Marketing Automation Deep Dive Tour with mXtr Automation

Well, greetings everybody. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Digital Marketing. And you are hopefully listening live, or maybe you're listening to the recording. But those of you that are listening live, hopefully you are here because you were either part of a prior Free Webinar Wednesdays webinar that I did with the folks from MXTR Automation, Joe Morrow and Nicky Losey, who are on the line with me right now.

Hi.

Or you are familiar with the concept of marketing automation and lead nurturing and how to leverage technology really to work smarter, not necessarily harder, on managing your digital and your inbound lead management efforts. So by way of a little bit of background, if you did not sit on Free Webinar Wednesdays and you are joining us for the first time, at freewebinarwednesdays.com for the July 29th episode, There is a high-level overview that the 3 of us did talking really about the concept of marketing automation and how it works. And so I want to mention that only because the hope is you'll get a sneak peek at the inside of this MXTR automation system and how it works. You'll get really excited and say, oh my gosh, we need to get this for our business. And you may need to convince or educate others in your organization as to what the heck marketing automation is. How it works, why it's beneficial, and get them as excited as what you hopefully will be. So I want to make sure everybody remembers that this is out there as a resource, as a high level just to kind of say here's how the industry has changed, here's why technology is important in managing the leads and the inbound connections and the email newsletters and the phone calls and all the other stuff that we're doing these days. try to generate interest in our business. So I wanted to provide that little public service announcement. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and send the presentation controls over to Mickey and Joe, and they will go ahead and share out their screens. They've got some slides that we're going to cover just real briefly. and then take us right into the backend of the MXTR system and show us exactly how it works. And we're interested in those of you that are attending live asking questions, posing what-if scenarios, maybe sharing the processes that you're currently doing as part of your lead management and efforts. And then we can really show you kind of hands-on how those could be satisfied with an automation system like this. So guys, looks like your screen has come up, and I will welcome you. This isn't Free Webinar Wednesdays, but I'll welcome you to the webinar and thank you again for taking time out to give us a real deep dive into your platform.

Yeah, well, thank you, Eric. As always, a pleasure to be with you and to be with everybody on the webinar this afternoon. This is Mickey Losey, and I'm here from Hello everybody, welcome. And as Eric said, we're going to take you through a couple slides here in the beginning. I do recognize that the majority of folks on this webinar have been through this previously, but we still think it's important to give a basic high-level overview of marketing automation to get everybody back on the same page again. And then we will spend the majority of the time in the platform itself today so you guys can really see the power of the technology and kind of what you'll have at your fingertips when you when you leverage the platform. As Eric said, by all means, meant to be interactive, so fire lots of questions at him. We like to keep him busy anyway, and that way he can interject at the appropriate time with questions, and we'll do our best to make sure they all get answered today.

That'll keep me from playing with Facebook on my phone while you're talking, right?

That's exactly right.

I'm joking, of course. I'm really excited about this, so I'm suspecting I'll learn a thing or two in the process as well. You have my full attention, I guarantee it.

Well, good. So let's just talk a little bit about some of the basic principles again as we get started for those of you that might still be joining us for the first time. The question becomes, so why automate? Why go through all this marketing automation stuff? A couple of stats are going to come up here on the screen, but in its simplest form, marketing automation is going to help companies increase workplace productivity. It's a big one. You're taking processes that you might be doing over and over within your organization, Marketing automation is going to put you in a position to be able to automate some of those things, make your employees, your team, a little more efficient at what they're doing on a daily basis.

And I think it's important to realize when we talk about automating processes, it isn't that these processes are robotic, okay? It's these processes are dearly needed, but before— because of sheer volume or lack of a lot of personnel They're hard to keep up with. And so automating those processes that are very important yet redundant in many cases, that's what automation does. And it leads to the next statement or next bullet point, and which is astounding because the consumers are changing. And this, this stat is amazing. And they're predicting by 2020, Gartner, which is a leading research company, that customers will manage 85% of their relationships directly with companies without human interaction. And that's not because they're being forced to do that, it's because their behavior is being skewed in the future to really be able to manage what they want, when they want, how they want. And what automation allows you to do is engage those relationships which are now beginning to become automated on the user side, Now on your side as a business.

Next bullet coming up here, automation strengthens customer relationships. I mean, I think that goes to what Joe just said, right? I mean, the idea here is that we're not just automating these things to make our life easier, we actually are automating things that should make the interactions with our clients better because our clients now are getting information when they want it, at the time they want it, the right information at the right time, so to speak. So it's going to really improve that overall dynamic with the customer and should turn into a better, more competitive, and more robust relationship between business and customer. Of course, saving company time and resources by automating lead nurturing programs. I mean, that's a big one, and we'll talk a lot about that. You'll see that when we get in here today in regards to drip marketing campaigns and really the power of what they're going to do for for your company. That seems to be the backbone of this thing, the nurturing idea, and talking with our customers in that educational nurturing kind of process. It's a real benefit. That's going to be a core part of what we're going to be looking at in the system today. Something interesting that came up across our desks in the not-so-recent past is this particular piece from American Express. And of course, I think the majority of us on the phone call would say that we know American Express and the power of their marketing team, and they have flat out endorsed marketing automation and why it works for them. They've seen it, they've seen great success. If you guys have the opportunity to read this particular link in this particular blog, I would encourage you to do so. We've got a link within here, but they endorse it. 3 Simple Reasons to Use Marketing Automation. It's a pretty compelling little article, talks about increased productivity, Reduction in marketing overhead, and here's some of the things we've already talked about: strengthening relationships, scale marketing campaigns by streamlining processes, and gaining competitive advantages.

And the reason we put that in here is because we truly believe that marketing automation has evolved, and there's companies like ours out here that are basically working closely to get it to the average business. To any business has the opportunity to really capitalize on what some of the Fortune 100 companies have very cost-effectively— well, actually costly in the beginning— put together marketing automation programs years ago, but it took a lot of processes to make that happen. American Express is just one of the many companies that deal with businesses that are endorsing this wave, if you will, of great marketing concepts.

