Customer Profitability and the Importance of Building and Managing Relationships

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, November 16th, 2016 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, I'm with WSI Digital Marketing where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff? Hi Eric, Say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world. And I think you're ready to go.

This is Jeff Simpkins. I am with Community Bank Consulting, Inc., and you can learn more about me and my company online at www.communitybankconsulting.com. Eric, just to confirm, I was going to ask you if you turned recording on, but I do see it's on.

It is rolling, so we are recording, which leads me to the next little announcement. For those of you that might be first-timers here on Free Webinar Wednesdays, a couple things. One, we do record, assuming Jeff or I remember to click the little button, so it's always good to double-check. We do record Free Webinar Wednesdays and make them available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. You can always go back and relive the joy that is a live webinar with Jeff and myself and our guest Mike today and others. As they are all live and not prerecorded, you will also notice that sometimes they have little verbal fumbles and other sorts of wonderful things that GoToMeeting throws at us. Live is genuine and it's real and we like to think it's nice nice and authentic. So the recordings are made available, and then also during today's discussion, those of you that are attending live, we do particularly enjoy and appreciate audience participation. We encourage that, and if you've got questions, comments, thoughts, observations, anything that you'd like to share, please feel free to use the chat functionality with your GoToMeeting and let us know. We'd love to hear from you. So before we officially kick in, I want to do a quick little plug. I know we've talked a lot about social media in the past, and we have some bankers that join us every once in a while. I actually got to participate yesterday in my very first live tweet event, almost a little bit of a tweet storm going on under the hashtag #BankOnSocial. And I wanted to mention this to those of you that were listening or catching the recording. If you go to Twitter and you just do a search for the hashtag #BankOnSocial, the folks over at CASASA are actually spearheading this up for Social Media Month, and you can go through, get an idea for all the different questions that I was asked. And there's a series of other participants that are going to be Going through tweet chats all this week, and several of the questions that I responded to and had some conversation around were different ways to use social media to be genuine. We talked about tools that are helpful to use. Some of those we've talked about on Free Webinar Wednesdays, like Buffer and Hootsuite and Flipboard and If This Then That. So if you're interested in kind of digging in and checking out some additional conversation around social media tools. Not all of it is banking related, so if you're listening and you're like, hey, I'm not a banker, there's still some pretty cool nuggets of wisdom that are being shared under this hashtag. So feel free to follow it, participate. I believe the next one's coming up later today, like at 3 o'clock Eastern time. It was kind of fun to be able to facilitate a live-time conversation through Twitter with people all over the place on particular topics and questions. So, a little public service nugget of info for you there that you can take with you. So what we're going to talk about today, and I'm very excited, Mike Martin is with us as our resident expert. And I had the good pleasure of meeting Michael in Hawaii when I got to go out there and do some stuff for one of the companies that he was with last year. So in addition to being able to say that we met in Hawaii, Mike and I actually hung out at our global conference this year in Toronto and talked about this very topic of customer profitability, relationship management. And so Jeff and I had quite a deep discussion on this last week, and we talked about how it's important for organizations to understand not just who is doing business with them or who they'd like to have do business with them, But get to the heart of what that relationship looks like from a profitability perspective. And in the world of banking, we have some ways of doing this because certainly in the world of banking, there's a lot of data that's being collected. But to the average business that may not necessarily know where to start, it can be a little bit more of a challenge. And so that's where Mike kind of reached out and we said, hey, this would be a perfect follow-up kind of a one-two punch. So if you happen to miss last week's webinar when Jeff and I kind of went off on the tangent of profitability and Jeff's appearance with the CSI conference down in Texas a couple weeks ago, you might want to catch that on a replay. But with that rather long-winded introduction to Michael, I am very excited that you're here. Thank you so much for joining us, and I will let you do any more of a formal who is Mike and why should you care intro about yourself, but at this point the mic is passed and I am very much looking forward to the information you're going to share with us and our audience today. Take it away, Mike.

