Marketing Pro Workshop: Your Email & SMS Questions Answered.

Come on in and drop your name and your business name in the chat while we wait for some more people to join. We'll start around 9:03. We're just early. It's better to be early than late. If you're not first, you're left for me. For those joining. Hello, I'm Sarah Gerardo. Can you please drop your name, your business name and your role in the chat for us so that we can get to know you? And if you can put your cameras on, that would be great because I like to see faces. So that way, if we're at Pantheon and we see each other, I would know who to say hi to. Hello, Dayla. Good to see you again. All right. Oh, Miss Christina, hello. Hello, Gary. All right, we're going to get started, so just a couple minutes. Thank you for putting your cameras on. That helps us see your face. It just helps me. I'm visual. Sorry, Sorry. Not sorry. All right. Irrigation. Oh, Mike, I would like to talk to you because I'd like to learn more about irrigation. Okay, I will find you. All right, so let's go ahead and just get started with introductions to make this easy. Sarah. I'm Sarah Gerardo, your marketer in the trades. Your marketer in the trades. I am the senior marketing operations manager here at Marketing Pro and I help out with a plethora of things. Today we're going to be talking to Alex and Ara and I will let them introduce themselves because they are brilliant and they have a long list of things that they do. So I'm going to meet myself and what this really is is a chance for you all to ask questions about email and sms and Alex and Ara are the ones that are the product managers that have developed this. So ask your questions away. And we're here to help. Mute. Igoe. Alex and Ara, your turn.

Alex, you wanna. You wanna start? Sure.

Hey, everyone. I'm Alex Atarian. I'm the group product manager for email and SMS and direct mail. So I'm basically responsible for overseeing those three products under the Marketing Pro umbrella. And I'm here to answer all your questions. So bring up everything you want to know about and how we can help you to be more successful. Take it away, Ara.

Hey, everybody. To add on, my name is Ara. I work on the Marketing Pro products under Alex, specifically, again, the sms, email and direct mail portion. So if there's any questions, comments, concerns, we're all ears. That's why we're here. Please, if there's any feedback or any questions, we appreciate the Honesty and are looking forward to hearing everything you guys have to say.

Who wants to go first? Because we know you have questions like how do I use the audience builder? There you go, Pam.

You know I always have excited. Okay, this is a question I've been thinking about for a while and I'm too scared to ask, but now I'm going to ask it. Let's I want to know if you have an automated campaign running, can a customer go back to the top of the funnel for the campaign? So for example, let's say we have an open estimates campaign running, customer gets an estimate and they get all the drips in the campaign and then let's say six months later that same customer, you know, they have the tech come out, they do maintenance, they get another estimate, but they've already received the first three. From the first time they got an estimate, will they go back to the top of the funnel of the campaign? Or because they've already completed the campaign, will they not receive the follow ups the second time around?

Alex, you want to pick it up?

Or they theoretically should. Depending how you set up the criteria for the original entrance, if the customer falls within that criteria, like if you did a dynamic date range, for example, you know you have your choices of dynamic and static. So if it's static and the static was picked during a specific date range, then they will not fall into that if the new estimate is actually outside of that static date range. But if you pick the date range that says maybe they received an estimate in the last two weeks or in the last four weeks and the first time they got it was six months ago, they finished the entire drip campaign and then months later let's say they got another estimates that have an open estimates which is sitting there for maybe for a week or two weeks and it matches the criteria of the audience. So they will fall back into the audience and start receiving the drip campaign again.

So what if? So that's good to know. What if similar scenario but it's only say two weeks apart. So within the range of the funnel. Right. So if you've got like three emails across 30 days and 10 technician goes out, they give an estimate and they say no, no, no, like I. Or they do an H Vac estimate and then they come out and they do a plumbing estimate. The week later your campaign does both. Will they get double emails or is this marketing pros audience builder only recognize like sorry, my question's so complicated.

That's a good question.

I'm just curious if people are getting like double Emails. And I'm trying to figure out, you know, they're getting duplicate emails like one right after another or like another. Okay.

