#08 Graphic Design & Email Marketing ft. Cory Riley, Citrix

Cory Riley, Digital Campaign Producer at Citrix, joins Pierce to discuss the good, bad, and ugly sides of consulting and how his self-taught email building skills led to a well-rounded career in MarTech.

Show Notes

Cory’s graphic design career began at a regional bank. He moved from graphic design to web design and then on to email marketing before he began designing and hand-coding emails himself.

Cory wants to understand how everything works together, so he taught himself to build emails through a mix of online resources and good old-fashioned curiosity. Over time, he learned how to create different design elements.

“I am the kind of person if I can’t figure it out, I’m gonna take it apart and see how it works.”

He moved into consulting, where he discovered that the most difficult part of striking out on your own is earning a complete stranger’s trust. As a result, he encourages his fellow consultants to set realistic goals and make sure you reach them so clients can see the value in your work.

He notes that consultants usually have two types of clients: some that are very hands-on and involved, and some that trust you as the expert to manage their goals. He says that the second type typically leads to better results, and he encourages consultants to be ok with turning down a client that’s not a good fit.

Eventually, Cory made the move back to the corporate world, finding the work-life balance he was looking for with Citrix. He’s been working remotely for the last six years, and he’s glad to be part of a company that allows him to work from anywhere.

“Life comes first, then work, but you still need to get your work done.”

At Citrix, he’s focused on channel and nurture-based marketing. He and his team work with stakeholders to create an engagement program, come up with the required designs and solutions, and then deploy emails in Marketo. They handle everything, from ideation to deployment, and at one point (before they discovered a certain email creation platform), Cory and his team were hand-coding 50+ emails each week.

Now, they’ve uncovered a much more efficient way to create emails, and they’re able to go after other initiatives. Cory has also evolved in his role, so this week, he’s sitting down with Pierce to discuss:

• Consulting: the good, the bad, and the ugly
• Why it’s ok to pass up a client that may not be a great fit
• Creating a work-life balance while working remotely
• Why hand-coding emails is a thing of the past

Check it out to hear all that and more. Enjoy!

Follow Cory on LinkedIn.