Hey, thanks a lot. Appreciate the opportunity. Again, my name is Mike Martin. I work for a company called Bridge, or Bridge Marketing. If you want to find out more about that company, go to thebridgecorp.com. Basically, Bridge started out as a data services company that worked and has partnered for a number of years with people like Acxiom, Experian, InfoGroup, Dun Bradstreet, Nielsen, and various other large data aggregators that, you know, a lot of independent businesses also work with as well. And what, what really attracted me to Bridge is I started working with them, and I originally started just doing email marketing with them, what they call third-party opt-in. Where, where I've got a list as a business, but those lists tend to be pretty small in the big scheme of things. Let's take Denver for an example. You've got, you know, 3.4 million people there, but a typical small business or medium business might only have 500 names, addresses, phone numbers to maybe a couple of, you know, 10,000, 20,000. Names, but there's still if you're a furniture store or something like that, you know there the potential market is still the 1.4 million that live right in the Denver metro area. So how as a business do I reach out to that? I've probably got Constant Contact or Mailchimp or Emma where yeah, I've got my list, and what I found from doing this for a number of years is that. You know, most businesses, as I've gone out to all 50 states, worked with thousands of businesses talking to them about how they're doing their marketing and everything, you know, it's taken them 3 to 8 years to get to a few thousand names. And those names that they get are from so many different sources. They're from point of sale, they're from conferences they go to, they, they do home shows, whatever it is that they do to drive their business. But it's really hard to acquire good names, good addresses, good emails, phone numbers, all of those things. What I've heard over and over and over again is, yeah, I've got it in a spreadsheet here, I've got it in a CRM system here, and I don't know how to aggregate all that data. That's one of the things that Bridge basically does is we can help businesses take all the disparate sources and aggregate it together. What does that do for you? Now you got a clean list but you're still going out and maybe after having 10,000, now you only got 8,000 because after you clean it all up and you find out which ones don't even exist or whatever it is, the addresses aren't proper or whatever. Now what do I do? Because we're partnered with Axiom, Experian, and all the other big data aggregators, We can actually run your data and do what they call onboard it onto our data and basically say, yes, we're going to verify that we now know that that's Joe Smith at 123 Cherry Street. We did something different. Instead of just being a data provider, we actually bought our own service platform for ads and it happens to be more in the mobile industry. So we have literally 400 million mobile IDs, as well as we partner with all the big ad exchanges that everybody else uses here, whether it's Trade Desk or Centro or DataZoo. There's, there's hundreds of them that people say, I want to run an ad now. But none of that data really means much because all you're doing is placing an ad and sending it out to the universe. And as the slide shows, it all starts starts with data. We can take your data and basically clean it and verify everything, then run and match it against our data and say, by the way, we don't know if you know that because we're partnered with Nielsen and Experian, we now know something about those people. Not only is it Joe Smith, but Joe Smith has— and this is all public information, this is no We are completely compliant with privacy and HIPAA and CAN-SPAM compliancy, all those things about personal information. These people have said, number one, it's either public record information. Everybody, you know, whoever registers to vote, owns a gun, registers their car, has a license of some kind. All of that's pretty much public information that we can now run and say, you know, Joe Smith, not only does he live at 123 Cherry Street, but he also owns a Ford Focus and it's 5 years old. His registration's coming up due. And he has a home, he owns a home. And we start being able to piece together who this person is. So a lot of people have data. But they really don't know much about the person other than that they've shopped there, they had an interest in something about our business. But now how do you find out more about that? And what happens is you go from a few thousand records to maybe being able to target over 100,000 in a metropolitan area. And it doesn't matter what size your market is, it's, it's relative. But you now can basically say, oh, I can market to these people And, and going to what Eric and Jeff have been talking about, about profitability, you can also start profiling. Here are the customers that we get that open up a bank account or only buy— spend $50 with us once a year versus somebody that says no, they take out loans with us and they're a regular customer and they tend to be a profitable one. And/or here's somebody that buys cars regularly and/or leases, and you start being able to then target to those people on a regular basis no matter how you reach them. We're able to basically look at any kind of way to reach them via either email or through social media, through video channels, native channels, display and banner, geofencing, as well as retargeting. All the things that I think you guys talk quite a bit about on, on these sessions. But we're basically a source that can take the data and then put it all together and be able to show you exactly who you're reaching, And then expand on that and be able to start looking for ways to find more of your new customers, whether that's through geography, demographic. We can drill into lifestyles. If anybody's looked at like Nielsen data before, it really gets down into the weeds of these people like to read books, these people like to go to the movies. Now that starts changing your whole marketing. If you're going to send out a message via email or a banner or social media, Wouldn't it be nice to know that you can send Joe Smith who likes football a message that says, hey, here's a program that we're offering as a business and as a special incentive we're offering 2 tickets or NFL, some kind of prize related to football. Or if they're into fishing, something that's more about outdoors and fishing. So this is how you're able to take what we normally do, which is kind of cast out a broad net. And many times when we market, we're usually doing things like, well, let's just go to these zip codes. We know there's a lot of people in that zip code that buy from us, but boy, I wish I could weed out the ones that don't even care. This is a way to basically take your data, overlay it with ours, and then formulate campaign strategies that basically go specifically to The people you're trying to target, the ones that actually buy, and then get feedback and know that, that your message got to this person. They opened it, they clicked it, they went to your website, they picked up a phone, they filled out a form, they downloaded a coupon. All of that information helps you decide whether or not the $500 or $1,000 or $5,000 you spent to to launch this campaign, was it worth it? Did I actually get a return? Could I tell that those people actually ended up doing something? And now that I know who does good and who participates and who opens and who clicks, find me another 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 of those people that are just like those people and let's do it again. So that's basically it, Eric, in terms of the ability to look at data and then maximize what you already have, expand it out, find more out about the audience, and then launch campaigns and messages specific to those audiences. Lastly, make sure that you get back information that says, wow, that worked, or that was a bust, but at least you know instead of guessing and always throwing out these broadcast nets where you're just going, I hope I get my 1 or 2% return. And then, you know, you still, you're worried about the waste. I think it was Henry Ford that says advertising works 50% of the time. I just don't know which 50% works and which doesn't. This helps you kind of narrow that down and get more efficient.