So again, what do we—

go ahead. Just an observation. The other thing that I like about, I guess, the validation from the folks over at American Express is they spend a lot of time trying to educate small businesses. Their Open Forum is a great resource for small business advice and tactics. A lot of times have some really good digital marketing information in there. But they really play off of how small businesses need to be thinking about doing business. in the months and years ahead. And it's cool to see that they recognize just the concept of marketing automation as something that needs to be on a small business's radar screen. So that's a really good find.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we thought so as well. Very, very intriguing. So for those of you that, that were on the call last time, you might remember us talking about MXTR in regards to marketing automation and what our big differentiator is. And that is the fact that our particular platform isn't like a lot of marketing automation platforms in that it's just technology. and you get to do all the work. Our solution is we've got the technology, and our team then comes in and really becomes an extension of your team to really be able to understand your business, your goals. You know, we really do a deep dive here, understand who you are, what you're all about, and then help implement the program and the technology for you to have a successful venture in the marketing automation arena. And so we talked a little bit about, again, a couple high-level overview here slides in terms of what marketing automation is. It's all about the customer. Everything we're going to see today, even when we jump into the platform, you'll see that it revolves around the customer, period. Their lifecycle, how they engage with you, everything leads back to them. Building profiles about them, understanding what products and services are important to them, understanding customer touchpoints with your organization, be it from an upfront sales standpoint or from an after-sales service standpoint, all that information can be gathered into the system and key messages and communication points can be sent back out to that prospect or that customer to again maximize their experience with your organization. It's as simple as it gets. And again, so what we do is we make sure we're immersing ourselves in your organization to understand that, and this little pipeline here just kind of shows you the basic processes that we go through from attracting customers, nurturing leads, which is a big part of what we're going to be talking about today, through the sales process, all the way through the backend. It's really intriguing to us how many of our existing customers come into us really thinking, I just want more leads and I want to nurture those leads and I want to drive sales, that's important, but that they really start to see the value of the upsell after the customer is in the system. And, you know, I think— I know we've got a lot of folks in the financial institution, you know, on this call. We have a lot of folks on board already in the insurance arena. Those kind of customers, we get them in and they're doing one thing with your company now, but we've got to teach them about all the other things that the bank can provide them with, or your business can provide them with. Great opportunity to do this. And again, if done right, the customer's actually kind of raising their hand and saying, hey, I'm interested in that product or service. Send me some more information on that so I can learn more and take advantage of that offering from you as well. So in terms of your marketing that you're doing now, you'll see when we jump in the system a very robust analytics platform that's really going to be a return on investment model for you. So basically every dollar that you're spending from a marketing standpoint is going to be tracked, not just in terms of how many leads that are being generated, but it's going to follow that lead then all the way through the sales process. If you've got your marketing person on this particular webinar and you've got a justified cost, the spend that you're doing, the system is going to help you do that. No longer do you have to guess about, hey, I'm spending money and is it working for me? The system is going to point that one out. We also break it down into a couple steps. For us, it's about stopping that leaky sales funnel. So for those of you that are generating leads on a monthly basis, spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising to do so, you know the scenario, right? Pour all those leads into the top of the funnel, A couple of them drip out the bottom, you get a couple of new clients, we pat each other on the back and we start that all over again next month. Our job is to stop that leaky sales funnel, plug those holes there so the wine stops dripping out of that funnel and remarket to these people, talk to these people because at one point in time they've raised their hand and they've said, hey, I'm interested in doing business with you, I just might not be ready today. And marketing automation in our platform is going to help nurture them through that process. Whether they're ready 6 months from now, a year from now, or 2 weeks from now, we want to make sure that we make it easy for them to get the information that they need to make that buying decision. So here's just a couple of examples real quick on some of the engagement techniques that we do. You'll see this again when we jump into the platform. Essentially, it's all based on email automation and triggers accordingly. We basically break it down into 3 categories. We'll talk about time-based triggers, meaning that we can set up programs that are based on a certain time schedule. Whether it be send today and then something else 2 weeks later, 2 weeks after that, 2 weeks after that, we can do those kind of things. We can do behavioral-based triggers. Joe mentioned this earlier so that when your clients are doing certain things, we can send off certain actions. We can send them other emails or notify people internally based on Really any kind of behavior they do from a digital standpoint, whether it be opening emails, clicking on links within emails, visiting certain pages on your website, clicking certain links on your website. All of those things are kind of behavioral-based, and thus we can set up automation and rule sets around those. And of course, event-based deals, pretty straightforward, can be as simple as birthdays, anniversaries, can be policy renewal dates in the insurance industry, or Or loan payment reminders for that matter. The sky's the limit. I mean, anything you want to do as far as events that are already hard-coded in there, we can set automation up off of that.

And we also— and this is critical— is we crossed the line of just online and digital mapping to real live conversations that also can be used as triggers, and the relationship is also built within the system that allows you to It allows you to take you through the whole process, adding comments or whatever on the phone calls, from phone calls and stuff like that. So basically you're starting from your products and this is like one simple engagement that you're seeing in front of you.

Right.

It basically starts with an email campaign on a product and takes you all the way through right down to filling out a form to notifying salesperson. And in between there while the salesperson is working with them, phone calls are being logged. Content and actions based off the phone calls are also being automated.

