuable insights about what's working and not working with your email program. This will tell you three critical things:

Who should I be sending emails to?

Are there customer journeys who receive, open and click on emails consistently, but never convert or upsell? What about all the customer journeys who do convert after clicking on emails? This will inform future customer segments who are worth reaching out to, and who you may want to leave alone.

When should I be sending emails?

How many days, weeks, or months typically pass between a user's first email click and their first actual purchase? How many nurture emails does the average customer need to prevent churn?

What does email pair well with?

By creating one unified customer journey that includes email sends and clicks alongside paid media interactions, your digital marketing and email teams can work together more effectively to convert customers via a multi-channel approach.

Other digital marketing tools

What are the other digital marketing tools that you are passionate about? If you can, can you share with our readers what they are and how to best leverage them?

Shameless plug! Bonsai itself is a transformational digital marketing tool that does many of the things I've been preaching in this interview — builds out complete customer journeys & multi-touch attribution models, generates predictive training datasets for platforms such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok.

Another tool I find incredibly helpful is Zapier, which our marketing team at Bonsai utilizes for back-end automated flows such as alerting the whole team via a dedicated Slack channel whenever we get a new form fill, demo request, etc. It's a great way to keep everyone aware of what's in the pipeline and breaking down silos between teams.

5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer

Here is the main question of our series. Can you please tell us the 5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Invest in your own data literacy so that you can make data-driven decisions.
2. When making data-driven decisions — don't wait for complete statistical significance. Fast directional insights are better than perfect, too-late insights.
3. Test, test, test! When implementing new strategies, tactics, or investment levels, use matched market testing wherever possible to validate impact before scaling.
4. Measure your impact against business outcomes, not just marketing metrics like clicks, impressions, CPC, CTR, etc.
5. Don't let ad platforms grade their own homework. Third-party conversions will never give you an accurate picture of what's really moving the needle and what isn't.

Resources

What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?

Some of my favorite resources include Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising by Alex Schultz, Avinash Kaushik's newsletter The Marketing Analytics Intersect, Marketing Brew, and our podcast, Branching Out with Bonsai.

Final thoughts

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Outside of my job, I volunteer as an ESL teacher for immigrants and refugees in Chicago. I love doing this and have found that it brings so much good — not just to the language learners, but to the volunteer teachers. It is a privilege to get to meet, teach and learn from individuals from all around the world, and I would love to see a much larger network of language classes, welcome centers, and conversation cafes pop up across the country to connect more people across languages, cultures, and countries of origin.

How can our readers further follow your work?

They can follow Bonsai on LinkedIn, visit us at bonsaidata.io, or listen to our podcast, Branching Out with Bonsai!

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!