John Wanamaker is the gentleman that actually coined that Yeah, the old department store mogul from, I think, the early '30s and '40s and '50s. But yeah, that's the hardest part about traditional marketing in an online versus an offline world is you don't know where that 50% is going poof and disappearing to.

Right.

So having the ability to track and pull all this stuff back. I did have a couple of quick questions if you're cool throwing some questions in now. We had a situation, and I guess maybe let's talk about how this might be different in your scenario. We had a situation where one of the banks that we work with gave me a call and said, I don't know what to do, but Constant Contact has just shut our account down.

Yeah.

I said, well, what happened? She said, well, We purchased a list that was told to us by the vendor to be 100% opt-in, and everything was on the up and up, so we bought it. And Constant Contact is very clear about not using purchased lists, even if you're told that it's something that is opt-in. And she said, we uploaded the list, that like 9,000 names of people that lived in our area that were potential mortgage customers. And Constant Contact didn't catch it before it was sent out. They sent the mailing and they had a variety of responses that reported the messages not known or spam, and Constant Contact shut their account down. And because WSI is a global partner with Constant Contact, we were able to make some phone calls and beg and plead and say sorry, sorry, sorry, and they got it turned back on. But when we start getting into purchasing lists and third-party data sources, and a lot of businesses are using a Constant Contact or a Mailchimp or a Bronto or an Emma, how is that different with your platform versus what maybe a business might get themselves in trouble and maybe even get them kicked out of the marketing platform when they try to go out and expand their mail list and get more people on their email list?

What a great question because it happens all the time. First of all, buying lists, yes, you can do it, but it's been my experience— I've been through 16 different list brokers in my 10-year career of doing this, and I found that to be true no matter how much they tout or whatever. When you buy a list, the real problem is we're so dynamic now as a population in terms of changing our email address, changing addresses, etc. So even if you buy a list, chances are if you go beyond about 8 or 12 weeks, there's going to be a pretty significant portion— let's just call it 10-12%— that's going to be out of date. And so that's where you're going to start seeing your hard bounces and rejections, unknown delivery, etc. When you run those, first of all, things like MailChimp, Emma, and Constant Contact are very picky that they want to know that that list was organically grown by your business and they kind of cap out at a few thousand. What you're doing is you're basically saying, okay, I want to send this out. Every time you send out an email, if you don't have We call ours adaptive delivery routing. I don't know if you guys can see the slide up on the screen.

