Working Smarter, Not Harder Using Marketing Automation

Well, greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, July 29th, 2015 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, and I'm with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations in helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI and all the cool stuff we do at www.poweredbywsi.com. Unfortunately, my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday co-founder and partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins, is unable to join us today, but I want to make sure I mention him in absentia. If you are a community banker or anybody that's involved in the financial services industry, Jeff serves that market very well, and his company is called Community Bank Consulting, and you can learn more about him and his business over at communitybankconsulting.com. Today's show I am pretty excited about because the 2 gentlemen that are actually joining me as guests, I've not had an opportunity to chat with for some time, and it's good to reconnect. And we'll kind of go into that in a little bit more detail. There's a little teaser for you before I formally get them introduced. But a couple of housekeeping items, and then we'll get this thing kicked off. Just as a reminder, today's show and all shows are being recorded, and you will be able to have access to the Recording at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So as we go through this information, if there's something you want to go back and revisit, feel free to do so. Share it with friends and colleagues, and certainly help spread the word about Free Webinar Wednesdays and today's topic. We do also appreciate and very much look forward to comments and questions and feedback from the live audience. Of course, if you're listening to this on a recording, it's going to be kind of hard to do. But if you're listening to us live, Or watching us live, feel free to use the chat function and type information in there. And during the presentation, I'll keep an eye on that, and when there's a break in the discussion, I'll ask it for you. And then lastly, I just want to make sure, because we're doing something a little bit different, this is going to be one of a 2-part series actually, and we're going to talk at a really high level about the concept of marketing automation. And if you don't know what that means, you've come to the right spot because We're going to learn you quite a bit. But at the end of today's session, we've actually got a different URL for a different registration for a different webinar that we're going to do with the guys from MXTR Automation. And that's going to give us an opportunity to kind of do a much more deeper dive product demo. So we always try to keep Free Webinar Wednesdays really focused on educating and informing and kind of bringing you into the know. But The folks that I've talked to about this service, one of their very next questions is once the light bulb goes off and they get what marketing automation and lead nurturing is, the next question is, well, how do I learn more? How can it work specifically in my business? And so Miki and Joe have been gracious to join me for another webinar in August. We'll have a link that we'll show at the end that you'll be able to go ahead and click on and that will take you to a separate registration page For another webinar we're doing on August 12th. So with those 3 little items of housekeeping out of the way, I'm gonna go ahead and work my GoToWebinar magic, and I'm going to send the presentation controls over to Mickey. But I wanted to, while he's getting his screen ready to go, formally welcome Joe Morrow and Mickey Losey, the co-founders of MXTR Automation. to join us today, and, and we're going to talk about the concept of marketing automation or lead nurturing. And back in the day, kind of when I started doing web development back in the mid-'90s, the concept of marketing automation and doing something automatically on a website was about as sophisticated as having an autoresponder on a Contact Us form that shot back a note that maybe even used your first name that said, Dear Eric, Thank you for contacting us. Somebody will be in touch with you very shortly. And it incorporated a name. It was a personalized message. It automatically triggered as an event based off of an activity that somebody took on the website. And as we're going to see today, and I'll warn you, it may seem a little Big Brother, but the technology is there to do it. The technology today that kind of manages marketing automation is really a phenomenal service. And when used for good in the hands of the good people, not used for evil, it can be a very significant player in your online and your digital strategy. So you are being very relevant, providing very customized information. We all know people have got a tremendous amount of choice and option when it comes online. So the more relevant you can be, the more personalized you can be, The more to the point and get them what they want as quickly as possible, the more success you're going to have. So I hope I didn't steal too much of your thunder, guys, but Mickey and Joe, thank you so much for being my guests here on Free Webinar Wednesdays. The show is yours.

Alright, Eric, thank you very much. This is Mickey Losey speaking. I'm here with my partner Joe Morrow.

Hello everybody.

Our pleasure to get the opportunity to speak to the group today. Yeah, our goal is to kind of talk, as the slide says, Marketing Automation 101. There's a lot to marketing automation. We're going to kind of keep it high level today. We'll go over concepts with you, really what it's about, how it works. We'll even give you a sneak peek into the technology that kind of drives the whole thing. But again, meant to be really a high-level look at what marketing automation is all about. And Eric, you know, really kind of hit the nail on the proverbial head as he was doing his intro there. And, you know, marketing automation in its simplest terms is about the customer, right? It's all about the people that want to do business with you. Times have changed. You know, back in the day, you know, as we all know, business has changed, marketing has changed. Back in the day as a marketer, we used to go, you know, to the center of town and take kind of a mass marketing approach to things and be able to say, look at us, we're great, we're the big company, we're the great company, trust what we're saying and come do business with us. And we just expected people to flock to our companies and do business with us.

Right.

Well, obviously we know now times are different. Heck, we're all different, right? We shop differently, we do things differently. It's all about the customer today, and thus marketing automation really puts the customer at the center of everything that we do, from what we're learning about them, from behaviors, to how they're interacting with our organization. It's all based around the customer and then the lifecycle of them doing business with us.

