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Interviews

How Marketers Stay Productive: Jernej Pavlic of Loop

September 30, 2019

This week we feature Jernej Pavlic, Head of Growth Marketer at Loop. Loop is a web, mobile & desktop email client that works with other email providers. It helps your team get things done on email. It connects with your existing inbox and simplifies teamwork with these features.

In this interview, you can read more about his work at Loop, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.

Your location:
 Stretched between Ljubljana, Slovenia, and London, UK.

Your favorite gadget:
 Kindle and a pioneer midi controller.

You start your day with:
 Short workout and a cold shower.

Your favorite time-saving trick: I don’t think I have one…probably because I don’t have kids yet :)) Maybe disabling all chat or email notifications on my phone. I check my phone regularly, I don’t need to react to every message. If its urgent enough, people will call. Other than that, I’m trying to focus on doing the right things all the time instead of saving time. But usually what helps me get more time is just waking up earlier.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily:Techcrunch is the source of my daily tech knowledge and the stuff that pops up to my medium feed. Although I’d say that what I read the most is usually the stuff that friends or colleagues share with me.

A picture of your workstation or the view outside your window if that inspires you:

A View From Jerry's Office

Describe an average day at Loop?


An average day at Loop means people from different departments working together on our weekly goals. Team leads usually start with a 15 minute daily meet up to align ourselves on the progress of the company towards weekly sprint goals. Since we have an open space office an occasional nerf bullet might fly over your head but otherwise, it’s pretty quiet. We like to leave most of the conversations on our platform. There is usually a group gathering for afternoon coffee at around 2 pm. Other than that, an average day for me usually means it’s different than the day before.

As a Marketer what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

My personal productivity hack would have to be quick workouts and cold showers in the morning. It helps me focus and puts me into the right mindset for the day. I’m usually working across different teams and this way a lot of small tasks come up, so one of my daily habits is just writing all my tasks down - whether they come through our meetings, our app or just talking to someone over morning coffee. It helps me understand my priorities at every point of the week and when the week is over I can also learn more about how successful have I been with my tasks and what can I improve moving forward. I also try to do the same with my team. I walk up to my colleagues and just ask them about what are they working on and how are we moving towards weekly goals. It’s a one-minute thing that helps us immediately align priorities. Most of this is possible because we have a great team culture, where we work very transparently. This way we don’t have to sit in meetings all the time as I’m pretty much aware of what everyone in the company is working on even. I think a big reason for that is using Loop Email - where we can collaborate efficiently and aren’t stuck on emails for most of the day.

As a person who is well-versed with online marketing/ inbound,  I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts.  What are the top 3-5 tools you use?

My favorite one is the one we work on - Loop Email. Because it integrates with email, I’m able to collaborate internally with my team and externally with clients or customers from the same app, which is a massive advantage for my productivity. We don’t need Outlook, Skype, Slack…it’s just Loop Email for team communication. I also use Mixpanel for user analytics, Google Analytics and Hotjar for acquisition data and Beautiful.ai for quick presentation slides.

Your company has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

We constantly loop customer insights into product development. Customer feedback has been crucial since the very beginning, that’s why we’ve developed a support bot that helps us talk with the users from within the app. This allows us to help customers with any product issues as fast as possible but also gives us leverage on understanding who the customer really is and what is he looking for. I’d say the biggest proportion of our customer persona development came from talking to our users from within the app. For instance, before our first ever public launch on Product Hunt, we formed a beta testing group of our most devoted users that helped us polish the product and also power our marketing speak.

What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?

As our app is still a relatively new product, we rely on Facebook and Google ads a lot to attract users to our website. But when they come - we try to build a lot of good content on our blogs, social media or with webinars that help potential customers understand the value that they could be getting for their company. As email collaboration is really a very new category we invest a lot in educating potential users.

Is there any advice you'd like to give to budding marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

I’m more in the role of user growth, so A/B testing is a big part of my daily work. As a marketer, you want to avoid doing things that cost you a lot of resources (time or money) and eventually get obsolete. So I always try to do the cheapest version of a marketing campaign that helps me validate it and justifies putting more efforts or resources in it. This has proven to have the best ROI impact on our marketing team results. Also, before I have to make any decisions on an A/B test, I usually ask myself these 3 questions:

  1. What is the cheapest way of testing this? Who can I show it or pitch it from my friends or colleagues that could give me early feedback to the idea?
  2. How can this test impact our north star metric - the metric that is most vital to the growth of our company
?
  3. Who are the key stakeholders in this? Who’s buy-in do I need to get this test going?

This usually helps us throw away a lot of unnecessary work that would just kill our resources while not helping with success. And the best advice I can share is the one I got from my CEO - which is “ always trust your gut feeling". Just make sure you turn it into a rational decision and A/B tests usually help.

How do teams at Loop have fun at work/ make work fun?

We have some pretty awesome activities, to be honest. We do daily energizers together (short workouts), we have weekly massages and every drawer is packed with nerf bullets in case a nerf war breaks out during the day. We had to limit those too after 4 pm, otherwise, people couldn’t get too much done. Also, pretty much all of the dev team is addicted to the table foosball with company-wide tournaments every couple of months. We also have some pretty cool team buildings. The last one we did was a whole day in one of Slovenia’s national parks - where we practiced ski jumping ( flying 20m in the sky on a 200m cable line) and threw a small party on the lake

How do you make use of your downtime? Any hobbies, out of work interests that rejuvenate you?

I love to read. Usually, psychology is something I'm most interested in.  Also, I work out every day and walk my never-exhausted dog, but probably my biggest out of work passion would be DJing. It’s sort of a mediation thing for me, where I can just put on my headphones and relax my mind for a couple of hours.

A big thanks to Jerry for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you check out Loop.


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