The Simple Messaging System: What Every Business Owner and Entrepreneur Needs To Know About SMS with Amanda Dobson, Joe Polish, and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #349

On average right now, when I was running my Q4 numbers with some of my SMS clients, they're seeing between three to five times earnings per click when I'm sending a text message versus what they're seeing in their email.

I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and this is the I Love Marketing podcast.

Amanda Dobson is a skilled, experienced, successful marketing executive and a super smart digital marketer. She's helped some brands go from zero to top of their industries and specializes in SMS messaging, push notifications, chatbots, Facebook groups and many other channels. She also leads a rockstar team that creates strategies, breakthroughs and drive millions of dollars in sales on a monthly basis. She teaches people how to create new traffic channels and make a lot more money. And she can help you and your company too. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today. More information can be found@ilovemarketing.com subscribe if you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, go to geniusnetworkevents.com if you'd like to access the show, notes, resources or the exercise to help you take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com Amanda hey everybody, it's.

Dean Jackson and it's Jo Polish.

And we have also a very special guest with us who I think you're going to really. I think we'll see but I think you're going to really enjoy it and her name is Amanda Dobson. So Amanda, how the heck are you?

I'm amazing. You know, I'm so excited to be here with you guys.

This is going to be fun and this will be so great for our I love marketing listeners because you are a smart cookie. I think there's but we'll discuss later. You know how you give you give a market analogies with cookies. Dean, I actually want you to bring that in so let's just jump into it. I'm going to quickly introduce Amanda. Amanda Dobson is a skilled, experienced and successful marketing executive and founder of seven Level Profits. She is specialized in SMS messaging, which is text messaging. You can describe SMS and what that actually means as a sales channel as well as push notifications, messenger bots and Facebook groups. She is currently serving as publisher at Agora Financial. Amanda leads a rock star team and together they create strategies, breakthroughs and craft integrated campaigns that drive millions of dollars of sales on a monthly basis. So me and Amanda, like you mentioned, we've known each other for a while. Recently though, I've had an opportunity. We sat next to each Other at our buddy Brian Kurtz's Titans event in Miami. And we've had conversations here at my office with Amber and Alona, who are doing an event that you spoke at that blew everyone away. And I've not only learned from Amanda in a very short period of time that she is frickin smart. She knows a lot about an area that is totally underutilized, certainly not leveraged in by almost anyone at the level that it could be. And I would probably venture to say out of all the people that I've met that utilize text messaging and SMS marketing, I don't know, I mean, you may be the very best in the world in terms of training people in this particular area. And she recently put together even a whole program on it that has not even been released yet. And so she just this is great to have her on because I love marketing. Listeners are going to get a little bit of an education on an area that could definitely make you a lot of money and create a lot of impact. So let's get into it. Amanda, if someone was to ask you what do you do? How would you respond? What would you say to them?

My focus and what I've dedicated all of my time to recently is teaching people how to take something like an email list, which is something most of us have, and actually leverage that email list not just to create money, but to create new traffic channels. In my bio, when you mentioned integrated campaigns, what that means to me is using an email list to build out other communication channels like SMS lists or text message marketing list, Facebook messenger box Facebook groups, which most people aren't paying attention to but are huge assets to both your marketing marketing programs. Any of your products that you're selling. Facebook groups are a huge tool that no one's using. Push notification audiences. All these other traffic channels can be built by leveraging something as simple as an email list. That all kind of came about just from me having a terrible experience where I had all of my domains blacklisted and I couldn't send an email out if I tried. And with really strict revenue goals for my clients at the time, I had to come up with new channels and new ways to communicate with people. So what I strive for is just when I created seven level profits, the idea behind that was to take one traffic channel like an email list that you've already got and build out all of these other traffic channels as kind of an insurance policy for your business so that if one of your legs is ever knocked out, you've got all of these other Channels that you could be communicating with people on, and it creates a better user experience for them, and it does act as a protection for your business because I think we'll talk about this a little bit later, but email is becoming a channel that we can control less and less. So if we diversify and add all of these other traffic channels, which is my focus, you've got a lot more ways to actually insure yourself.

Sheila, why don't you tell that story that you've left a message to me and Amanda? I think it was yesterday or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw it. I posted up on my Facebook because I was in my newsfeed and I saw this ad with a picture declaring, email is dead. Text marketing is the new wave. See what's happening kind of thing. And then you click on the ad and you go to a landing page, and the first line on the landing page says, what's your business email? And then you got to put in your name and then your password to set up your account and stuff. It just seemed like how they can declare that email is dead. And then without a hint of irony, when you go to the landing page, the first thing they ask you for is, what's your email address? And I say, I point that out to people for all of these things that people are declaring as the new email, the new thing. These, like, social media and, you know, Facebook groups and all these things, which I like Amanda's approach of thinking about them as, you know, seven levels, different channels that you could adjust to. But the one thing that every single one of these social media platforms has in common is they require an email address to join them. The first thing that all of them ask for when you join them is, what's your email address? Email is the baseline of all of it. There's nobody who's completely out of. It's kind of another feed. You know, that's really what it's become. Nobody can keep up with their email in terms of, like, thoughtfully looking at each email individually that they get and responding to it. Everybody kind of just keeps every email all the time.