And I think it's important to note at this point It has evolved very nicely over the last 2 years, and Eric made a very good point when he was talking about it not being Big Brother these days, because properly managed, the automation and the touching, if you will, of each and every customer, if done properly, is just getting them information that they want, when they want it, and how they want it. The beauty of it is having teams that can recognize how to make that happen, so it's a very rewarding experience for the consumer. And that's the magic of the new automation. It's like a digital hug. I kind of call it like that, but it just makes sense. So I want to make sure that I reemphasize what Eric was talking about, that it no longer is in the hands of the technology guys. Now the technology supports good marketing and sales concepts that essentially are there to embellish the relationship, but gives you the capabilities of not overwhelming you as the business owner that have to constantly figure out what customer is doing what, where, and how. How do I talk to them at the right moment? You know, the automation just supports just smart contact and behavioral targeting and, and just, if you will, building relationships very easily. And that's what automation these days is all about.

Absolutely. And so, you know, the slide is up on the screen there now. Automation helps get your buyers where they're going. I mean, that's the beauty. You know, we talk about technology and leveraging technology to help our customers stepping through the buying process. We know that regardless of whatever business that you're in If you have a web presence and people are visiting your website, every visitor to that site is coming in at a different stage of the buying process wanting different information. In the buying process, some of them may come today or 5 people may come today, and each of those 5 people that visit for the first time are all at different steps of the cycle. Some of them are ready to buy immediately. They're ready to make their buying decision and they need to be served information that's going to allow them to do that. Others are are just kind of interested, they're checking things out, they don't know exactly where they're at in the process, and others need to be a little more engaged, need to get more information and educated a bit to be able to step them through the sales process. So an automation system, an automation program done right, allows us to do that with your consumers, is to understand the customers, understand where they're at in the buying cycle, and help guide and direct them through the steps of the sale. By doing that, even though we're setting up the rules in the backend, the customer is actually in charge of how they step through the process. That's what makes this so great. As the customer interacts more with us or with your business, more information is fed up to them and they can step themselves through that sales process or through that buying process at their own rate and at their own pace. Another big benefit of marketing automation, it's going to help you organize your marketing and again really give the audience the content they need. It kind of goes back to not only where they're at in the buying process, but making sure they're getting information that's relevant to them. So if we use that example of 5 people coming to your site today, each one of them is not only at a different step of the buying process, but they all want different amounts of information. Joe and I could both visit a sporting goods shop today for the sake of discussion and both have an interest in buying a new set of golf clubs. But I might be interested in brand X, Joe might be interested in brand Y. Joe might be interested in a whole bunch of other things that go along with that set of clubs. So we're gonna make sure that we send that information to Joe on Titleist clubs, where I might want information on Callaway clubs for the sake of discussion.

I've seen you hit the ball, maybe a set of girls' clubs would be nice. Women's, sorry.

I have the pink bag.

Okay, there you go.

And in the same way, there's other ways to segment that information as well, right? It's not just all product-oriented, it's other business rule sets that you might have as an organization. That allow you to learn about your customer, segment them out properly within the system, and then feed them the right information that they're asking you for. They're clicking on things, they're doing things saying, hey, send me more information on this, and automation allows us to feed that up without anybody in your organization needing to take the time to send those messages out. Pre-programmed, predetermined messages ready to go. And so before they're ready to buy, you can act on the fly with a little nurturing. To me, this is one of the big benefits of marketing automation. In fact, a lot of times you'll hear the terms used interchangeably— lead nurturing program, marketing automation system— because so much of automation is about nurturing the prospect, nurturing the lead from point A to point B. Back to the example of somebody visiting your website, and obviously one of the goals we have is the WebZip site visitors gets to the end of the line and actually purchases from us. But there's a couple steps of the sale probably in between there that might need some nurturing to get them through the 5 steps that typically lead towards a sale. So each one of those steps can have their own little nurturing program set up to help the customer feel good about the organization that they're doing business with, give them a little more education and knowledge on the choice that they're about to make, so that through the process they're learning about our organization, we're learning about them as a customer, And hopefully we're making it easier for them to make their buying decisions.

Through automation, I've heard Mick talk to a lot of businesses on this, and I think one of the points that you have driven home, that I've heard you do this many times, is if you had the ability to talk to that customer all the time, if they were walking around your store and they had questions or they had interests, okay, if they were just in that store and you happened to be right behind them without bugging them They had a question, you had an answer. That's what automation will do. It basically allows you to do that, and the trick is to make sure that you're not intrusive, but just getting them that information when they're ready, and that's the trick of automation.

That's exactly right, John. I mean, a great point. I mean, because as marketing executives, business owners, we have a pretty good grasp on the typical sales cycle, the typical steps of the sale. And as Joe said, if we had the opportunity to sit across the table from or hold the hand of every customer that visited our website, we would probably increase our close ratio pretty dramatically as a result of that. And essentially, that's what we can do, right? We can give you the opportunity to put dialogue into an automation platform that allows you to feed that information out to your customers Information you know helps step them through the sales process, but feed it out to them at pace when they want it, and that's the real beauty and strength of this organization.