Is it—

As I'm going to thread these out, and there's all kinds of technology in there that says don't send them all at once. I do is we're going to send them out, you know, in five-second bursts, and I'm only going to send ten to an MSN server, and then ten to Yahoo, and then ten to AOL, and ten to. Google, Gmail, and all that. It knows how to do that and you basically get ranked and rated as a provider. We're a trusted provider to a lot of the email servers that they know we know how to do it right. Where Mailchimp and those guys get upset is if all of a sudden they start seeing red flags of bad data or too much being sent out at one time because you bought a list and you'd only been sending out your 800 to 2,000 each week or each month through your, your normal channel, and then all of a sudden you hit them with 10 because you bought a list and it hasn't been what they called hygiene and verified, you're gonna— that's when they go red flag, shut it down, something's wrong. And they, they, they start saying to themselves, that might be some spam or junk mail going out, and therefore they don't have a choice. That's really what's happening, Eric. You have to have these systems in place that really know how to send that out, especially when you go beyond, let's say, a 5,000 list. We sell lists too, but we have a lot of ifs, ands, theres, and buts. We actually call it a license, meaning we want to understand what you're going to do with it. We're not just going to hand over all the fields to you and say, feel free. Ready, set, go. We want to understand what the use is going to be, and for most people, what they should be doing with the list is to check the list after you run a campaign and say, here's everybody that we sent a message, either email, display, social, or whatever. Now I'm going to match that back to my point-of-sale invoices at the end of the month to see if any of those people bought. That's the real use that you should be using for those kind of lists. Otherwise, you should be acquiring them organically, or you should go to a provider like Bridge that says, we'll send it out to the 100,000, but we know how to get it to them and get it to them correctly.

Right.

We have very minimal bounce rates and very minimal unsubscribes, and, uh, and, and I'm talking less than like 1/10 of 1% or less than 1% as an aggregate that we ever say, wow, you got a high bounce rate, you got a bunch of rejections, and you got people turning you off and, and telling you to reporting you as spam.

Sure.

Mike, you made a comment that—

Hi, Jeff. Go ahead. Sorry.

You made a comment that I want to follow up on with, I think, something that is related. There was an article within the last few days in the New York Times about how the new piece of information that really is tying us together, that's That's becoming, well, almost the current equivalent of the Social Security number is the mobile phone number. I think that's interesting in the context of what you just said about how quickly an email list can become outdated.

It can. There's all kinds of things called ad fraud and there are bots because these cookies are just running rampant out there and everybody's brokering them and selling them. And now the race is to what they call first-party data, meaning you should only work with vendors who aren't brokering the broker who's brokering the broker, but should basically be dealing with source. Yeah, I know, but that's what it is. That's what's happening out there is there's just way too many multiple tiers of people saying, oh, I've got access to that, but they're now sending it to someone else who actually then puts it in the system. And it gets pretty convoluted and detached. So one of the ways to stop that— mobile, you can't put a cookie on a mobile. You only have device ID, and we happen to own one of the largest in the country that basically helps us identify who that person is. But you can't put a cookie on there and then follow them around and everything. So And, and it prevents fraud. So if you've ever had run a campaign where the numbers just don't match up, which happens a lot, where they say they delivered 100,000 ad impressions and your Google Analytics says nope, looks like you only did 80, that's the issue, is there's all kinds of, you know, how the information's getting passed, how the impressions getting served, all of that. And so mobile, especially with the fact now, and this is why we did it, 60 to 80% now of people open their email on a mobile device. So not only do you have to send an email, but it has to make sure it works on both the desktop and on your mobile. But that's true of almost everything now, whether you're serving a social ad or anything. You might start your morning on a desktop at work or at home, but for the rest of the day, you're pretty much on mobile when you start checking your social channels and everything else and your email accounts. So you've got to be able to, be able to make sure you're still delivering to Joe Smith at 123 Cherry Street, but he just happens to be on his mobile phone now. Now you got to make sure that that email or that banner ad is in a format that reaches him or her there as well. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. And I— my response to the bank when they said, well, how do we do that? What would be our process? Um, and before I even had an opportunity to chat with you about this, it was find a processor that would be willing to take the responsibility on sending the message and giving you a good list so that they're part of the process instead of somebody just selling you a list for a few hundred or a few thousand bucks. And then they just disappear.

Yes.

So it sounds like that's definitely the way to go, and glad that you kind of validated that.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's getting more complicated, and that's what kind of drove me to wanting to do this kind of work, is, you know, it's gotten so complicated. You gotta worry about SEO, SEM, social media, all these different things. This still goes back to the basics of What data do you have? Who are you trying to reach? Who's my audience? And then let's put a campaign together to reach them. And it's very clean and easy. It's not as complicated as a lot of the other stuff that we have to deal with every day.

Good.

I did I have another question, but if there's more that you're gonna go through, I don't wanna derail us at this point.