We'll take you through one basic workflow just to kind of get everybody on the same page in terms of what a basic automation workflow might look like. In this example, we're just going to take 2 emails there at the top. We're going to do a little A/B test, split test if you will, with an outbound email campaign that we're sending out to a list. Within that, there is a link that's going to drive the recipients of that email to a specific landing page, give them an opportunity to fill out a form associated with the offer that we have included in that particular email correspondence. Pretty typical marketing up to this point in time, right? From here though, this is where the automation starts to really kick in. All these rules can be customized. First thing that's going to happen is we're going to notify somebody internally that hey, a form was filled out. It could be one person like a salesperson or it could be multiple people. People in the organization if multiple stakeholders need to take action on that form fill out. Same thing, we're going to go ahead and obviously send an autoresponder back to the prospective customer. Hey, thanks for filling out this form. We'll be in contact shortly type of deal. In this example, we said hey, we're going to set up 2 time-based communications at 4 weeks and 8 weeks later after the form is filled out because we know that's an important communication stage to keep this particular prospect warm in this particular sales cycle. So 4 weeks later we send out a message, 8 weeks later we send out another message, and off of those we put a rule set in place as well. And we say off of either of those 2 emails, if the prospect should happen to come back to the site, in this example 2 times, we want to set up another set of rules that are going to go into place. And we're going to say, hey, if that happens, they visit our site 2 times, we want to make sure that we notify the salesman again. Because, you know, customer X has been contemplating doing business with us. He's received our 2 emails, visited the site 2 times. Mr. Salesman, he's obviously pretty interested. Pick up the phone and give him a call. And at the same time, we'll send an email back to that prospective customer that says, hey, we noticed you've been checking us out again. Thanks for coming back. Let us know if there's anything particular we can do for you. Love to let us know if we can help. Simple communication, again, all geared towards keeping the customer engaged, Making it easy for him to convert and become an actual customer. Just one example, this is a pretty basic one. Some of these workflows can get pretty complex but it's always based on this, all geared around that customer down there at the bottom of that graphic and making sure we're making it easy on him.

I think the important thing to note on this whole process is especially if this is somewhat of a first exposure or when you're explaining this to others in your organization, The initial result or the response that I sometimes will get is, well, that's kind of creepy. That's a little bit Big Brother. At a seminar that I was actually at last week, that was one of the comments at the very end was, I don't want to be the overly attached girlfriend that's stalking you in your inbox. How do we keep that from really— The question was, what's the right way to do it? The answer really goes back to what your organization's culture is. If you're not— and I don't even want to use the word aggressive, but if you don't have a real outbound mentality with emails and whatnot, you can tone this back to whatever matches your personality. Because the last thing that you want is for the digital communication to not match the actual communication strategy or culture of your organization.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, no. Sorry to interrupt. I mean, I couldn't agree more with you, and I would say I'll take it even a step further. Not only does it match the culture of the organization, if this is done correctly, which I think we're pretty good at working with customers and understanding their workflow, this will be set up that it's kind of based and paced based on how the customer is interacting with what the company is feeding to them, right? So it's not necessarily about just forcing things at them.

It's reacting.

It's reacting to what they're asking us for, because We think that you've been in your business a pretty long time, you understand how the typical lifecycle of a customer goes, and you understand if somebody knocks on your door today, how they might step through that cycle to get to the end. Of course, we recognize there's lots of zigs and zags in that road to get there, but we're going to map out that basic flow. If the customer— again, I always use the example— raises his hand and says, I want more info, then we want to make sure we're there with that bit of info for him. What automation can do for you is make sure that that happens on the customer's timetable. I'll give an example that we've got. We've got a customer, they're in the real estate side of things, and they love this stuff because their customers are looking at things at all hours of the days and nights, as most of our customers are. These communications end up coming out at 10 o'clock at night or 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning or whatever the case might be. They're getting instant responses at off hours from a real live person, or so it would seem within the organization, and it's really beneficial for them. It helps what oftentimes might have a 24 or 48-hour lag in the process be immediately processed, if you will. And our response, what we're finding so far, is customers are thankful for that.

At the end of the day, this technology married to people that know what they're doing programming it Works. So if it's converting, then obviously it's working and it's building the relationships, it's not tearing them down.

Right.

So that's proof in itself on how it happens. I see and I understand why people might think in the beginning, well, that's crazy, that's like stalking. Those days are over in our opinion. It's kind of like the early days of email when spam was happening. That never works. This is all permission-based, and this is behavioral-based. So properly done, it really quickly— the users become evangelists of this. And we feel that if you're very sensitive to building the relationship and not tearing it down, the indicators are there. And to the trained eye, we watch them very closely— open rates, click-through rates, behavior, all that kind of stuff. And it's very important to know that this is a lot of horsepower. But properly done, it can actually enhance the relationship, and the proof is in the conversions.

That's right.

Yep.

Yeah.

Alright, so a couple more slides here before we jump into this thing. This is something you're going to see in great detail when we do get into the system, and this is really the profiles of the customers individually that you're starting to build in their communication flow, if you will. So sake of discussion, what you're looking at there is you've got 4 contacts within your database listed down the left-hand side, each with their own unique desires associated with your business, signified by product A, B, and C, and then service A as well. So we want to make sure obviously that we're sending messages out to them geared around their interests. So, you know, Louis at the top is going to get things about product A, whereas Timothy at the bottom is going to get things more oriented around service A. And then every one of those little dots on the right-hand side of the screen indicates their digital footprint or actions with us as a company. And this starts working, as we kind of laid out in earlier discussions here, 24/7. So it doesn't matter when you're interacting, we're learning from you, we're listening to you, and we're giving you what you want when you want it. So we get asked a lot, you know, is this a marketing tool or is this a sales tool? Fact of the matter is we believe it's both. It's, you know, I'm a marketing guy that's been at this for a number of years now and have lived through the time where marketing is on one side of the room and sales is on the other side of the room. The two aren't necessarily always on the same page. This really brings them together because not only are you cultivating leads from a marketing standpoint, you're working your lead gen programs, you're nurturing through the system for you, then at the appropriate time we're bringing the sales team into the loop. We're not just sending them a maybe kind of lead, a lukewarm lead. We're sending them leads that have been nurtured, been warmed up, and have really said, hey, I'm ready to talk to a sales guy. You know, let me talk to the appropriate person at your organization because I'm now ready to make a buying decision. The sales team then gets pretty engaged, obviously conversion rates are much higher as a result.

For example, what you're seeing right there, that's a real-time example of an actual real-time alert that comes through, and also in addition to that, every day you'll receive a list of the top web leads that were pulled from yesterday. So these are all people that have come to your website and so on and so forth.

