Honest CXL growth marketing minidegree review. Part 6/12
Hello there. If you land on this article looking for opinions about CXL, there is something you should know before. First of all, welcome. I was in the same situation as you are, and I know how hard it is to find genuine reviews in this magic world. I will be 100% honest with you.
Please read the following disclaimer to better understand the reason behind my review on CXL.
Just to be really 100% honest with you, as long I am try to keep it simple and fun I have to use GIF from The Office to make it fun also from me.
Disclaimer
This article reviews just the CXL growth marketing minidegree (not all the CXL courses). The review is written by an actual user, me (Diego). BUT… it is not entirely bias-free. My experience with CXL is due to them granting me a scholarship (yes 100% courses). We know that in this capitalistic world nothing is for free and there is always a bilateral exchanging. Santa Claus does not exist, and it is not a drama only for children. Instead of money, the CXL scholarship program asks you to write 12 posts sharing your learning outputs and impressions with the mini degree. So yes, this review is biased but just for the fact that I am grateful to CXL. As a broken AF graduate (like me) trying to start a marketing career, it is very stressful to gain useful knowledge for free. Giving back to the community by delivering free education to people unable to afford expensive courses is per se a great reason to buy CXL products.
You can find more about the CXL growth markeing minidegree here:
And more about the CXL sholarship here:
A little bit of contextualization. CXL growth marketing minidegree is a 111h long course (111h 42min to be fair) composed of 9 modules. In this article, I am going to review the fifth module: Channel-specific growth skills. This module is the longest within the minidegree so I am going to cover it in multiples articles. Just to give you an idea: this models includes thirteen potential channels you can leverage to grow your business includining PPC, SEO, influncer and email. For the review of previous and following modules have a look at the bottom.
I would like to take a more unusual apprach to reviewing by talking about people instead of contents. Growth marking video courses are approximately the same all over the industry. What really matters is how growth marketing has been taught, depending on teachers, not contents. So, today I am going to talk about a girl and a guy.
Jessica Best talking about Email Marketing: from basics to best-in-class.
As her surname suggests, Jessica is the best at teaching email marketing for just two kay aspect: firstly, she is very down-to-earth by walking you through each single steps even the most simple and obvious, and secondly, she has a holist approach to email marketing including all the aspect involved like copy, design, email providers, data management and automation. The first hit that makes me confident in trusting Jessica’s lectures is that is very honest and ethical as an email marketing strategy should be. In her first lesson she is very focused on setting emails collections and communicating in a trustworthy manner with your user by not only following the various rules and laws /she will provide summaries and resources for the various related law you must respect in various countries you may operate) but also showcasing that spam is very much different from email marketing as its goal is to build relationships and not bombarding the users with promos. Infact You should always get the permession from users to starts emailing thema as well as allow them to opt out. Noboby wants to have a useless relationships both you and the user.
One of the most useful tip from Jessica is how the different email platform treat emails and their content (e.g. some email platforms don’t show images by default) and how the various email services provider can fit your business and email marketing requirements (she goes through the main services you can use underlying advantages, prices and limitations). The course is divided into four sections each underlining a key aspect of email marketing. While the first provide you an overview of the subjects with dos and don’ts the rest are very focusing on the optimization processes to grow your email list, copywriting and design them for engaging and conversion purpose and lastly, on using data to automate and efficient the optimization process itself. The greatest takeaway from this course is how much data in email marketing can do a difference. I believe that most companies are focused on copy and design while the data actually can guide you in alp the aspect of email marketing from strategy to copy and design itself. So, you better be good with tracking, storing, analyzing, and automating to be a great email marketing professional.
Johnathan Dane talking about Google Ads.
As I said multiple times, I got to be honest and with all due respect to Johnathan, I did not like this course at all. I believe that Google Ads is a crucial channel to master for any business. Google and Youtube are the two most used search engines by people all around the world so it is a pity to not understand how to leverage this coverage. Johnathan is an expert for sure on this matter but his course doesn’t measure up his knowledge and the potential insights he can give to us learners. Especially for beginners who have never used Google Ads this course is kind of confusing and dispersive. There is a lot of strategies and optimizations on this course but not actual studies of the tool and its features, at least not in a comprehensive manner.
So, my suggestion is to learn Google Ads from somewhere else, as I did, and then go back to Johnathan’s course to level up your strategies and optimization processes. Honestly, a 1,30-hour course can cover all the aspects of Google Ads. I took another course on Google Ads that lasted 6 hours and I was able to understand all the little details of the platform. In conclusion, the great takeaway of this course is the strategy especially the temperature method and the optimization routines but this is a course for people who have a strong fundamental of Google Ads not for newbies. I reckon that CXL should implement a more basic version of this course like it did for other tools just to fill the gap of no experienced people.
And that is pretty much my comments on the forth module of CXL growth marketing minidegree. If you want to know more, please read the previous reviews of the CXL growth marketing minidegree:
Or simply go check the CXL Institute, they offer a 7-day free trial so you can have a first-hand experience of the validity of their courses and teachers:
Take care.