If I remember correctly, the audience builder builds a unique set of email addresses and populates the proper tables with unique sets, so it should remove the duplicates. I would have to check if the most recent one actually takes over, but it's possible that it just continues our idea. Now, if it continues the old one or picks up the new one.

Do you mind bouncing back the case again?

Basically, yeah. It's a bit tricky one. You're a homeowner, someone came out and gave an estimate and then we start because the estimate is open, you haven't accepted yet, we stopped. They go into the drip campaign and let's say the technician goes back and changes the estimate, maybe gives the new estimates. So now you have Pam, do you end up with two open estimates at that time?

Yeah. So what happens, like a better case for this might be if you have H Vac and plumbing in the same company. And so you have an H vac estimate and a plumbing estimate, but just one campaign for all open estimates.

Yeah. So theoretically the second open estimate would trigger the customer to fall back in again. But if I remember correctly, when we talk to engineers, but this might be just regular campaign related, we always pull the unique set of the recipients. So I don't know if it gets deduplicated or if the second open estimate takes over.

Do you mind if I just bounce the case back to you? So you set up one campaign that handles all of your open estimates. Either your customer may have originally had, say a plumbing estimate maybe a week ago and they received first email, maybe out of four for that one. You send out another technician to their home before the first drip campaign has been completed, before they meet the stop trigger criteria. You leave another estimate at that point and your question is one, will that second campaign include them? And two, will they be included in the first campaign? If they are included in the second campaign, the answer is yes. What'll happen is when the first campaign is set up, once they meet the criteria for that campaign, that campaign is going to continue to send every single drip in its step until the stop trigger is met. If they call into that number and if there's a job book, for example, at that point the stop trigger will be met and they'll no longer be included in the campaign. If there is no trigger on the campaign, it'll go all the way through. Now, the second that you create the new estimate, our audience builder refreshes every night. The following day, it'll be picked up by the audience builder for the second campaign. And then at that point, the user will start receiving the drip for. Or, excuse me, will start receiving the drip. Does that make sense?

The very first one again, like, it basically restarts them.

Yes.

Okay.

I guess my feature request would be that we're somehow able to delineate that for companies that operate multiple business units. Specifically, the issue is the opportunity link. You know, like, go here to view your estimates. If they have two different estimates for H vac and plumbing, it's difficult for the customer to tell. And then I don't want to set up two separate campaigns because then we're like hitting them with, you know, two. Two emails at the same time. You know, I would love for there to be some way where we can. I know which opportunity link is going to the customer and what kind of emails they're getting. This is a kind of common but more complicated issue that I'm running into with, like, whether or not people fall back into the top of the funnel. Another similar case study to the first one that I provided would be like a welcome new member campaign and whether, you know, if somebody renews their membership, if they pop back, like to the beginning of the campaign or not. Right now I keep separate campaigns for that, but just something to think about. If we say membership starts on this day will, and they do the entire membership campaign and then they renew for another 12 months, like, do they go back and start and I think the answer is yes, based on what I've been told so far. But in that case, I might need to think through my campaigns a little bit.

Yeah. So for. For the. I'll have to look into this. If we currently support it, ideally you would have new member campaigns that guides them through the drip campaigns to introduce them to your company business and everything else and services. For the returning ones, you want to have a completely different campaign set that welcomes them back and thanks them for, like, their support and everything else. Right. So they need to be separate campaigns. I'll have to look into the case where we can maybe either through exclusions or somehow built two separate. You. You do want to have two separate campaigns, though, like a new welcome and a welcome back.

Yes. Yeah, it's more about the welcome back campaign because I'm able to do the audience, like, exclusions, like, you know, send this welcome new member email if they're, you know, their start date is whatever, and then exclude it if they have a membership that expired within the last however long. Right. So it's easy to do the welcome new member. It's more about whether the welcome back email like keeps getting cycled through every time that they renew.

Yeah, we'll have to look into that case, how we can build an audience. I'll get back to you on that one.

That's it.