And I think it's important to note some of the things that have evolved over the last 24 months is Mick refers to people coming to the website and things like that. The new platforms that are out there are expanding out and they're allowing the salespeople To actually, you know, you might have a dialogue by phone, you might have a dialogue in person that also allows you to put that inside the automation system. So now you've leaped from online to brick and mortar also. So all these great things are available out there. So it's, you know, again, the purpose of today is to kind of give you a 30,000-foot view just so everybody starts thinking about this kind of thing. And I want to make sure that everybody understands that it has bridged the line of not just digital, it can be personal, one-on-one too. So these things, once they are noted and put into the system, now it has become a full encompassing system. And that, quite frankly, from a marketing standpoint and sales point, and that's what Mick and I have been for decades, is marketing and sales. We've seen so much benefit to this kind of technology and interaction because it isn't just— it's like a business, a complete business system.

Alright, so we're going to circle back now, kind of go back to our initial slide where we started this whole thing, right? It's about the customer. The whole process, the whole kit and caboodle is about the customer, as everything is that we do in business these days, right? It's about the customer, and we've got to understand the product and services, right? Here's just a little overview as far as slide deck goes in terms of what this thing will actually be. So you can kind of see the lifecycle, right? This is what we pride ourselves on as an organization because, you know, we just don't bring the technology to the table, we really bring a full-service approach to what we do. So we work with businesses every day on making sure that we understand their business and that we help to really clearly define the customer's lifecycle. Because if we understand that, then we can develop these programs that we're talking about. We can develop programs to attract the leads, get them into the system. We have to understand how to nurture them through that process, and the only way you can do that is if you understand the lifecycle of the customer. You have to understand, you have to put yourself in the customer's shoes. You have to think about how they're thinking and what their next logical step might be, and that's how you develop these nurturing campaigns. Some of them are educational, some of them are just little blips of information that they might find helpful, but the whole idea in most cases is about nurturing them through a process so that they then convert to a sale. And the beauty of the system is it doesn't stop at the sale, right? So for those of us, most of us are in this kind of business where we appreciate repeat business from our customers, so we make that first sale, then put them into a whole other nurturing campaign, automation program if you will, geared towards the next sale, upselling them, cross-selling them, referral-based type stuff. Whatever it might be is how that works, and it's really all geared around your business and the rule set that applies to that business.

And I think it's important to note that this is a journey, it isn't really a destination. When it's integrated into a business, it's kind of like a crawl, walk, run. Don't feel like this might overwhelm you as a company, or how— where are you going to start? It really evolves. And, you know, some of our largest clients who have been with us for a while, how they started and where they are today, it's amazing. It really is. And it builds on their knowledge base being shared with us so we can help them nurture.

Yeah, it's a great point, Joe. In fact, I did an onboarding with a client this morning, and we discussed that same exact concept, which is, you know, the customer wants to get to, you know, the end zone today. It's his first day in the system. And we will tell customers that, you know, we got to start slow, because to try to tackle all of this all at once, it can really be a burden, not just, you know, as far as resources directly working on it, but the whole, the whole company may not be ready for that. So we like to start with an initiative. A segment, some part of the business to start that launch, and as Joe said, the cross-brand kind of things really works well and typically lends itself to a more successful program when it's implemented. So one of the things we talk a lot about with marketing automation, we've talked a lot about nurturing leads, stopping the leaky sales funnel, right? So again, anybody out there that spends money on marketing is familiar with the graphic that's on the screen here, and we've all been through it at some point in time in our life or another, right? We develop these marketing campaigns, these initiatives, we go out, we spend a lot of money on various advertising things to drive leads to our company. We pour all those leads on top of that funnel, a couple of them drip out the bottom, sales cherry picks a couple of the hottest leads off the top, they have meetings with these leads, they close a few sales, they pat each other on the back and they say, great job guys, we made some sales, wonderful. And then we start that cycle all over again next month or next quarter or whatever the case might be. And oftentimes what happens is those people there in the middle that are signified by that line leaking out of the funnel, they go by the wayside. And as a marketer, as a sales guy, that's absolutely crazy, right? We had a prospect that raised their hand and said, hey, I'm interested in your company, but it goes back to those earlier slides, he just may not be ready today, or she's got to do some more research on a particular topic. And that's what marketing automation is all about, is making sure that we remarket to those people in the beginning, that we give them every opportunity possible to do business with our organization. The system's strength is nurturing and ultimately stopping that leaky sales funnel. So a couple things that we do, again automated engagement, right, so just some examples for you. Engage customers at critical touchpoints, and we touched a little bit on this already. But it's email automation, and a couple ways that that can happen. You'll hear us talk about time-based triggers. In other words, we can say every 2 weeks we want to send an email out to a given customer and touch base with them. It could be behavioral-based triggers. In other words, we send an email to a customer and they click on a certain link within that email, then we want to send them another sort of message. Or the customer does something on a website and we want to send them a specific message that way. And again, that's the same kind of deal with event-based triggers. If they're doing something, a specific event takes place, we can send them another sort of dialogue.

Or it could be a birthday as an event. That's another description.