So it looks like you have some other stuff up there. I was just pulling it up in case we talk about different things, but we're very fortunate that we've been able to work with the big data groups and the fact that we handle some of the national campaigns. Some of the top companies out there, which teaches us a lot. They get to do a lot of A/B testing. And the one thing I want to emphasize is what's nice about working with your data and then having us do it, you do not have to have huge budgets. You know, we do things— I've done projects where we're test marketing in zip codes to a certain audience of a certain Income. One of the greatest things we get from Nielsen is it's not credit scores, but it's creditworthiness, things like that. It tells us a lot about the personal profile of a person. We're doing a program with Mercedes-Benz in Florida where we've now been able to drill down that, okay, we've been marketing to the 6 zip code region of people that have a certain income and have luxury cars. But what we're starting to notice is the ones that go to the site more than 2 times and look at 2 or 3 pages at a time is the Mercedes-Benz buyer. And that's what's nice is that you don't have to like put all your money into and say, well, we think we know what we're going to do. Let's take our entire budget and wrap it into this and let's cross our fingers.

Right.

This is a great way for any business to say, I want to test. I know my market area, and I know we've done good with either homeowners or renters or low income or high income. Ethnic groups are very popular right now to do specific marketing in, let's say, in Spanish or in Korean, and being able to identify those. Again, another great way to identify people is through mobile phones, and we get a lot of data that tells us their lifestyle and behaviors. And, and, and then putting specific messages and A/B testing the heck out of it with whether it's $300, $500, $1,000, and then, then looking at the data and doing more of what works and less of that which doesn't so that you minimize waste. Because let's face it, even a direct mail campaign, my goodness, you know, there's minimums all over the place. You got to work 6 to 8 weeks in advance. You got to do a 4% overrun, and then you send it out, and it's usually with a lot of other mail or in a group of things. This is a great way to basically, before you make that big investment— let's say you're a window company or a roofing company or landscape company, home services are great for this kind of marketing where you go, let's go test 6 zip codes with 4 different messages, see how it works, see what kind of data we get back, what kind of activity they're doing on the site and everything. And then once we find out, okay, this is the best audience for us, now let's put it out there and do a larger investment and help me find another 10,000 of those people or 20,000 or 50,000 of those.

We were working with a bank. You mentioned direct mail just now. We were working with a bank on converting from system A, a system, to system B, a new system. And one of the things that the numbers, when we ran them, were so shocking was the system they were converting from did not have a good way to household. When we did an analysis on it, when we were able to actually do some analytics on the numbers, they were literally every time they did direct mail, sending several pieces to a number of the same households. It was in the tens of thousands of dollars per year that that alone was able to save them.

Yeah, we get that a lot, or multiple people in the household, they didn't clean their list, you know, and they— you're finding you're sending 3 pieces to the same household or Or just bad, bad places, you know, that, that don't even exist anymore. And so we start with postal data with almost everything by working with Axiom and Experian and people like that. We start— that's our baseline point. Do we have a physical address? Do we have a physical name? You know, do we have an email address? And how recent is that? So that before you even do your first send, and by any way, because we work with people that do direct mail a lot too. And, you know, we just want to make sure it's clean and that you're getting what you pay for. And, you know, there's not a lot of waste because it's getting expensive when you tack on printing plus postage. That's why email still shows like one of the highest return on investments of any kind of marketing out there is for about every dollar you spend, you'll see like about a $38 return because you're basically going into that person's inbox and they're either opening it or they're not. They either subscribed and opted in and depending on how you write your subject line and your title, we tend to get You know, it's, it's different than just putting banner ads out there. We like doing both. We see about a 20 to 40% uplift when you combine the channels, especially if you know who it's going to. If you know that it's Joe Smith, but he just happens to be on his email this day and then on his mobile phone the next day, but both ways he gets a message, you're going to get a higher return, especially if you know that Joe has an interest in new car loan or a home loan. You've got the data that basically says Joe is an active shopper of home loans and here's his— we think this is pretty accurate about his income and the price of home he's looking for. We can target that.

I got to remember to take myself off of mute before I ask another question. Right, Jeff?

Yes, I actually have the windows open today. It's so nice here, so I'm trying to be very cautious to make sure I mute myself so I'm not causing background noise.

Yeah, well, we've got some energetic golden retrievers here, so you never know when they're going to decide that they want to say hello, so I got to be careful with that as well. One other question, Mike. that I've got for you, and you were in Toronto, so you know the amount of emphasis that has been placed on the whole concept of marketing automation.

Right.