And then I might want to be careful with membership right now because the prices are going to need to increase. Right. So what you had as your welcome might need to be adjusted for the content. Right. Gas prices are going up, like everything is going up. Membership needs to increase with the companies that you work with and along with their prices. So be careful of saying that this is going to keep going for six months to a year when they could be an inside actually adjusting their prices. So double check with those. Pam works with an agency. It's really important for her to know what's going on inside and so just. Thank you.

Yeah. We have a process to audit all automated campaigns on an annual basis so that that doesn't happen. So my last kind of feature request item is going to be perpetual memberships and how to target those people because they don't have a membership end date. You know, it's like that field is empty. Would love to be able to put together a membership newsletter for those folks. And it's kind of like, you know, they just keep going until suddenly they stop. So it's a little bit tougher to put together campaigns for active members that are just perpetually members. But that's just something on my mind that I've been thinking about. It's hard. It's also difficult to exclude members with no end date, you know, so like, I would love to have a little toggle. I mean, right now what I do is just exclude the membership type. But even that is a little. Doesn't always work the way I want to. So just some thoughts.

Is that a common use case where people have memberships?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, almost all of our clients here at Powerhouse are transitioning their memberships to perpetual only.

So how does that work? Do they just get auto charged or.

Yep.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay with that. I'm going to go off camera and I'll let somebody else talk.

You're fine. Okay, so what other questions do we have? Remember, this is about SMS and email, so we'll talk about direct mail next week. Jessica. Christina. Christina, you always have questions like we work through audiences every day.

Yeah, I have nothing off the top of my head today, surprisingly.

What kind of fun campaigns do you have running right now.

Yesterday. So we've got. Let me see. So I just started a filter outreach because we have a filter shop on our website. So that's a new one for us. Basically just going out to recent customers who just had service done on either. Not quite air conditioner yet, but we're getting close. So once we get to that season, it'll go to them or H vac maintenance in general, just telling them, hey, if you need filters, you know, our website, it's pretty simple but I mean it's something to go out and try to direct people to our filter shop.

So are you creating a subscription service with your filters is basically what you want to. Yeah, yeah.

So they can do a one order or they can set up automatic delivery and they save even more money. It's just cheaper for them to buy from this website than it is for them to come to our office and buy them. So it works, works great for us. But yeah, I don't, I just, I have the, the normal ones, I guess the time to schedule maintenance with current services, the memberships like Pam was talking about, welcoming new customers, thanking people for their recent installs. We've been throwing out some tune up specials lately just because it's a little bit slow right now. We are, we're in Wisconsin so we have that lovely period of time. Where is it winter? Is it spring? I don't really know what's going on. Like it's, it's nice out for our standards, but that also means that it's a little slow on the heating side. So we're throwing out some tune up specials just to try to get some people who we haven't seen in at least a year but sometime within the last three years and just trying to drum up some stuff. But my God, we're close to AC season. We're so close.

Yeah, yeah. March is always the fun one, right? You're like sitting there, you're like, I've got to redo marketing again. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh no, we have no calls. What do I do? So I totally understand, totally understand what's going on. Christina. What? You're on twice. Christina.

Yeah, I don't know. I saw that pop up when I. Oh, I bet it's because I shared the link somebody posted in the Facebook group looking for a link and I shared mine.

Hey, my name is Larry and I am quite new to marketing Pro. I've been at it for about two weeks now and I do have a. A question regarding My new customer campaign. And that question is the send until option when I'm creating the campaign. I don't know exactly what all of those options mean right now. Now I have it as call created and then stop sending emails when customer exits. The audience criteria, obviously I only want to send that email one time. Do I have that set up to only go out one time? Does that make sense?

Eric, can you give the details of your audience again?

Sorry, say again.

Can you give the details of the audience that you set up?

Sure, let me pull that up. Audience. I'm including residential and created on less than one day in the past. And then I'm excluding commercial. I'm excluding residential complete excluding last job date between one and two days in the past. And I am excluding residential canceled.

So you have a bunch of exclusions and your inclusion is only. Was it residential and what was the second one?

Less than one day in the past.

And this is what's the filter for the audience?

This is a job or filter for the audience. Not quite sure of that question.

Like which one of the criteria did you select? Was it job invoice or for the include?