Absolutely, absolutely. So we look at that from a standpoint of— we call them if-thens. So if customer does this, then do that, and we'll show you an example of that on the next slide. The other thing that happens within the marketing automation platform is lead scoring and grading. Concept, which really helps easily identify your most active and engaged prospects within your organization. There's a scoring mechanism that as they interact and engage with your customers or with your business, everything from visiting your website to clicking on links, their score will rise. They rise to the top of your prospect list, and you can do all sorts of things off of that in terms of notifications internally and such with your sales team. Joe mentioned it's a journey and it is a good one. We'll give you an example, very high-level, simple automation flow here. On the right side of the screen is a diagram. You can follow along here. Let's just say for the sake of discussion that we're doing outbound email campaign. We're going to send some email correspondence out to a list. We're going to send them all to a given landing page. Off of that landing page, we've got a form that they're going to fill out. They complete the form. Here comes the automation that kicks in. Couple things happens. We're going to notify internally people within the organization. Could be the salesperson, could be the marketing director, whoever we want to notify. Same time, the auto-response form is going to go back out obviously thanking that individual for the completion of that form. Pretty simple stuff. That's pretty commonplace and happens on most websites today. Then after that, we've got 2 time-based emails that are scheduled as well. Already pre-programmed based on the fact that we know that they're interested in this offer. So after the initial form fill out, 4 weeks later we want to touch them with this and 8 weeks later we want to touch them with this message. Then off of either of those emails that go out, we have the ability to say, hey, if they come back and visit the website off of either of those emails 2 times, we're going to do a couple things. We're going to notify the salesman internally that says, hey, Mr. Sales Guy, your customer has been back to our website 2 times, why don't you give them a call? And at the same time, we can send out a behavioral email to the customer that says, hey, thanks for coming back to our site, glad you're checking us out, let us know if there's something we can do to help you out.

And the trigger that we have up there that says visit website 2 times, that could be 5 times, could be 1 time, could be It could be visit the pricing page or it could be a certain product page. Whatever we want or you want it to do, we can make it happen. Again, what it's doing is kind of like getting the digital footprint, if you will, of that person and kind of nurturing them along based off of just one interaction or one flow. This is an example of one customer's engagement sequence.

Yep.

Okay, and so think about what happens after you continually tweak and build these things. In a year's time, you have this beautiful machine working in the background that allows you to engage yourself and communicate better than you have ever done before.

And the thing that's most interesting here is we find in time that if this is set up properly and done right with the right messages and relevant content and information that your customers want to receive, They're thankful for this because they're not waiting for somebody to get back to them. They're not requesting info and hoping the salesman calls them back in a week or somebody remembers to send them a catalog in the mail. It happens. It just happens automatically. We have a number of clients on board, some of them in industries that are notoriously bad communicators, and if there's any construction guys on the phone, my apologies to you, but getting back to people sometimes is a challenge in that business because they're very busy from sunup to sundown. So we implement this program and communication is guaranteed and automated. And we've got such positive feedback from our construction partners because of that, because they're saying we've helped them achieve and overcome what was a real challenge for them.

And the same data that is available to— that drives the system also drives a good marketing automation company to saying and doing the right things. By monitoring open rates and unsubscribes, you're actually not only looking at the good behavior, but you're also looking to the reaction of what you might be— how you're communicating. So you just keep tweaking and making sure that you have a happy level, if you will, that you're not abusing this relationship that you've worked so hard to build.

Hey guys, this is Eric. I am back. Hopefully my audio connection is a little better. Can you hear me now?

We can hear you much better now, Eric.

Yay! I think some days technology just hates me.

That's all good for Eric.

You'd think, yeah, yeah, happy day. You'd think doing this after 6 years we'd get it figured out, but every once in a while. Anyway, we did have a question I think goes back a little bit, but I'm sure you guys will know what it's referring to. We've got a listener who's asking, what kind of data is used to trigger the automation and understand the life stage of the lifecycle That visitor is in. Thoughts on that?

Well, it could be a number of things. It could be based on things that they filled out. For example, we have one client that they— it's a builder, right? So they do everything they do based on where they're at in the sales process. Let's say that we've identified that they have land because they filled out a form that told us that they have land, and we've also learned through the process of inquiries and back and forth that they have financing in place. That puts them in a whole different funnel, a whole different set of information that goes out to them than somebody that doesn't have land and is very early on in the process. We create custom fields, custom questionnaires off of forms, opportunities to interact off of emails or other dialogue back, and that's kind of how we gain that behavioral type information, if you will.

Once again, very important, a lot of times very quickly the sales teams get involved. Once they're involved, they have different things that they can mark on the actual contact's information and say that they are this, they are that, they are this. Basically from that, we have the data that triggers a communication.

That's right. That's where we're going to be going next, which is the integration between sales and marketing. One of the best things about this tool in my opinion is that it's just not a marketing tool. It's really a business tool, and I don't know if it was Eric or Joe mentioned that at the beginning, but it's true, right? I mean, for so long in my professional career, marketing was on one side of the room and sales was on the other side of the room, and the two never really played real well together. This thing really ties them together very nicely because you'll see that sales starts to warm up real nicely to the marketing folks because they're handing off really good qualified leads to them.