Okay, so I think it's come to that time. We're going to jump into the platform now and start giving you a look at what the system is really all about. Might also be a good time, Eric, I don't know if you've had any questions or anything come in you want to field before we jump into the actual walkthrough of the system. Might be a good time to do that as well.

Sure, I was just going to ask, is this the time in the presentation I'm supposed to make the motorcycle noises? We're going to rev up our engines. You might have a—

I'm sorry, I got a Vespa, sorry.

Yeah, well, my bike involves pedals, and the only noises it makes is my breathing when I climb hills. So there's no mechanical noises in that.

I have one of those too.

Yeah, so there was a question that came through, and I kind of addressed it, but I want to maybe talk on it a little bit in general here. There's obviously other marketing automation systems that are out there. Yours isn't the only one, so clear disclosure.

Correct.

The thing that I think separates the MXTR platform from some of the others that I've seen is there's a lot of platforms out there that will— I guess maybe to use the bike analogy— they'll build the bike and they'll give you the bike, and it's a really great bike, but you're still responsible for getting on and pedaling it and making sure that it goes where it needs to go. I think the difference, to carry that bike analogy a little further as it relates to MXTR, is your solution has developed somewhat of a SaaS component, software as a service, where you not only provide the bicycle, but there is a certain degree of, you know, hop on the back of the tandem and we're going to go for a ride. And if you feel like pedaling to go faster, great. You know, providing us with additional white papers or research reports or you know, a lot of specific industry-related information that deals with your business, that can help. But there's a team of folks at MXTR that are there to lead the business through the process. So there's assigned account managers, there's assistance in building the actual emails. And as a consultant who would typically provide those services for my clients, that just augments my team and makes it easier for me to provide those services to my businesses. I think that makes this attractive to me in the sense that I can provide better value to my clients. I think the clients that are using the platform also need to know that you've got people that are in there with their sleeves rolled up and their hands getting dirty on a day-in and day-out basis. As good as I think I am as a consultant, I do a lot of other stuff. Marketing automation is not my forte although I know enough to be dangerous, and you're bringing that team of experts to help increase the odds of success, which I think is one of the big differentiating factors of what you guys have produced. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's kinda how I see it.

100% spot on. I mean, it is, it is definitely our differentiator. We've got a, as you said, a whole team here of not just, you know, designers and such, but it's the marketing expertise that we have, you know, as part of this team that I think really separates us because As you can imagine, strategy is a big part of implementing a successful marketing automation campaign. I don't pretend to, nor would I think Joe would say that we're experts in every business out there, certainly not. But we are pretty darn good at marketing automation and understanding how to have the best success with that system. So we can listen to a customer, understand what their goals are, what they're trying to achieve and really help them guide the best way to implement this platform. If nothing else, it's really speeding up the learning curve that we often hear from customers that come to us after trying other systems that they failed at, that they really struggled at, and they made a major investment, but they couldn't get marketing automation off the ground because they just didn't have those internal resources at their disposal to be successful with it. We kind of fill that void for sure.

And Eric, you are spot on. There are just some amazing software technologies out there— HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot— they're wonderful platforms. What the advantage and what our opportunity was is we've got a platform that cost-effectively allowed us to get all the same horsepower but offer it to our clients at a very cost-effective rate that is way, in many cases, way below what the do-it-yourself ones are. And just if you guys would like to take a look at how hot this is, take a look at some of the job sites and put in marketing automation specialist.

Mm-hmm.

And you will— it is unbelievable. It's like the hottest job sector out there right now because everybody is scrambling to figure out how do they run this complicated kind of software that is working for so many companies. Well, the companies they're working for, it's big investments. They're hiring the people to bring in, and they're paying a lot for the per-seat license and things like that. But they're doing it because it works. So our opportunity that we saw was helping clients that have really big dreams who might not have the huge teams. And so we just fill that void and make that work. Cool.

At this point, the question queue The queue is clear.

Okay, alright, so we'll take a tour then through the actual platform. Again, it won't be a deep, deep dive, but it will be deep enough that hopefully you're going to get the understanding of what you're going to have at your fingertips. We kind of break our platform up into kind of— I look at it as 3 different sections. We've got analytics, obviously they're going to help you analyze everything that you're doing from a marketing standpoint. Then you've got the sales side of things which is the other end of the spectrum which is how much of this effort is turning into sales which you'll see in the CRM. Then there's the contacts, the CRM component and the actual automation workflow. We're going to look at those in kind of 3 unique steps here as we go through the system. The first thing we'll talk about is analytics. We talked about it a little bit in the slide deck. Certainly every campaign that you're doing, whether it be an outbound email campaign, Facebook advertising campaign, a paid search campaign you might be doing, we're gonna track the effectiveness of that for you in terms of overall performance, number of leads that are being generated off of each one, how many of those leads actually turned into true sales opportunities for you, and then from those opportunities, how many of them turned into sales, and of course a few of those opportunities that were lost as well.

And I think it's important to mention too that Due to the fact that I'm old as dirt, I realized there was actually advertising before the internet. So we also enable, if you're using outdoor, if you're using radio, TV, or whatever, the associated landing pages that also show you how traditional advertising is working. And Mickey's laughing because he knows I got gray hair and all that kind of stuff.

Deal with it.

But the beauty of this platform, it attributes wherever you're spending your money We will be able to help you track that.