Yeah, I did not select any for that. I just have a residential and created on less than one day in the past.

And what kind of email are you sending to those? What's the.

The new customer campaign?

Okay, so basically anyone who was created in the past, you're targeting those. And then do you just have one email in the automation or multiple one email. Okay, and then you're excluding. Did you say you were excluding residential as well in your exclusions? Did I hear that?

I am excluding customer type residential job status completed and then also customer type residential job status canceled.

And you're doing that in. In one membership group, right? Not multiple ones.

So it doesn't.

Well, on my exclusions I have 1.

2, 3, 4 groups because that might actually exclude. Although if you have the. If you have the. The job status that actually should be. Should be. Okay. It'll only exclude the ones that apply to the job status.

So it seems like it's pulling the way it should be. I would much rather have it go out two hours after a job is booked. But apparently I can only set that up to go out at a certain time of the day.

Yeah, you don't have the first campaign that you. Or the first email that goes out usually goes out when. When you set up the. The time for it. There is the second one. The second email you could then tell to go out a few days later and with. With A new time. But we don't currently have a way of basing the email trigger to go out based on when the job was actually completed. So the scheduling point is always the time that you specify when you create the campaign. For now. Yeah, go ahead.

I didn't want to take up too much of the audience's time, so I think probably my inclusions and exclusions might be okay. But I guess my. The one question I do want answered is the option when I'm creating, setting up the campaign where it says send until I have selected call created and then I checked stop sending emails. When customer exits audience criteria, does that mean, with that selection, does that mean that one customer will only receive one of these emails? Like, you know, a new customer will only receive one email. They're not going to be receiving like multiple emails of the same new customer email.

You mean when, when they re enter the, the audience criteria?

Well, when, when, when the first email goes out to the new customer, I want to make sure that they don't get another new customer email.

So you.

They didn't take the action. That's what he's saying he wants. Like say they didn't call to book or whatever the trigger was. Right. But it's a new customer email, so if they opened it then that would be the trigger that I would select. Open rates are a little bit different because you can't really tell who opened and whatever. That's another story. But if it's a new member, I'm going to throw them onto a drip series of thank you for this is my brand. And then I'm going to go and say, okay, thank you for your recent service. If they left an estimate, I'm going to put them on an estimate one. If they didn't leave an estimate, I'm going to throw them on a referral one. Right. Like they have multiple journeys in this. So if they just had new member, I wouldn't want them to receive that email again. That blue box would be checked and you know, like they wouldn't be able to fall onto that one. They would then go on to another campaign. Does that make sense? Yeah.

So yeah, Larry, the, that checkbox that you check with the audience box because there is a, there is a case where they actually get the email but they don't call in. Right, Right.

So we're not asking them really.

Yeah, exactly.

So there's different ways you can actually do the stop criteria, but the second stop criteria is actually the audience builder removing them from the audience. So what would happen is you know how you mentioned that you have the date filter. You say there was. The customer was created one day ago. Right. So they would naturally, once the first email goes out, they would not naturally fall out of that audience because the date filter doesn't apply anymore because they're now not one day ago. They're like multiple days ago. Right.

Okay.

And that will remove them. This is good that you have that in place. That will remove them from the audience criteria and they will fall out of the audience and they will get removed from the drip campaign. They will never get back into the drip campaign because the filter logic doesn't apply to them anymore because they were not created a day ago anymore. They were created, let's say 10 days ago.

Perfect sense.

Perfect sense.

Thank you.

Thank you for that clarification.

Yeah. And it's good you have that actually in place. That's a good kind of like filter protection to set up so you don't months.

I also set up a refer friend after service that goes out two, two weeks after service of 499 or more.

Huh.

And then I, I have an unsold estimate blow up drip that I do that I created in the best, a series of five emails, first three every two days and then one four days and then the, the last one wastes a week. So that's how I have my stuff set up right now.

Okay.

And with that I'll just leave it with you.

And then make sure you have the. Some kind of filters in there in place with dates and things so they don't get repeated over and over again.