And we'll show you in a little bit, now that you've raised that question, we can show you some of the trigger events If you will, that are custom. Every business is different.

So Eric, did I answer the question?

Yeah, I think so. We can come back to it later on and I'll ask for clarification whether or not we're talking about really their stage in the buying cycle or if we're looking more at their demographic, which could be done with third-party integration or if they provide an address where they live that has a typical Type of consumer that lives in a particular zip code that can be used to indicate potentially education level, income, those sorts of things. Let's go ahead and continue. We can get clarification on that. We can circle back around at the end if we need to.

Absolutely. Just to piggyback and close that out a little bit, what you just said is 100% right. All of those kind of things, it's data. As long as you're able to capture the data in the system, you can leverage that and set up rule sets around pretty much anything that you want. Yeah, zip codes, I've got customers that do exactly that. Based on county and state that they live in, certain things happen in the system. What happens without fail with us in our organization, guys, is we bring the customers in and we start with some relatively simple automation program. We get some things in place and somewhere through the process, without fail, the customers start to take— the table starts to flip a little bit and the clients start to say, hey guys, this is really cool, but can it do this? How do we do that? I want to do this. That's what makes this tool so cool is because there's really not much it can't do because we create custom fields, we've got data in the system, you can really leverage the data any way you want.

One other thought on that. Let's say you've got a mailing list that's tied back to your existing customer base and you know Eric Cook is married, has 2 dogs, lives in— what size my house is, what education. You know that about me. Through the email marketing process, if you wanted to then take that data and leverage it, you could send me an email through the system. I get a unique link that, you know, Eric Cook received. I click on that. I've identified based off of my email that I'm the one that's clicking on it. So now you don't need to rely on third-party data if you're able to bring that data as the business owner, because now you know Eric Cook responded to an email. Now you know what Eric Cook is doing because he's done an action that's unique to Eric Cook.

Eric, you're 100% right. In fact, the screen that we're looking at, or the slide that we're looking at here, is a screenshot out of the system. We'll jump into the platform here in a little bit so you can get a closer look at this. But this is what we call our life of the lead screen. It's a view out of the system. So what you're looking at here is a couple of leads down the left-hand side, which are names, all with their unique interests, right? Product A, B, C, and Service A. So we're sending them information about those respective things, right. We're not going to send them, you know, Louis at the top isn't going to get information that Timothy is interested in and vice versa. But then every, all those little dots off to the right indicate all the interaction points that those customers have had with our company from a digital standpoint. It's like a digital footprint, right. So every visit to the website, every page they visited on the website, every email they've opened, everything they've clicked on within emails, all logged and as you're stating, all registered so that then we can create triggers or do events or behavioral automation off of those events that they're doing. The beauty of this is it's going 24/7 behind the scenes. It's always working for you, always happening, always capturing data that you can then leverage as you move your customers through the And always improving.

Right.

So we touched on this a little bit already, we kind of jumped slides in terms of, so which is it, a sales or marketing tool? And again, I submit to you that it's really both. It's a business tool. The automation and the marketing and the creative and all that stuff, sure, it's something that's probably marketing-focused, but really it's marketing-focused geared towards driving sales. This platform really puts you in the position to know that every dollar I'm spending, how is that marketing dollar performing for me in terms of generating leads and activities, and then how many of those leads that we generated are actually converting into sales. That's the power of what you can get out of this platform. It's pretty all-inclusive in that regard, and again, it really crosses that bridge in terms of, or fades that line that's typically in the sand between sales and marketing teams. The reason for the integration is that the notifications and how we interact with the sales team is front and center. We talked about all the notifications that go when people fill out forms and people do this, but the notifications don't stop with that. We can notify the given salesperson that's assigned to the prospect anytime this prospect does Any kind of rule set we set up. For instance, internally, when our team is prospecting somebody, we like to know when that particular prospect has come back to the site, you know, a given period of time. In some cases it's 2 times, and our sales guy will get notified that, hey, prospect X has been back, pick up the phone and give them a buzz. It's a rule set, standard rule set. Some of them are as simple as, hey, you filled out a form, obviously that's pretty straightforward, you give them a buzz. And other times, I think as Joe mentioned earlier, Maybe he visits the pricing page on your website, or maybe he visits a— watches a video that we know is a really close step towards making a buying decision. We can notify internal people in terms of that so we can take the next steps. The notification side of this is again just another trigger that can be implemented based on the customer's actions, based on what they're doing and how they're interacting with your organization. At the end of it, what really starts to happen is your marketing really starts to become more effective. You're doing all this marketing already, you're spending all these dollars on marketing and advertising to generate leads. What this really does is help you take those leads, step them all the way through the sales process and hopefully convert some of that leads directly into sales and again really tie your organization together real nicely. So Eric, I think what I want to do, and I know time-wise we've got a lot to cover here, so I'm going to give you a sneak peek into the system just to give you a quick idea of some of the power that's behind here. We'll do a quick, real high-level tour of this, and as Eric mentioned, we'll do a follow-up webinar where we can get in deeper. But for those of you that are on the phone that are into analytics, there's more data in this system than you can probably imagine. Here's just an example of how you would be able to follow as an outbound email campaign and the cost associated with it, how many sales were driven off of each one. You can see everything from leads generated, opportunities that were generated off of it, sales that were won off of each one. All of that's there and at your fingertips for you to really see how it's performing. System links directly up to Google AdWords, so if you're doing paid search campaigns, you pull all that data in. You'll be able to pull in your Google Analytics information as it links up directly to that as well. So very high-level information, certainly not meant to replace the Google interfaces in any way, shape, or form, but it gives you some of the most reference data right at your fingertips. One of the cool things we talked about in the beginning, that this is, you know, the whole idea behind this is a customer-centric system. So you can go in and within here you're gonna have a record on each and every one of your customers at your fingertips. You can go in and click on any one of your customers and really start to learn some pretty cool information about them. It has a CRM component to it, so if you want to use it as such, you can make notes in here, schedule tasks, upload documents and such in there to attach to the record if you want to use it to that end. From a marketing standpoint, this is the life of the lead that we referenced in that slide earlier. Here at a glance, we can see everything that this particular gentleman has done with this company's website. We can see he visited way back on the 7th of June. We can see every page that he visited while he was at that particular site, how much time they spent on each page. We can see he filled out a form, in fact he did it twice, he liked the site so much. He got an autoresponder, clicked on a link within that, and we capture every bit of communication from that point on. Just not the automated stuff that goes out, but also correspondence that comes directly from the internal salesperson that's communicating with them. it's automated as well, which makes it really nice. So your sales guys, they can just send messages right from their smartphone or whatever email client they might be using, and that links up as well. And again, all of this is actionable, so we can, you know, based on their behavior and pages they're visiting and things they're doing, we can automate other, other things off of that.