I've got a real close friend of mine who runs the digital marketing and inbound efforts for a big mortgage bank, and they're doing billboards literally all over Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and each one has its own unique URL that is related to the brand, but it drives to a site, and they're using the HubSpot platform and they're killing it. But he's full-time on this, and, you know, they've got a dedicated person, and that's pretty much all he does. And, you know, a lot of businesses haven't gotten to the point where they can dedicate that. So the fact that it takes your offline efforts and merges it with the online, I think, is an important thing to note. So I'm glad you mentioned that.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, in a perfect world, what this system starts to become for you is really kind of your one-stop in terms of, you know, my marketing experience, the dollars I'm spending, how they're performing, and bringing data back in to really analyze that. And, you know, for instance here, I just clicked through and this particular client does a lot of paid search, and this system will link directly up to Google AdWords. There's a direct connection there, so all your AdWords data is going to funnel into the system as well. So that's at your fingertips. Certainly for those of you that are intimate with the AdWords interface, by no means is this meant to replace what Google does, but it's meant to put some of the most looked at information right at your fingertips so you can quickly see what's going on in terms of your overall campaigns, the keywords and what's performing to you, all the way down to what leads have been generated off of the various paid search campaigns that you're running. So again, that'll be right at your fingertips. Just as we do with AdWords, we're going to link directly up to your Google Analytics account as well so you can get some of the best and most reference information from that standpoint. Here in the platform for you as well. For those of you already doing email marketing, this really becomes your email platform. We believe one of the things that we use a lot is this kind of email on steroids or email next generation of email marketing and that's what it becomes. Certainly we have clients that still do the monthly email newsletters but with this, I'm sure you're already telling that that's only part part of the scenario here. This is really more about nurturing and ongoing initiatives. All of that said, the traditional reporting that you'd be accustomed to with any email platform, whether it be Constant Contact or any other platform you're using, from open rates and bounces and click-throughs and all of that, all of that kind of email reporting is here and available to you as well. We're going to jump over here I think into the contact manager. We'll talk a little bit about the aspects of what you can learn about each of your customers because again, as we started out this presentation, it's all about the customer. This is a customer-centric system. Again, all of your leads will be here for you in this system. I say leads, they can be existing customers or prospects. They'll be at the appropriate stage. All the leads can be segmented as you would within any email marketing program. You can create any number of lists that you might want to create. You can segment them out by salesperson within your organization, by region, It's like any typical CRM and lead management type system. That type of segmentation is almost limitless in terms of how you want to look at the data. Within each record, you can click on any contact and you really can start to learn an awful lot about that particular individual. Again, there is a CRM component to this so some of this information is going to be in here in terms of contact information, name, phone number, address, all those kind of things are going to be here on the left-hand side. If your company chooses to use this as a CRM and your salespeople are getting in or even your customer service people are getting in, they can make notes about every time that they've talked with that particular individual. They can schedule follow-up tasks in here, not just for themselves but they have the ability to assign tasks to other folks within your organization as well which is pretty cool. Then we have the ability to really customize this program for each organization based on any custom fields that might be needed. If you choose like this particular organization likes to upload documents, we can give you the ability to do that, ask specific questions. Again, just kind of fill in custom fields based on what's important to you.

Keep in mind, every custom field, every action that's being built within these are triggers, have the ability to trigger any kind of communication automatically. For example, I guess it says here, do you currently own land? That's This is a builder, this was something they wanted in there. That is being used as a trigger for a series of communications that are based on the fact that yes, I do own land.

That's exactly right. That's what these custom fields really do. As you can imagine, what starts to happen then with all of these custom fields is we really start to build a nice profile of the organization. Even as we go forward from a more traditional marketing standpoint and and we say, hey, let's take a look at— if we stick on the builder front here— let's take a look at all the people in the system that currently own land, have financing in place, and are looking to build within the next 6 months. We want to send a special campaign of some sort out to them in a 3-series email kind of deal. We have the ability to do that now because we're capturing and learning that information through the process.

The thing you're gonna love is whether you use our company or get into automation is if you have the right mindset to know that you have to eat this elephant one bite at a time, You start getting very creative on how to nurture based off of behavior. So if somebody does have land, for example, and we— the first step is we learn that from you guys. So we put that into the beginning of the engagement, and then we start talking, well, if they do have land, what do you want to say to them? If they come back to your site and they hit floor plans, your page that goes over floor plans, they moved up the ladder a little bit on, on where they are in the sales cycle. So what do you want to say to them? So then we start building out communications based off of— they're at the next level.

And that's really all very visually seen here in what we call the life of the lead. So every contact, and we saw this in the slide deck, starts to build a profile in terms of their engagement with the organization. So in this case, this particular gentleman Charles visited this customer site back on the 7th of June. We can see all the activity that Charles had on that site during his initial visit, which is pretty cool. We can see he filled out a form while he was there. We can see he got the follow-up email, clicked on a link within that email, and again, every interaction he's had with our organization since then. And as Joe mentioned, you know, he comes back to the site, we might put a rule in place that says since his initial visit, if he visits the site 4 times or Whatever the case is, send him a certain email. If he visits this particular page on the site, send him a certain email or notify a salesperson accordingly because he watched a video that we know is a very good buying sign. If they take the time to watch that particular video or download that particular white paper, we think that's a pretty good buying signal, so let's notify the appropriate internal party of that action.

Or behind the curtain, if that's important to you, you score that so you also note the fact that they have done something. So when you are talking to that person, their score is higher based off of what you told us was important about their behavior.

And that brings us to the next tab, which is lead scoring. So we do all of this automatically as well. All the rule sets associated with the lead scoring side of things are 100% customized to the business. So there are basic components that remain the same, but the point scale, if you will, and what we're scoring is based on your business and what you, again, as Joe said, tell us is important So some of it is pretty straightforward in terms of how much information do we know about them. But then we look at things like how engaged are they with our organization. Are they opening our emails? Are they visiting our website? Are they filling out forms? Are they clicking on links within the emails that we are sending them? Are they visiting certain pages on our site? All of that, we can give them points for that. We can see their lead score go up. And then this is probably one of the coolest things, we call it fit. This is really based on the individual business type. Again, this is a builder, so do you own land? Do you have financing in place? Have you visited my facility? Have you toured my model home? All steps of the sales process and all receive different points associated with reaching those milestones in the sales process.