Yeah, like marketing behaviors like those might be something you want to add in as well. The, the other thing I really want to talk about that for new customers coming on is the opt in, in opt out messages in your settings. If you have opt in on in your settings. So go look at it, go ahead and turn it off.

I don't have that checked.

Okay. If anyone has this on, go ahead and turn it off. You will not be able to do new member series if this is on. Because it's basically, it's basically just opting everyone like they're cleaning your list and it's a mess. Just turn it off. So that's just my one tip for Friday for you. It's my Friday tip.

So the onboarding meeting number one, that was the first thing they mentioned was because I initially had it turned on.

And they said let's just go ahead and turn that off.

So that's what we did.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you all.

Appreciate it and if you need to re opt people back in. Because if you think about it, you have this suppression list, right, that you might not have talked to in a long time and they might have an outdated email address. It depends on the what it is that happened in the journey. Like they could be bounced. They could be whatever. You can reactivate these emails and see if they are still valid. So you there are templates in there that says opt in and you can utilize those and then create that list and see if you can undorm it those emails. Is it best practice? I mean cleaning your email list is best practice to do every six months and then re import it back in. It's something that I would just take into account in consideration. Cleaning your list is really important.

Okay, got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Do we have any other questions? Who has SMS reoccurring services going on? You do? How's it going, Jessica? Good. Okay. Christina, do you have SMS going on? Jamie? Jamie. I haven't seen Jamie in forever.

No, we do not. Because you can't eliminate commercial customers from it.

Same here.

Okay. Alex and Ara.

Yeah, I think we have that on our roadmap, Jamie. That's one of the requests we've gotten since beta from few clients.

Yeah, I did see that. So I didn't submit it. But yes, we would use it if we could exclude our commercial accounts.

Okay.

Now is the audience builder coming to sms?

We will slowly start exposing more and more relevant recurring services filters into the recurring services audience builder things like customer things within the customer record specifically. Also outside of that we're looking at some other filters that users have requested as well like business unit separation which currently isn't there right now. And it's causing some difficulty for users who are running multiple businesses or operations within their account. But yes, it is on the roadmap and we are working to get it included. Don't have an exact date at the moment, but relatively soon.

Awesome.

Is there anything fancy you guys want to show us that is coming along the way with email or SMS that you can demo for us or walk us through a really complicated audience? I don't know, something fun. There's lots of templates coming. Price increase templates are coming. Just so you guys know about that. I doing one for membership, I'm doing one for equipment and I'm doing one for service that you can that has a bottom layer that has equipment prices going up. So like I said before, if your prices have not increased, they should be increasing at this point. They increased about nine times Last year. We understand we want to be there to help you with the content as much as possible. We know that conversation is a little bit difficult to have with the customers. All right. Do you have anything cool to show us?

We have quick slide campaigns which we can run through and demo and give like a sneak peek of. I just kind of make sure that everybody kind of got their questions and concerns out of the way before we move on.

I have one that I keep trying.

To build and can't figure out.

I would like to. The day before our replacement specialist goes out to a customer's site, I would like them to get an email with the customer with the replacement specialist picture and then kind of a brief description about him. Plus what to expect during the sales appointment. And that parts I can do.

Problem.

It's the fact that occasionally we have a second appointment because of, you know, they wanted us think about and come back. Or we couldn't price it on the Scott bot because something, you know, XYZ we need to look up, whatever the reason. But I don't know how to prevent that second email. The same email going a second time.

Is there any. Is there anything that you guys are doing to the job status or appointment status after you guys realize there's a need for second appointment?

No, that's the only thing. I guess we could add a tag to prevent it from going again, but it seems like without adding some other step that someone has to remember to do, I haven't been able to do it.

Yeah, the workaround I was going to suggest was the tag. I. I think I need to know a little bit more about your case specifically and the, the campaign and audience setup. But I think we could find some sort of workaround. We probably would have to upgrade. I mean, in terms of steps, it'd probably be the same thing. You would have to update the job status potentially. My recommendation, honestly for now would be just do the tag. It's more than likely the simplest thing to do. If you just set it up as an exclusion criteria or have a dedicated campaign specifically for that case where you're just sending out emails to people who have that tag specifically, it should work.