Hey, Mickey.

Yes.

So let's use Charles as an example. We take a look at the timeline that you've shared there. We see that he stopped by initially and visited the website Yeah. And my suspicion, and you can confirm this, is that very first action that has the little globe, when he showed up, the website basically identified him as a unique user and a visitor, but maybe didn't know that his name was Charles. It just knew that somebody showed up to the website and had this path. And at some point down the road, that same individual returned and either filled a form out or clicked on an email or took some sort of an action that either he self-identified who he was Or he responded to some correspondence from the company that knew who he was and it connected the two together, and then it backfilled and said, well, all of the stuff that's been done so far, we didn't realize it, but all these activities that were— that started, um, were really Charles. Is that a correct statement?

That is a correct statement. That's— you hit the— again, the nail right on the head. Yeah, because I don't care what Joe says about you, Eric, you're a pretty smart guy.

At least he didn't accuse me of golfing with girls' golf clubs.

You'll play golf with me one day too, Eric, you'll find out.

Well, when I pull a wood out of my bag, it still is a wood. That tells you how old my clubs are. So I don't golf that often. I spend my time on a bicycle. But I'm just watching the questions come through, and there seems to be a pretty consistent, you know, do we have to wait for the visitor to take an action to identify themselves, or if we already know information? And again, I'll go back to my banking example. Banks know a boatload of information about their customers. You fill a mortgage loan application out, and there's a lot of information we have. At a basic level, I'm thinking all that you really need is just the person's name and email address for the system, but then all that other data can be fed back into the banking platform or used so that you know so-and-so is more ripe for mortgage promotional material versus maybe you've got somebody identified as a brand new parent, you know, husband and wife just had a baby, and maybe college funding is a little bit more appropriate for their message. And working that into the conversation as part of the nurturing experience.

That's 100% the idea and you're right. Sometimes we onboard clients and they have a robust database of information like you're describing and we make a determination on what bits and pieces of that do we want to pull into the system. Again, creating oftentimes custom fields in terms of what's important. For this customer, they like to know things like do you have land and is financing in place. Well, same kind of deal. You would say to us what custom fields need to be created, we do that, and then yes, you can leverage that data to send nurturing campaigns based on what you just described. Who has an auto loan that's going to expire in the next 12 months and we want to send a certain correspondence to them, or whatever the case might be.

99% of the clients we bring on have a great database that we import for them. Start working right from there. So yeah, you hit the ground running.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Well, I think the key component in that is being able to know how to manage your own data, because I know a lot of organizations— and again, banks, sometimes even though we have a lot of data, it's somewhat unusable or unreachable without a lot of effort. So having the ability to, I guess, first have the light bulb go off that you can use that data, and then figure out a way that you can effectively leverage it and categorize it so that we can then, you know, use it as a strategic component instead of just sitting in the vault or on the data center and really not taking it into consideration. I think those are all really powerful revelations.

Absolutely, Eric, and then not only leveraging it but learning from it, right. So now we're going to do an outbound campaign and now we're going to learn how do these people actually interact with what we think is a good next step. How many of them convert this way versus how many of them take a right turn or a left turn? There's a whole other rule set and things to be gained from that as well. Perfect.

I thought I knew it all. I'm learning stuff. Nowhere close, nowhere close.