I'll tell you, this stuff really works. When I go and walk into our sales room I can tell our salespeople that they're sitting in front of the screen and when they're talking to somebody, they have confidence because they know where that person is and how they are related to within our company. And they know that they have seen this, so therefore they're picking up from where their behavior has last left off and intelligently engaged with that person. And these prospects in many, many cases are welcoming The fact that they don't have to go backtrack, or you're not speaking at them, you're speaking with them.

The thing that that whole lead scoring and the points and the fit kind of reinforce is it has effectively digitized what exists already in human nature from a sales perspective. If you are somebody that sells custom homes, you're going through that process in your mind already, and depending on how busy you are or if you've got other distractions You may forget to ask some of those questions, but in your mind, in order for you to determine if you're a home builder and if you've got 2 people that you're talking to and you want to figure out which one of those is a qualified prospect or somebody that really is interested in buying a home versus just kicking the tires, that's the thought process that you're going to go through as a home builder. And I think that's where you go back when we talked earlier about the discussion and understanding the personality of the organization as well as what's the thought process That's there. Talking to some of the business people that are doing sales and saying, what is it that exists in your qualification process? Then let us figure out a way to digitize it. The great part is down the road if you realize, oh, we forgot to ask whether or not they've had an inspection done or has the land been perked or some other factor that's starting to become a hot button, you just sneak that into the process and then next time somebody enters the the funnel, it takes that into consideration and you don't miss a beat. So I oftentimes try to convey when people hear digital stuff that don't focus so much on the digital and the technology, but this is a process that exists just in life and it's being translated into an automated process that works really, really slick.

Eric, again, spot on. I mean, it kind of goes back to some of those things on that initial slide that we were talking about and automating some of those processes, making perhaps the internal operations even more efficient than what they already might be. Because again, Yeah. like you pointed out, 9 out of 10 customers kind of go through the same, you know, 10 steps to become a customer. So let's identify those, let's make sure we've got a streamlined approach for those, and we know as a business owner We know what we want to be saying to those customers at each step of that sale, so let's have some dialogue with them accordingly. It's that easy. I mean, that's really what it comes down to. Certainly there are a million paths you can take off of that, but simplicity, that's really what it's all about.

Well, it's the same discussion I have with a lot of my banker friends in regards to social media. You know, I do a lot of work with community banks, and what have they been really good at for years and years and years? Building relationships with their customers and being part of the community, giving back. All social media is is a digitized way of building relationships, being helpful, conveying what you're doing in the community. We're just doing it electronically through the computer instead of in person at Rotary or, you know, the other ways that we did it before the internet. So we're just using technology to do the tools that have made us successful in the years gone by.

Again, that's spot on. To do this electronically, obviously we need a bunch of emails and communications and things to go out to these folks to kind of do all the things that we've been talking about. Again, we mentioned that's kind of what our team is all about here. We help make sure all those emails get put into place and we build you buckets of content based on each flow. Here's the cool thing. You talked about building relationships. That's what we see working the best with this email communication and this marketing automation. Yeah, like this company does, they still send out a monthly email newsletter that's from the company, and you can see that here in terms of how that looks. It's got the basic email newsletter kind of feel to it. But if you look at each of these buckets, these are all personal one-on-one kind of dialogue messages that aren't necessarily coming from the big company. They're coming from a person within that company. They're emails that are drafted from the desk of That look like Mickey's taking the time to send Eric a personal email based on what Eric has told me that he's interested in, and I'm here to help you through that process. It becomes a very personal one-on-one experience as a result of that. Thus, what we find our customers are experiencing is people aren't just receiving these emails and reading them and clicking on them, they're actually responding to them. They're responding to them because Mickey the sales guy sent the email, not MXTR, the company. It's a whole different dynamic in terms of communicating with the customers.

And obviously, that's being logged.

That's right. Everything is being logged. But you look here, each of these buckets— and we preach this a lot, we talk about buckets of communication— but each of these buckets have their own unique goal associated with them. And so this particular goal is about, in this case, their Connecticut office and and stepping somebody interested in building a home in that particular market through the sales process, all geared towards trying to get them to talk to a salesperson. But you can see that some of these emails, there's not a whole heck of a lot to them. This is email 3 in a 6-step process, and it's just as easy as saying, you know, be personalized, hey Eric, here's some info I thought you might find useful in terms of financing your modular project. You know, click here for some more details and 8 steps. Look forward to talking soon. Simple, not over the top, certainly not intrusive. It's helpful and guess what we get to do? When they click on that link and they go visit that particular page and they download the information on financing, we get to learn a little bit more information about where they're at in the sales process. Right.

I think it's good to show an example of this email because I think a lot of times when people think of email marketing, it's the templated newsletter with the big image banner across the top and advertisements. That may be what you're going to send out on a monthly Yep. But as part of this lead nurturing process, that can very much make somebody feel like they're a number, just cattle in the corral basically. This makes it look like you said. Just like Heather went in, created an email specifically to Eric and boom, she's sending me a note. I don't even know that that's being automated by a system. It's helping Heather grow her business but it's allowing her to focus on other stuff while taking care of that whole development process. I've not seen that email yet before so it's good to see that.

It's pretty cool. What starts to happen over time, all these tasks and workflows start to get put in place, all these rule sets start to get put in place and all those buckets of content get built and emails start getting sent. This particular customer, again they've been with us a while, almost a year now. They've got 766 emails that are scheduled to go out to their Individual customers, not email blasts, not newsletters, but individual one-on-one communications that are scheduled to go out at all times of the day and night.

From 12 different salespeople, correct?

All from different salespeople, all the different people all within their market area, all geared towards stepping people through the sales process. And guess what? Nobody in their organization has to do anything to make that happen. It happens automatically.

And it took us— we were talking with this company for over a year to help build this out so it is transparent and so it is not intrusive and that it works. So, you know, first month we didn't send out 766 elements.

Of course not.

It took us time to build this out and that's what our team is all about and that's what any marketing automation system does forever.

Right, and to this end, I mean, it is frankly From a marketing standpoint, it's amazing, frankly. There's no other way to describe this because we have seen firsthand for this customer in particular that their prospects will receive an email, and it seems to happen on the weekend for this guy more than anything.