Thank you.

Sarah. If that's it, I think I can. I can move forward with this demo.

Yeah, go for it. Cool. Jb.

So give it. Let me know when you guys can see my screen and let me know if you guys can see the prototype. Right now it should be a Figma screen. Does that look right, Sarah? Okay, cool. So really the first. Just to introduce this, this is really service titan's attempt or first attempt at coming out with campaign templates. We'll be calling them quick start campaigns. But to quickly highlight what that's going to be looking like for those who don't have a campaign set up at the current time that they move into marketing or enter marketing, they'll have this banner message up here which will prompt them to explore the campaign templates. Also, when we opt to create a campaign, we also have the option to start with the template or or start with the blank campaign. And when we opt to choose a template, we'll see our first three templates. So we'll have a here's what to expect campaign which is basically an automated email informing the customers about what they can expect when the technician arrives. But thank you email which is a post job follow up and rehash open estimate. So two things on our end, the goals here are really one to drive the amount of automated emails going up. For those of you guys not privy to the information, a lot of inboxing providers want to see consistent automated throughput from you as an email sender. So part of what defines your email sending reputation and the deliverability of your emails is your own sending reputation and the way you preserve and increase that reputation is by driving automated throughput. So we're trying to put these campaign templates out not only to just give you guys all the different ideas on where you can market and how and all these different points of communication to build rapport with customers. We also want you guys to be sending out these automated emails to protect your volume and ensure your deliverability. When we click in onto a template, we'll get a quick preview of the campaign which gives us a quick description of what it is, what it features and what's included within the campaign, as well as an overview of the actual drip as well as a preview of the emails that we may want to take a look at for actually moving forward with the campaign. If it looks like something we can opt to use, we'll use the template. By the way, one quick caveat before we move any further. We will be making some changes to the campaign building UI relatively soon and this is your first sneak peek at that. So upon first look we'll have a pretty big portion of the campaign filled out. We'll prompt users to review. So at this point is is really when you're kind of just going through your content setup. We'll pre build audiences for you and define them for the campaign. However, you can go through and edit and filter down make them more specific or use any existing campaigns that maybe you may prefer or excuse me, audiences they may prefer over hours. Once you set up the campaign details or the audience details, make sure everything is good. The next step within the campaign setup is the content. So we'll quickly review the content by clicking on the review, take a look, make sure everything is as we expect it to be. Should anything need to be changed, we certainly can. And at that point we're pretty much ready to launch our campaign. We'll schedule our campaign. You can choose between now or later. Let's say we want to launch it now and at that point we'll get the campaign launch. So in terms of these campaign templates, again, this is really us trying to provide more templates, say let's say and also templatize other portions of the campaign building process. So things like the, the actual campaign setup and the audience audiences, et cetera. I'll go ahead and pause here. I'm curious to know if this is something that you guys would think is useful. I'd also like to get your general feedback, your first reaction and let us know if there's any specific campaign types or any specific content that you'd like to see as well. Any thoughts so far?

Wish Pam was on here. Jamie, would you use any of these audiences?

Feel like I already have most of them built, but it would have been very helpful at the beginning and it still would be something that I would probably go in and look at and think are there's better than mine and do I just have to tweak them.

A little bit or ours better than yours? Probably not. You know your data, right. So trust yourself. There's always going to be something funky in a marketing audience. Right. You're going to have a 1% deviation of something wrong. But think about that. If you pulled that audience out somewhere else, then you would have way more of a deviation in your data. So yeah, you know, our audiences is built are built off of this is the like what we could do. But then you would add in your layers based on your data. That makes sense. Does that, does that make sense? So our audience wouldn't be like, ooh, this is 100% correct. Like that's just not possible. There are all of your tenant accounts are different in data fields.

I think it'll help with your sales process too to get on because it'll be so much less time dedicated to creating everything.

Yeah. Yeah. Hey Shauna, thanks for joining. Shauna. We've been talking all week. Shauna was the one that works at Trinity Water and Septic. Did I get that right?

Yeah.