And email kind of drives that because— and for those people that maybe aren't as familiar, the whole concept around a marketing automation process, especially when you can lead it off with email, is as a business, I send Mike an email, Mike responds opens the email, clicks on a link, and visits my website. What marketing automation can do with tracking code that exists on your site is now I can tie back and I know that it is Mike. I know now not just I have a visitor, I know that it's Mike because he's responded to an email that has his name associated with it. And then what I can do by cookieing or tagging at least his browser I can determine what other pages Mike visits on the website, if Mike has been here before but hasn't defined himself or identified himself yet. And there's all sorts of other really cool website data analytics that can come out of a marketing automation platform. Well, my question for you, Mike, is a lot of those systems have email built within them, yet using a service like yours has some tremendous advantage. Are there ways that you can blend those together to get the best of both worlds, where your platform is responsible for sending prospective messages to people that your database knows might be likely mortgage customers or other types of clients for other businesses, but yet still feed data into a marketing automation platform that the business would then be able to use for future marketing activities and other sorts of ad placements? All that fun data stuff.

Yeah, you just nailed it that we're the front end and the acquisition trying to grow the list but you end up with here are the active people that you now can feed into your marketing automation system and go back to what you were doing at Constant Contact and MailChimp and all that. Or if you're using, you know, WSI solution or whatever, that now kicks that off that says we now know who's active and who's whatever. I now want to send them a personalized message through marketing automation that says, Joe, we noticed that you've been visiting the site. And this usually revolves around like e-commerce sites where somebody abandoned the shopping cart. And then what you do is you automatically send them a message, whether it's you know, immediately or 24 hours later that basically says we're now offering free shipping, or you like this item, maybe you'll like this item, or we just reduced the price. Anything that you want to do to try and drive that person to a conversion. If you come in now, you'll get this, get an extra $50 off, or buy now and get an Amazon gift card, whatever it is that you're using as incentives. That's where the marketing automation comes in. So we're we're trying to micro target and yet do it in in a much larger fashion than probably what your current database does. But then once we get done with a campaign and we end up with wow here's a a bunch of names of people and information about them, now you can plug that back into your database which will grow your current database faster than you trying to. Just do another show or, or, you know, people that come into the store. You're going to end up with a lot more names and information about that person that you can now plug into your marketing automation and send them individualized automated messages based on whether they're coming to your site now. And you'll know, like you said, you'll get a notification that says, hey, Joe Smith went to your site again and he looked at these 5 pages and these 3 items, now your automation system should be able to custom put another email message together that sends to him and says, how can I help you? That conversion rate goes up. I forget the statistics with marketing automation, but it's substantial. Because let's face it, we all don't have great sales forces that are always going to follow up with every lead. You give them a lead and they're like, that's not a good lead. Well, at least marketing automation, whether they don't have an opinion and they don't have behaviors, they'll just go ahead and send it out anyways and try and drive Joe to pick up the phone or come in the store anyways.

Right.

I think it's a, it's a good To add to that as well in favor of marketing automation is sometimes it's better to not have a human involved. Often it's better not to have a human involved because I mean, I can say for myself, when I do something that an hour or a day or whenever later somebody starts calling me and aggravating the heck out of me, I hate it.

I'd much rather have—

Yeah. An automated system that's going to touch base with me electronically. In my case, I find those things are actually effective. It's not that I open all of these emails, but if they've done a good job crafting a subject line, it still helps it in remaining top of mind for me.

Yeah, it depends on where you're at in the funnel. If you're still looking, you're kind of like, go away, I'm still researching. I hate that too. that call where you download a white paper or something and you haven't even had a read and the phone starts ringing and, hey, we saw you download. To me, that's the extreme.

Right.

They don't have their system set up to know that you're at the top of the funnel instead of somebody that's now going to their site regularly. Some people are more aggressive, but I like the arm's length distance that email in particular provides me. That I can either look at it, save it for later, and/or opt out and say, go away, leave me alone.

Right. It's funny that you mentioned, and a lot of times the effectiveness of follow-up is really, I mean, the Achilles heel in that is the human involvement. In conversations with another client last week, we were talking about marketing automation and email. They shared one of their strategies as a community bank is to do these little open house seminars, you know, little get-togethers where they'll bring in and invite people within the community and people can sign up for additional information. So they put their name and their email address on a piece of paper when they check in, and then the bank goes back and puts that information into an Excel worksheet and then gives the Excel worksheet In addition to templates. So all the loan officer or the branch manager has to do literally is copy and paste and send a couple of emails. And rarely did they say that ever gets done because the employee comes back and says, I'm too busy, I don't have time for that.

Yeah.