I guess just a couple other things again because we could spend another hour just going through the system and I don't think we have that much time. I guess I want to show you a little bit of— for those that would be following this thing all the way through the sales process, there is a sales pipeline in here. If you plan to use this as a CRM tool, you're able to track those prospects that turn into real opportunities all the way through the sales process, if you will. Dragging and dropping those opportunities from one stage to another. An inordinate amount of reporting as you would expect from any CRM type of system in terms of how many deals you have at each stage of the pipeline and those kind of things. That's all in here and at your fingertips as well. From a B2B standpoint, this is a pretty cool feature as well. We reference B2B because there's privacy things that prohibit us from doing this on the consumer end. From a B2B standpoint, we call this visitor ID. So visitors that come back to your website, those here in the green are your returning people in your database already that have come back and we learn about them. But oftentimes what happens is you have people that come to your site that you don't know who they are. They're not in your current database. They're coming to your site trying to learn more about your organization. So we can see here in this case this Mid-South Building Supply came to this particular customer's website. I'm actually then able to go out. The system will ping against Dun Bradstreet's database, pull back relevant contacts for me to consider bringing in as a prospect for my sales guys to go after. Again, I look at this particular aspect of the system as kind of icing on the cake. Gives me a little more extra, something I didn't know before that I can go out of. I've got a couple clients that actually use this as part of their weekly sales meetings. They love to use this as a prospecting tool.

Now let's take away all this whiz-bang technology and say at the end of the day what we have just shown you, you've learned so much about your customers. And how they're interacting with your business before you even hit the send button. Look at all the stuff that's coming in that you now have at your fingertips for you to make decisions. And then now, you know, it could be as simple as that. Now you know all that info, now you can start talking to them.

That's the key. It all goes back to that first slide if you haven't kind of gauged that already. It all goes back to the customer. It's a customer-centric deal, learning about the customer, trying to do our best job of communicating with that customer. Alright, so again, we'll do a deeper dive into the system during our next visit because there's an awful lot out there to look at. We're going to kind of keep this thing moving along so we have some time for questions and answers. Boy, does it work? Yeah, it does. I mean, again, we can go and tell you firsthand some of our customers and the results that they're getting. But without a fare, some of the stats that you see up there on the screen are what you can expect and what customers using marketing automation are appreciating. More leads at a lower cost, which you would expect, right? You've got attribution, you can see what's working and what's not working. Conversion rates are up because we're sending relevant information to our customers, and our customers are appreciating increased sales as well. And I think it's frankly because we're nurturing those leads through the sales process and they're seeing more leads turn into actual revenue for them, which is pretty powerful. And I can give you an example of that. In fact, we were just in this particular customer's platform there when we were doing this the case study, but this is a customer of ours that is actually a manufacturer. They manufacture buildings in an offsite building and then deliver them to a job site and assemble them, also known as modular construction. And they've got about 12 internal salespeople. Their big challenge was, you know, as most companies often are faced, they didn't have access to critical sales and marketing numbers. Salespeople, as is typical, only taking the hot leads and following up on them. And they were certainly doing a blast-oriented marketing approach. So, you know, what we came in is we came in and we implemented the marketing automation platform and to the tune of building landing pages specific, you know, to each market and each segment of their business that they're utilizing. So for instance, if somebody's searching out building a home in Ocean County, New Jersey, well, when they visit that landing page, they're going to see Ocean County's premier home builder, you know, Archon, with a pretty picture of a house that looks like the houses in Ocean I mean, that's the kind of detailed deal we did there. Then we brought all those leads into the system and we implemented a nurturing campaign to help step them through the sales process. Does it work? Yeah, it worked. I mean, to the tune of almost $12 million in new business that this owner would tell you is directly a result of doing business with marketing automation. Now, this customer doesn't just sell single-family houses, he sells big multifamily projects as well. But within 120 days of using this system, this particular customer was sending out email correspondence from his sales guys to prospective customers, and customers were responding to those emails saying, hey, I like what you've been sending me, here's my plans, I'd like to talk to you about maybe building my house. And within 120 days, he signed his first deal off of the system. A $600,000 house was built. His sales guy had never picked up the phone, wasn't chasing this lead down, wasn't communicating with them because it wasn't a hot enough lead. It wasn't on that sales guy's radar screen, but yet we were able to nurture that prospect through the sales process and help this builder get that particular sale. It definitely works. Again, understanding your customers is the key to the program. Summary, automation is going to help. There's various aspects to automation, various goals that you're gonna have within your own organization in terms of rolling this out. This was just the tip of the iceberg today in terms of marketing automation. We could probably do— heck, Eric, if you give us a session every week, we could probably do a month or two worth of automation sessions for you. But hopefully this gave you some basic ideas, put some thoughts in your mind in terms of how you might be able to automate some of the things that you're doing and really leverage a platform such as this to be able to not just communicate with your customers but learn about your customers as well.