Okay. And she is working with location based estimates, so I know we talked about that. Shauna, you missed our cool demo of Quick Start campaigns and so we're kind of talking.

Yeah, I'm going to go back and watch the recording. I totally meant to come right at the start and then I got sidetracked.

I do know that you have some special cases going on with your data, so if you have questions, we have Ara and Alex here and they are the product managers for email and sms. So, you know, beside the one feedback that we're working through with tagging, your location or your location to get the estimate and what else are you looking for in the way that your business is set up in comparison to. It's different. It's a different way to do, you know, so that's. We're just learning what you need.

Tag is working, which is great. It would just be nice if it pulled like all open estimates, not just ones that were created on a job.

Right.

Because it's just. It's an extra step which is working. But if we forget to add that tag or if, if cus. If we forget to take that tag off, for example, things like that, like it just leaves room for error. And I don't like leaving room for error. Right. It's nice if it's just automated. So it'd be nice if it just pulled all open estimates. Doesn't matter if it was on a job or not. But otherwise like as a workaround.

But it is working.

I mean, yeah, tags are most definitely something that can be. It can be difficult to keep track of. Right. Is it scalable? And so that's what you really want to say. But when you create the tag, you say, is it scalable? So is it something that is now part of a process or is it something that is superfluous that needs to be created into a different process from a product perspective? And it does so most definitely. We really appreciate you bringing it to our attention. We did know that locations was something that we do need to build for a little bit more and bring in. In the audience filter. And it makes sense because commercial, residential and the way that we set up estimates has progressively changed in the trades. So. Yeah. And it keeps changing, so it makes sense. But I wanted to, you know, bring it up to. Yeah, I wanted you to speak.

Sorry I didn't catch you up there. But the one thing I noticed about making an estimate on a job is that sometimes like so A one perfect example is one perfect example. Sorry, I can't find that happy medium. We do a lot of real estate inspections for plumbing and for septic work. So we have a business unit called Inspections. So that's how we keep track of all that. But if the customer needs a quote, then it's usually a service or an install. It may either have to get a repair or a new install done. So when we're going to make an estimate on the job, we can't pull estimate templates from other business units because it's not like they're not under the inspection business unit. And we don't want, we don't want them to be because then we can't track them with install and service. So that's why, another reason why we just go to make like a new estimate because then we can pull the estimate templates from those, those business units. So that's another thing we found too, just a different way of doing it. That's another reason why we wouldn't make investment on a job. Then we have to start from scratch if we can't pull those estimate templates.

Good point, good point. Yeah, it is something front of mind for us. We know there's a current gap with location based estimates or non job based estimates right now, but thanks specifically for calling that out. Further validation that we kind of need to go and plug it in. Just for your own reference, this is, this is something that's like an ongoing priority right now. We are, we are looking to address it again. Timeline. I'm a bit hesitant to give out right now just because it's not 100% clear. But it's front of mind for us. Expect a solution soon.

Okay, that's perfect. Thank you.

You don't have to raise your hand, you can just speak.

So I did come up with a question, believe it or not, just kind of sitting here with the wheels turning. Is there anything in progress or might it be possible to consider anything for email acquisition? You know, we might just have a customer name and email. We want to make some points of contact. Maybe don't want to put them in as a customer. Anything for that.

You can segue into this now.

Oh, I'm excited.

So we're currently doing a discovery on something we're calling a lightweight CRM for Marketing Pro where you would be able to basically manage or the hope is to manage all your contacts in terms of customers or non customers inside Marketing Pro and outside of kind of service titans, main CRM and bring all the marketing related actions, preferences and everything else to that portion of the CRM. So are I actually. So it's funny, he just messaged me on the side and said hey, should we use this leftover 10 minutes for CRM Discovery, ask questions. And then it was like at the perfect time when it dropped.

Yeah, sorry Alex.

No, it's basically there will be a concept of something called lists and things like that where you will have non customers be part of it. Where it'll be like maybe email address and their names and basic information and they will be treated differently than they're treated kind of like in service titans main CRM, depending how you add them there. But Ara, go ahead.