Yet one, they're missing an opportunity because somebody is, you know, let's say that's Jeff, and Jeff has filled out his name and info and he wants to get a copy of the slide deck that the presenter had or wants to get some additional information. If I as a bank don't give Jeff that information, that's probably going to piss Jeff off and go, I asked for that, where is it? And the flip side, even if you didn't necessarily get upset, you could be losing opportunities that people are just a little nudge kind of along the way. Hey Jeff, thanks for visiting our seminar, it was great to see you. Here's the slides that we promised, and, you know, in a couple of days we'll have the date and time for our next seminar ready, so we'll send you that information. And by the way, if you've got any other questions, give us a call. And then like 3 or 4 days later, the next email goes out and it shows Jeff when the next seminar is and invites him to register for it, so you can keep him engaged. The bank was like, You mean a system like that does that? There's a service out there? They were baffled that they didn't even know that that existed and they were just satisfied of— I guess not satisfied, but they just tolerated the fact that employees said they were, I'm doing air quotes, too busy to follow up with all these people that asked for information.

Absolutely.

If that can be kicked off through a much larger email that your platform would provide and then some follow-ups. So the possibilities there when you start thinking big picture and going back, and a lot of what Jeff and I talked about last week was strategically, what do you want to do? Who do you want to reach? What's the message that you want them to understand? This is just one more arrow in your quiver. as a business to help go after those people that you want to do more business with you. So, Jeff, I think I talked over you. You were going to have a question?

Oh, that's okay. No, I was just going to say I'm fascinated by the prevalence. I say fascinated, fascinated is accurate. The, the thought bubble above my head also says frustrated at times. But with organizations that have the best of intentions, Of making a good impression. Like you just gave an example of— actually, this week and last week you used that example, Eric, of this organization that wanted to make their touch feel so personal that it ended up being ineffective. Another great example of well-intentioned organizations is— I mean, there's a company that I do business with that they don't like people to get voicemail. So what happens pretty often when I call is the phone will ring and ring and ring and ring and ring, and I'll go from queue to queue to queue to queue before I can ever get a person to do anything. I think this entire discussion this week, as well as our discussion last week, has illustrated how important it is to whiteboard or drill down When you have good intentions and ideas like that to make sure that the end result comes out as expected because often it doesn't.

Yeah, I got to tell you, you stumbled onto, you know, there are best practices. If you want to learn a lot about just those basic things, just type 2016 best email programs in Google. And you can see I've ended up with like 25 articles, but this— we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. I think people try to accomplish too much. They're used to putting a newsletter together that has 35 things on it, or they're used to, if you're going to do a print direct mail piece, let's take a car dealer or real estate, I got to show all 35 properties, and by the way, we also provide this service and that service. I think you guys are spot on that if you're going to do this, that the beauty of being able to do these in small chunks is to kind of say, no, if we're marketing to women, let's put a women-oriented message. Let's not try and do one that it's saying, hey, we do this and this. You basically want to say, here's who I'm trying to reach. So put the message to that and make sure you're following that and then targeting them with a specific message to them instead of trying to do, you know, anywhere between 10 and 50 items per message and things for sale. Remember, all your goal is to get them to click or open. Once they get there, then you can say, by the way, we got all these other things if you're interested as well. But keep the message, either the banner ad or the email marketing message or whatever, specific to only trying to accomplish 1 to 3 things. instead of everything and then go from there.

My guess is 3 would be the exception and not the rule. I would guess 1 is probably best.

It depends. I mean, if you're a home services guy and you say, we do windows, but we also do energy efficiency products, or whatever, I think that's fine if you have it bulletized. But what I'm talking about is I see You know, we've got all these things. That's what the main message is. We're the largest provider of all this stuff. If you're a car dealer, you're trying to say, I'm service, we lease, we've got 0% financing, we've got used car inventory, we sell tires. You know, it's too much. You should have individual messages that say, you know, one of them is saying, this is what we absolutely do, windows, and here's our special, and target people that are interested in Mostly in Windows. Then when they click through to the landing page, that's your spot to have the extra bullet points that say, by the way, we also do these other things and we have specials on these things. But get them to open it first.

I'm just basking in the glory of all of this that is, you know, what we've been talking about and the conversations that I'm having with clients. I'm just looking forward to being able to take this webinar and sending it to a client and saying, please listen to this. This will give you a reason why email is not dead. You have to do it right. There is a lot of power in marketing automation. You know, and I think a lot of what Jeff has picked up on and you picked up on You can take all this data and all of this info and you can really creep somebody out. Like you said, Mike, you know, somebody can know when you've downloaded a white paper and immediately pick up the phone and not only know that you've downloaded the white paper, but their analytics might have actually revealed that you've been visiting their website for the last month.