Yeah.

They'll get them on a Sunday morning. It'll be an email from the salesperson like Heather that you just saw up there on the screen. Somebody will respond to that email Sunday morning while they're sipping their coffee on their back deck and say, hey Heather, I really enjoyed what you've been sending me lately. Why don't you give me a call on Monday and we'll talk about trying to move this thing forward. They're selling houses as a result of that. The sales guys are getting warm leads. Heather's really happy because she didn't have to work too hard to warm that lead up and they're making sales off of it. This nurturing idea, this one-to-one marketing, it definitely works. Show you a little bit in terms of this. This is behind really in-the-weeds stuff but this is what our team does. To make all that content go out and to make things happen, we have to build what we call task Another way to look at that is if-then statements. If something happens, then do something else. If we take a look at this, you would say to us, hey, I've got this form on my website. When somebody fills it out, I want all these different things to happen. We build the rules. This is a pretty long one. When all these different forms are filled out in different markets that they do business in, then we're going to notify these different people. We're going to send an automatic reply out. They're going to get a week later, 3 weeks later, a month and 2 weeks later. All these kind of things automatically kick into gear. Again, we build that, we set it all up, that's kind of behind-the-scenes heavy lifting stuff, but that's the backbone of this system is all the rules that go into place to make everything happen.

Takes a lot of listening.

Yeah.

And I'm an old guy, I don't listen too good. That's why we got a great team that we use.

If I said turn up your hearing aid, would that be inappropriate?

What?

Exactly.

He's quick in his old age. Alright.

Yeah, he might be tough but he's quick.

That's right, that's right.

Again I say what?

What? Alright, so a couple other things to show you in the system here because I know we're approaching the top of the hour. I want to leave time for a couple of questions if they're out there, Eric. So we mentioned the fact that there's a CRM component to this system. And the ability to track these leads that we're generating through paid search or whatever it might be all the way through to the sale. So we will customize a sales pipeline for you. Again, all these stages at the top are 100% customized based on the organization, allowing the sales team then to track their opportunities through the various stages of the process. You can kind of drag and drop them as they go along. Like most systems, you can go in and Add notes into them, tasks, all those kind of things to really see what's going on with your organization. The nice thing, as you can imagine, like most CRM systems have, they have a pretty robust reporting engine then to really allow you to see what kind of activity you have at each stage of the pipeline. There's a fairly robust reporting engine off of this that you can look at everything from activity to actual sales dollars to see what's going on. Other cool thing that we want to show you here is something called Visitor ID. What Visitor ID is, is it's an opportunity to learn who's coming to your website. We've seen through the system already that if our existing contacts are coming back to the site, we're tracking them and we're seeing what they're doing. Visitor ID here will notice your existing customers by these little green boxes on the left-hand side, you can see your existing customers coming back to the site. You can see, you know, this guy visited from an email. You can see the total number of pages he viewed during that site, and so on. But sometimes we get people coming to our site, no matter how good of marketers we might be and how compelling the landing page content is, they didn't convert. They didn't fill out the form. Okay, well, we still have an opportunity to learn information about them. We call that anonymous Tracking, anonymous visitor ID. So all these folks as we go down the side here that have visited our site that don't have the green next to them are anonymous. So here we know this Southern Light Company visited this particular organization's website. We see down below the various pages that they looked at during their visit. Now we don't know who from that organization visited, but we know somebody was there. And we actually have the ability to click this Get Contacts button, and based on the profile of who we say we like to talk to, At organizations, it will pull in contacts from that particular company that then we can say, okay, I want to click on the tech support guy, convert him into a lead, add him into my system, and he becomes a prospect for us to start going after. My sales team loves this because oftentimes, as I'm sure probably happens in your organization, the sales guy is working hard to get company X, Y, or Z to call him back. He's called them a couple times, he might even stop by and knock on the door. He's to the point where he says, man, I can't get anybody to call me back. And all of a sudden he sees them show up on his visitor ID one morning and he says, I'll be darned, well at least they're paying attention to me.

I'll give you an example. Not even 2 hours ago, we have a very large medical group here in central Pennsylvania, Geisinger Medical, and they're very stoked on this and we're very close to starting the first campaign with them. I walked into the salesman's office this working that account. He's smiling ear to ear and he goes— excuse me because I'm old, I forgot the lady's name.

Phyllis.

Phyllis. He said, Phyllis from Geisinger was just at this site, he was just notified because he wanted to know. He's all smiling because he has the final proposal out to her and we're about ready to pull the trigger on it. That gives you the example of the kind of engagement and power that's at your fingertips to truly understand the relationship of the prospect/customer with your company.

You take that same technology that exists in LinkedIn. I think there's a lot of people that are listening either live or maybe watching the recording. In your LinkedIn profile, even if you're using the free version, there's a certain level of intelligence that you get as to who stopped by and looked at your LinkedIn profile. And sometimes you may just see that it's somebody from XYZ company because you don't have access to that. But other times it will tell you, hey, Joe Morrow just stopped by your LinkedIn profile.

Right.

And so we talk a lot about from a social selling perspective, making sure that particularly if you're in sales or customer contact, you want to be paying attention to that if you're using LinkedIn so that you get an idea of who's looking at you as an individual This is that same kind of LinkedIn function only from a corporate perspective because now you know who's stopping by your organization and your website, tying it in that way. So that's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's definitely— I always look at it as a little icing on the cake. I mean, all this stuff is great and then oh my goodness, I get a little bit more. I think that's a pretty cool feature. And by the way, that visitor ID is part of that daily report that Joe referenced during the The slide part of this deal. That comes out every morning. So for me, that's the first thing I get. I go downstairs, I look at my phone, and there's my report that says, here's all the people that were at your site yesterday, including the anonymous ones. And that's a pretty neat email to get every morning.