Yeah, I had a couple questions for you, Christina. Are these people like people that have come into the funnel like maybe through a landing, like on a form on a landing page somewhere? Like how are you sourcing these customers specific or these contacts specifically?

So we do trade shows, we go to the big home and garden shows in our area and we also do just a couple other things where we have iPads and we have people sign up to enter our drawing and like this a couple like a month ago we have a list of 3,600 contacts, most of whom aren't may not be in our customer base. We get their, we already ask them so many questions on the iPad, but we get their name, their email, their phone number and then what services they're interested in. And so we either have to make the outbound calls and they may never answer our phone call. I would love to be able to plug those email addresses into something and be able to send them an email through Marketing Pro for you know, whether they were interested in a new system or maintenance or IAQ or whatever. But just something that I'd be able to use with the templates that I already have built the same type of, you know, audience builder, that kind of thing. Some with it to be able to send those emails from Marketing Pro and have that, have that ability to have that contact make additional points of contact and just be really front of mind with them.

Christina, how are you acquiring those prospects at shows?

So we have an iPad, they sign up for the drawing and they enter in their information and indicate what services they're interested in.

Okay.

So currently they're signing up for an iPad. They hit submit and then what is the funnel right now?

So it's a, it's an app. I'm not sure what it's called, but it, it just goes into a spreadsheet that we then download after the show. And I Sit there and I sort through it and I color code and make different tabs on the spreadsheet for what these people are interested in. Because it just put in your email address. Sign up for our drawing. They're saying if they are interested in, you know, any number of services or what areas of services that we provide.

Got it. And if you imported them into Service Titan as a lead, it would create a customer record which then you would have to filter out. Right. But you could at this time enter them in as an excess. Right. You don't. Might not have, I don't know. It depends on the number of information you have. So you could do it a couple ways, right? For. I'm telling you, a workaround. It's not going to be perfect, but this is going to be something that I would think of. So if I had a funnel, I would. And you have the list. You can either use Zapier, you can use Airtable, you can use something to hook in, grab that list and email them out of. Not maybe Marketing Pro. And I know you want to use the same thing. You can use the same language. Right. You can just copy and paste your content that you have. Not perfect is a solution that you can email them that way. The other thing is if you wanted to, you could. And you had more. Most of the information, you could load this into Service Titan with a specific tag and then email them from Service Titan and start their journey there. You just need to collect.

We don't collect their address just because it is so much more information to input. So that's, that's what we start with is a name, phone number and email at the time.

Got it. So you, you'd have to have dummy data and that probably is just creating more crappy data. And we don't want crappy data.

My office manager would kill me.

Yeah, I hate. I really despise crappy data. I look at it all the time and I'm like, does that say my email at Email at my.

Com?

And I was like, that doesn't even make sense. Why are you doing this? Like, you're costing yourself more money when you enter in fake addresses. So you know that's. We should be careful with that. But like I said, you can use Zapier at the meantime to like hook in and like send an email from your Excel spreadsheet. Not perfect, but it's definitely something that we are, we are definitely thinking about, like, how do we bring that lead in? How do we hold it, how do we funnel it so it doesn't mess up our data we use.

Yeah, Christina, One of the big issues in the email marketing world is acquiring actually email addresses. At trade shows, people end up entering a lot odd email addresses, wrong email addresses, fake email addresses and that starts causing a lot of problems with your reputation and delivery. So one thing we usually suggest doing is once they enter it, just send a quick opt in message so they can actually confirm it's them. It's their email address. So we'll have that in on the future roadmap. We're going to have that functionality, especially if you start bringing in external email addresses that are not from your customers but non customers to kind of protect your reputation. Also, it's for good hygiene of your email data. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, we have about six minutes left. Are there any other questions that we have not answered or could answer about SMS or email? Bye Dala. Have a great one. Good thing you there are no other questions then I guess we can. Do you guys have anything? Alex and Ara.

Not mind.

Okay, awesome. Thank you all for joining. We'll give you some time back and yeah, we'll see you next week where we talk about direct mail with these two. See you then.

Thank you. Bye.

Thank you.