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Interviews

How Marketing Agencies Stay Productive: Chase Clymer of Electric Eye Agency

March 1, 2018

This week we feature Chase Clymer, Co-Founder at Electric Eye Agency. Electric Eye is a boutique agency focused on helping business owners grow their sales on Shopify.

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

Your location: Columbus, Ohio.

You start your day with: black coffee.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Sunday night I usually look at what’s coming up for the week and schedule out all my emails in advance. Then, I can focus on other tasks that aren’t email on Monday.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: Big fan of podcasts actually. That’s like a audio blog, right? I listen to How I Built This, the Unofficial Shopify Podcast, Freelance To Founder, Bill Burr’s Monday Morning Podcast is good for his unique humor as well. I listen to a lot of agency and freelance specific podcasts.

A picture of your workstation or the view outside your window if that inspires you: This is Shawn & I at the coworking space we work out of

Chase and Shawn

Describe an average day at Electric Eye?

There really isn’t an average day at Electric Eye. We built the company so we can work remote and take time off if we’d like. For example tomorrow Shawn will be following up with all our clients about Black Friday & Cyber Monday successes while I get some much needed R&R at a cabin with no cell phone reception.

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

I am a big fan of automation. I try to challenge myself to automate at least one thing I do every week, so I don’t have to do it ever again. These are little things, like sending clients reports or following up on leads, but all that free time starts to add up so I can focus on other, more important things. I don’t know if this is really a hack, but accountability really helps me get things done. I have a business partner who will let it be known if I’ve dropped the ball, so that keeps me in line and getting work done. Also, I’m a member of a mastermind group with some other smart guys, and they also hold me to a standard of getting tasks accomplished.

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?

Our business could not run without automation. To accomplish this, I use a handful of tools, including Drip & Zapier. I’m pretty proud of our lead qualification system we have in place, but I can not take credit for it. It was a combination of some information learned from Kai Davis and Brennan Dunn. Boomerang for Google Apps is another game changer. Helps you follow up on leads, projects, etc. Calendly is great to just get rid of the back and forth, who’s available, etc headache of scheduling calls. That has saved a lot of headaches.

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

Often times when we have a win for one client, it would be a win for all of our clients, or future clients.

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

As an agency, the most powerful marketing tool is a referral. We’ve built out a pretty robust referral system (and it’s automated!). Getting a previous client to recommend us makes converting that lead into a client so much easier.

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

Keep it simple. You to-do list will always be growing, but just focus on one task at a time. A friend once told me about the Japanese approach called Kaizen. Essentially, it’s just about focusing on 1% better everyday. The snowball effect will happen over time. Worth looking into and reading about!

How do teams at Electric Eye have fun at work/ make work fun? 

We love to travel. We attend conferences all over, and we also have clients all over so we make a point to travel out to see them. Exploring new cities and cuisines always raises moral. Plus, spending time with our clients helps keep everyone on the same page.

‍Shopify Unite 2017 in San Francisco

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

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