So let's say I'm somebody that— oh, hypothetically speaking, let's say I work for WSI. And I stop by the website, and I check things out. You guys see that somebody from WSI is there, but you don't really know who I am. And then I come back a couple more times, you still don't know who it is, because there's a question in the chat queue that I think is alluding to this. Let's say 3 weeks go by and I finally decide that I want to download one of your white papers, or I subscribe to your email, and now the system knows who I am. Will it go back and say, well, you know what, it looks like You've been visiting us for the last 3 weeks. Now I know who you are. I'm going to attribute your name to all those visits. So now I can see where you came from and what pages you looked at, because you've now identified yourself, and I can go back and track that activity. Does it go backwards?

It does go backwards. Certainly there's some caveats to that, meaning assuming you've been searching us and visiting us from the same device over that period of time and those kind of things.

Sure, sure, sure.

But yes, it does go backwards. So if you visit it every day while you're at work surfing the web, you know, like you do, Eric, then yes, we're going to get all that information on you. Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that's great.

It's a great time to be alive if you're a marketer.

Amen.

Well, the thing that this does— and when I did marketing for the bank back in the, you know, late '90s, early 2000s, before I even thought of this concept of digital marketing or lead gen is, you know, it's a lot of gut. You know, you're trusting your gut, you think that it works, and for us, you know, we had to put a special in the newspaper to try to elicit some sort of a response, but what that meant was, you know, you're quote-unquote giving away a toaster for the privilege of knowing that your ad worked. And in this instance, now with this type of platform in place, this technology, It gives you the ability to know what's working so you can determine, you know, am I getting anybody that's even paying attention to my newspaper ads, or does anybody even hear my radio? Are they coming through? Are they using it? And it allows you to more effectively manage your marketing budget. And in some ways, you know, there's a cost obviously to this, and that's one question that's come up a couple of times, so we want to maybe finish with that. But in some ways, using a platform like this, once you get 5 or 6 months into it, you actually, even with the cost of the system, might be able to reduce the overall expenses because you're spending your money more efficiently in areas that's producing results instead of just holding the shotgun in the air, blasting the trigger, hoping that you hit a bird that might be flying by.

There's amazing stats out there that's saying how much higher conversions there are with how much less of an investment in actual front-end advertising.

Yeah, yeah. So the million-dollar question, and I know it's not a million dollars, but we'll kind of wrap it up here and then kind of paint the picture for what's next. So from a cost perspective, I know you and I have talked about this and we went over it a little bit. It's pretty safe to say that for right around $1,000 a month, we can put together a program that would be very tailored for most businesses, account for about 5,000 email addresses in the platform, you know, some minimal content generation, and then be open to using other content. So I mean, it's not like a $5,000 a month commitment is required for something like this, and I think that's important that people know that it's a manageable amount. If we go back to that last comment regarding use your budget more effectively, over time this could actually be something you can use to reduce your overall budget even though you're spending a grand a month in this platform. I know that's come in a couple of times. I wanted to make sure I got that number out there for folks just to give a heads up on.

Absolutely. Understand that the basic pricing model Eric, again, I think you picked a good price point to talk about. That's a safe number to budget. We make it very easy from a budgeting standpoint because our system is based on contacts and the number of contacts that you have in the system. We don't nickel and dime you for how many sends you do during the time period.

Unlimited.

Unlimited sends. All those things, it's going to be a flat monthly rate that you can count on from a budgeting standpoint. Should you go from one contact level to another, certainly your rate goes up, but that's always given a 30-day— hey, you've reached the next level of contacts before your rate goes up. And certainly if you're putting more contacts in the system, that means you're probably generating more business, which is a good thing.

It's a great thing, and you get our team, you get a full service, you get your own management of the console. And if you guys have not shopped around, if you take a look at some of the other consoles or the other softwares that are out there, which are do it yourself. We're probably around 60% of their pricing and we do all the management.

Yep.

It is a very attractive system and we do that because we are really, really learning quickly in every different vertical. We understand the automation side of this and we have really learned how to quickly understand and implement this for our clients.

Yeah, so cool. Well, we've trickled past the top of the hour. My apologies on that. I wasn't looking at the clock as closely as I should have been. I know we had a couple of questions that came in that I wanted to make sure we covered. Follow-up, if you are interested in chatting more detail, getting a closer look at your particular organization, drop me an email. I think a majority of the folks that are attending today came through some sort of an Eric Cook or Free Webinar Wednesdays connection. Hopefully you know how to find me, eric@poweredbywsi.com. There will be a follow-up email sent to everybody that registered, so even those that weren't able to sit in live will get an email. There'll be some instructions on that as well that'll give you an opportunity to reach back and certainly talk about where this could go for your business and really just do a high-level brainstorm is probably the next step if you'd like to talk about it, and then we could figure out budgets and all that other jazz. So I think that kind of covers it. We're probably wrapped unless there's any closing thoughts or comments that you guys would like to offer before we go ahead and close the show for today.

I just want to thank you again, Eric, for having us as part of your webinar series. We really appreciate it. Certainly look forward to working Working with you and some of the folks on this call. Again, just really can't say thank you enough.

Yeah, ditto. Thank you, everybody. Much appreciated.

Good. Well, like you said, it's an exciting time to be a marketer, and I love cool tools and gadgets, but I also like them when they make good business sense. And I think in this instance, you know, it's a pretty nice one-two punch. So thanks for everybody that stuck in there and spent an extra 6 minutes with us. We'll get the recording out. Made available, and just keep your eye on your inbox for a message here coming once that's available, and we'll provide you with some instructions for some suggested next steps. So in the meantime, feel free to make sure that you're subscribed to freewebinarwednesdays.com, and also those of you that are in the community banking space, be sure to check out my banker education series monthly webinars powered by wsi.com/bankers. We feature monthly webinars specifically tailored for the banking and financial services sector, and we've got another episode coming up next Friday at 3 PM Eastern time. So hopefully we'll see you online a variety of different ways, but thanks, Mickey and Joe, for your time, and we'll go ahead and close this up, and I'm sure we'll be talking again soon. Take care, everybody. Have a great week.

Thank you.