In summary, with Mick and I, we started this company— we've been around for a long time in marketing and sales, and when we both saw the effectiveness of this, we said this is where we want to be. This makes sense. This is our clients. We feel we can do a lot for our clients, and that's why we started it, founded the company, and We haven't looked back since. It's been awesome. And so at the end of the day, this is something we're very proud of, and we're excited to be involved in this industry. When I just say proud, we're proud to be in this industry because, you know, as marketers and salespeople, it's really fun to be working knowing that you can make a difference. And that the knowledge base that we have coupled to technology is very important people, and we really appreciate that.

That's a great, great point.

Yeah.

So Eric, questions? Anything we can answer for the group?

Well, there's one question, and then at the risk of being redundant, before my audio decided to go into the blender and nobody could hear what I was saying, I may restate my comment at the beginning. But one question, and I think this got addressed because it was asked prior to giving that example, But the effectiveness of the platform at managing typical lead generation activities like cold calling or email marketing, and then maybe a little bit more information with regards to integration with pay-per-click advertising.

Yeah, okay, so a couple things there. So hopefully I get, I get all of those as I go through it, but I'll start at the end because my memory is such I can only remember the last thing that you said. So pay-per-click. Certainly a perfect bolt-on to any paid search campaign. First of all, you saw earlier it integrates directly with Google AdWords, so if you're doing AdWords, your data is going to pull right in. You can see your ad groups and what's happening with your campaigns right within the platform. But maybe more importantly, you know, I tell this to all my clients that are doing paid search, you're spending money to generate these leads, why stop there? Why hand them off to your sales guys and hope something happens with them? Why not put them into a system that's geared towards nurturing them straight through to a sale? It is the 100% obvious bolt-on to that.

If the question is how does it enhance pay-per-click or anything, the bottom line is it enhances any marketing that you want to do on the front end. The way typical marketing automation drives you to a landing page and starts a relationship with any new leads. So it doesn't matter, whatever seems to be working. It could be a billboard that has a landing page on it, or it could be anything. No matter what your company is using that's effective, it could be bus signs, it could be anything. Our job is to make whatever you're doing to rattle the trees work better.

Whatever leads you're generating.

Well, and the other component that was asked as part of that question, because like you, I kind of have to work backwards. They talked about cold calling and email marketing for lead gen, and I think both of those really have been addressed. As I understand it, when you're using a marketing automation system, you know, I don't know how necessarily from a cold calling perspective, but certainly if you're blasting out an email and that's typically the lead gen that you've done, maybe you're using or you should be segmenting your lists more effectively. We go back to the banking example. These are people that we really are interested in getting a mortgage in front of versus these are the people that we think are the age range that may be more interested in college funding or something like that for children. You know, I think it certainly augments all of those activities because you can segment those people down and, you know, cold calling can quickly become a thing of the past because this kind of warms everything up for you.

You're 110% right. I mean, look, we do cold calling, we do emailing, we do all of that, and again, it goes back to the planning aspect of it and understanding what your goals are. What are you trying to do? What's the next step and all these things? You're looking right here at kind of our—

Very extensive.

Extensive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8-step little process we have that starts with a cold call. When our guys are making phone calls, there's a step of the sale here that they fall right into. If they made a couple phone calls and they get no response, they go into this funnel. You can see there's a series of 4 emails that's geared towards warming them up. If they get a warm lead, they fall into this funnel. If they get a lead that's kind of interested but need a little more love, they fall into that funnel. So yeah, that's the idea here. This should enhance some of the basic principles and things that people do and really help improve it or make it more efficient.

Yeah, why don't we— because I know we're getting close to the top of the hour— why don't we flip back, show that last slide that has the registration link? Because I know we wanted to show a sneak peek at the platform, but again, on August 12th Which is a Wednesday, so you can come to Free Webinar Wednesdays, and then just a little bit after, you can come back and, you know, we can dive into a little bit deeper. You can see there's a link there, bit.ly/WSI-MA for marketing automation. That's going to give us an opportunity, like Mickey said, we could spend hours in the platform and show how it works. The hope is today introduce the concept of marketing automation, and there's a variety of platforms out there, and I know MXTR is one that I'm personally very excited about, but, you know, there's a lot that we've probably heard of that have been doing this for a while. I think MXTR's got a pretty interesting fresh perspective on things that maybe others don't have, and you can kind of dig into some of that as well. But we would love to have you join us, and we've given it a couple weeks because we've got a couple other venues we're going to try to promote this. But we'll get them to really dive in deep and kick the tires and show us exactly how it works. So you now are armed and dangerous. You can bring specific questions. How would it do this, that, and the other? And it'll give us a really good chance to dig deep into it. So hop over to that link. It'll redirect you to a webinar signup page. And we'd love to see you on August 12th. Well, guys, we are at the top of the hour. I hope everybody gets a chance to sign up for the webinar and we can talk again on August 12th. But I want to again thank the both of you for spending the last 60 minutes with us at Free Webinar Wednesdays and sharing all the really great information. This has been really good.

Our pleasure. Thank you very much, Eric, and thanks everybody for joining us today.

Thank you.

Sounds good. Excellent. All right, well, that concludes this week's show. We'll get the recording up on Free Webinar Wednesdays And with the exception of the little audio burp on my part, enjoy the recording and share it with folks. And hopefully we'll see everybody on August 12th. So until then, have a great week, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.