We f****d up.

Five years ago when PAASE was born we had a simple mission, to take the CRM learnings we had from the enterprise space and bring that strategic knowledge to the owner led and SME space in a commercially viable way.

In effect we built an agency by accident, it’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot over the last six months, have we lost our way in this time. The answer isn’t as nuanced as a yes or no.

We’ve stuck to our core proposition, but we tweaked and changed our marketing to make it easier for brands to understand what services we were providing and by doing so, our appearance to the outside world has changed into just another agency, but our credentials run further than watching youtube videos and a couple of ESP accreditations on how work their platform.

Putting the customer at the heart of everything

Our depth of knowledge goes far deeper, at the heart is our customer’s customer. By understanding their current position in the customer lifecycle means that we can activate the right message, at the right time through the right channel.

A good agency should challenge the brands they work with, not every test will be a success but everyone is a learning.

We’ve worked hard to boast some of the best client retention rates in the sector by understanding our customer’s customers, their journey and their values. That being said, we’ve still got it wrong at times and those learnings have gone back into the business to make the process stronger.

We’ve also fired ourselves from brands where we know we can’t add further value until other KPIs outside our control our met. This honesty with brands means that 90%+ have returned at a future date additional projects or retainers.

It’s the expertise that adds value

Working with PAASE you’re not paying for the activation of an email creative in a generic process, you’re paying for the expertise, knowledge and experience required to build, evaluate and continually optimise activity. In fact we prefer to work with clients that will take our strategic input and do the activation themselves (We’ll always lend a hand, but the value is in the strategy and not the implementation).

Automations should never be ‘fit and forget’ but always subject to the continuous improvement methodology such as the one embedded across PAASE.

Less is sometimes very much more.

If you are thinking about employing or an agency (or already do), these are the questions you should be asking them;

• When was the last time you reviewed your customer journey
• What is your customer journey? Do you even have one?  
• Where are the gaps and what is the prioritisation for implementation?
• What channels should you be using?
• What is your data acquisition strategy in order to drive personalisation?
• What data are you capturing from new sign ups?
• What data are you appending to existing records?
• Why not check out our case study here – Curlsmith & OctaneAI case study – PAASE, Klaviyo experts for a few ideas
• How are you using this data to drive a personalised experience in a commercially viable way?
• How is it impacting content in automations?
• How is it defining content in your newsletters?  
• What are the success metrics (increased revenue/engagement, reduction in unsubscribes)?
• How will you test the uplift of this activity?

A supplier will pitch you x number of campaigns a month and y number of flow activations per month. A partner will work with you to build a vision of your brands specific customer journey then help you bring it to life.

So as I say we kind of f**ed up, we haven’t bought this to life enough in our pitches but we’ve gone back to our roots.

It’s got to be worth a coffee and a chat right?