Yep.

What other pages you've looked at. I mean, I could call you and go, hey Mike, it's Eric. I know this You downloaded the white paper, but I also noticed you stopped by about a month ago and you've been looking at all these other site pages on our site, but didn't take an action over here, and I'm wondering why that was the case. And, you know, even though we have access to this data, we need to be very careful that we don't totally creep out the customer or the prospect.

There's an art to it.

Yeah. They will not be a customer anymore, or they're certainly not going to go from a prospect to a customer because they're going to feel like they're being stalked. And we've all experienced businesses that don't get that, that just take the data and think they can, you know, but there's a lot of businesses that don't get that. And I've not had it happen recently, but there's a certain furniture store here in Michigan that has the reputation as soon as you walk in, Everybody's kind of lined up waiting for you to walk in, and then boom, somebody hops on you, and then they kind of tail you and follow you around the furniture store. And if you stop at any one area, they're like, you know, that comes in other colors. And you're like, dude, go away, I don't want to talk to you right now. And I refer to that as vultures. Exactly. So you can be a digital vulture just as much as an in-person vulture. And to a certain extent, a digital vulture has got even more power because the digital vulture is going to have all that information. The furniture store vulture just knows that I've showed up to the store and may not realize that I've been doing Google searches and I have cookies in my browser that are related to sleeper sofas or armoires or furniture suites.

Right.

Whereas the digital vulture knows that and can really freak me out. So I always say we use our power for good, not for evil. And it's important to make sure that that's reinforced anytime we have an opportunity to have a conversation because consumers immediately go to the creepy furniture store vulture and that's what they think of. Yep.

I agree.

I think I've just, I think I've just coined a new term, creepy furniture store vulture. There's a blog post somewhere, I think.

Creepy fill-in-the-blank vulture. It happens at car dealerships.

Insurance agents, probably not so much a bank because banks are just scared of the word selling and they'll let opportunities oftentimes slip through their fingers for fear of feeling like they're being a vulture. But anyway, I digress. Well, in the last few minutes that we have together, Mike, you've shared a boatload of helpful info. If somebody wanted to get in touch with you and talk further, I don't know if you've got a slide with your info or if you want to give it. Certainly, you can touch base with either Jeff or myself and we can put you in touch. But how does somebody get to know more about you? And any other closing thoughts that you'd like to just leave people with?

Well, definitely you can go to LinkedIn, which has everything that I've done over the last 25 years. And just look up my name, but you can also get a hold of me at mike.martin@thebridgecorp.com and/or go through, through Eric or Jeff. They know how to get a hold of me as well.

Cool.

Good.

Well, I have to admit, even though we sat and had lunch and dinner and attended little gala sessions and had a couple of adult cocktails, This was very eye-opening and didn't realize all of what you've shared today. I personally am glad that you were able to take the time. I can think of a handful of clients I'm going to reach out to and encourage they watch this and make some introductions. I think this is a great augment and supplement and add-on to a marketing automation process that can really bring some nice power to to a business's digital strategy. So I'm— I've learned a lot and I appreciate it.

Well, thank you.

I really appreciate it. Anything else on your part?

Yeah, it's been fun. I appreciate you doing it as well, Mike.

Anytime.

Well, good. Well, that's the wrap on another Free Webinar Wednesdays. We'll get the recording out there and made available. Yes, Jeff.

Next week is Thanksgiving, so let's go ahead and go on record and say we're going to take next week off.

You know, I totally forgot next week is Thanksgiving, and I think I've heard that once or twice, but it escaped. But yeah, we will take next week off for Thanksgiving, so we will let everybody enjoy Thanksgiving with their families, and Jeff and I will get an early start maybe on the Thanksgiving festivities. Enjoy your turkey or your tofurkey if you are a vegetarian. And we will be back the following week and likely we'll be talking about some of the things that I wanted to talk about last week, the changes going on at If This Then That and automating and productivity. But we got so into this whole customer profitability, it They actually spawned 2 shows, but we'll be back the week after Thanksgiving and we'll pick that up and have some discussion. So until then, have an awesome and a wonderful holiday season with friends and family, and we'll look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks right back here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Take care, everybody.

Bye-bye. Thank you.