And I think we're also. I don't think email is going to be dead anytime soon. I mean, like, that. That's clearly like a marketing statement. But I do think the irony is hilarious, you know, and just true congruency, you know, they should have, you know, had an SMS option be emphasized there.

But could you imagine even the opportunity, even the opportunity if they went on that landing page and there was a video, somebody holding their phone and saying, hey, that's kind of a radical statement to say that email is dead. But let me guess something about you. You're watching this and you're holding your phone just like this right now. You've got your iPhone in your hands right now. You want to see what's working better than email right now? Go ahead and text this number right now and I'll show you something really cool. Like that would be a much better landing page. Then what's your, what's your email address?

Email is absolutely useless, but I want it anyway.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, I just think.

They'Re smart to collect the email just from testing. Like it's so much easier to collect an email and then get a phone number rather, because text platforms for SMS just aren't built to effectively collect email. So starting with email and then building off on text is so much easier. But I mean, had I been them and you know, that were my campaign, I would have put on like, if you're going to say email is dead, and I would have explained the logic. Like they're targeting that whole platform towards businesses and marketers. So if I were, that were me, I went on the landing page where I'm asking for the email and I would just explain to them like, hey guys, I just want you to know I made that statement. Email is dead. But I also know that it's easier to collect phone numbers from an email versus emails from a phone number. That's why I'm asking you for your email address. Like, if you're going to make a statement with that, like, you've got to back it up and explain it and teach them something in the process, like that's usable data for their users. Like, as a marketer, I mean, I would have used that as a tool to actually teach them something, give them some value and get another asset.

I've got text built into gogoclients.com so we used to say to people how you get both is to have somebody text me your email address. So if somebody is speaking at an event or something and they've got a book to offer to people to download, just go ahead and do this right now. Just text me your email address to this number. And that way then you've got the text number and their email address in the same thing.

I get a little bit when I'm doing public speaking. Joe mentioned I have a course that's just about to come out on SMS and just to build my own leads list. Like at all these events, I've been speaking at. I put a little keyword on my slides that's like if you want to get these slides and then a special invitation, text whatever the event name is to this number and they get my slides, but they also get an invitation to my private Facebook group. And before creating my SMS course, I think all marketers should start to look at these traffic channels as ways to mine data. For example, like with the Facebook group, I went into my Facebook group and I was like, hey guys, I know you see me talk about SMS a lot. If I were to do a course, what would you want to see it? In the course, the people in my Facebook group filled out my course content for me. They told me exactly what they wanted to learn, how they wanted me to teach it to them. And I also can see in my Facebook group, when users are active, I can see who my top contributors are. It gives me so much data, not only on what the course should be, but what the offer should be. You know how I'm going to position this to them because they're telling me I want to learn this so that I can do this. So for me, when I'm building my offer, like the copyrights itself, which is.

Actually an incredibly great point on how to leverage and utilize user generated content. I mean, it's just another form of Socratic selling, which me and Dean have spent quite a bit in previous episodes of I Love Marketing talking about. You just simply ask your clients what do they want and then give it right back to them. I want to point out a couple of distinctions here because certainly, Amanda, I want to go through different ways that people that are listening can actually utilize this. How to do it, how to think about it, why? I mean, we'll cover many of those things. One thing that I do want to mention. Do you know that Dean actually invented the Squeeze page back in 1997? Did you know that?

I'm shocked that Dean has done anything of value, to be honest.

Most people are. No, no. Most people already.

This is great.

Yeah, it's always surprising that Dean has any redeeming quality whatsoever. Yeah, that's why I'm tried to say mean things to him and stuff. Mostly because he deserves it and he's valueless. But he's smart. He is smart though. And so back in the day, Dean, you created this Squeeze page because you had this thing that you wanted to sell. You had a book called Stop youp Divorce that you put together with your buddy Homer, who was the world's leading expert on helping people that wanted to stop a divorce that one of the partners had initiated. And you had this tremendously valuable knowledge that was, you know, would help a lot of people that needed help in that area. But you wanted, as any smart marketer would, how do I, you know, how do I get it to people? And, and so you created this mechanism where they had to enter their, you know, their email in order to go to the next page to find out about it. So there's this sort of psychology and I always like the Steve Jobs quote from the 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference where we focus first on the psychology and then on the technology and so understanding the psychology of how to use. Because if someone's like, oh, use, you know, SMS marketing, use text, that's one thing. But there's a whole art and a science which Amanda has just literally not just been studying and learning, but she's been using it and she's now teaching other people how to do it. And it's really valuable. And that's what I kind of want to get into. But there's this whole psychology of it. And I've always liked what Gary Halbert would say. There's three things you need in order to sell something. You need a product or service, you need a sales pitch or a marketing message. And then you need a delivery system, the copy and the timing. And when you say it, how you say it, how many words you use. There's a whole psychology behind doing this effectively. And that's where I would say that you really understood that with the squeeze page. And now literally, I'm sure in the billions of people have probably been exposed to it at this point numerous times throughout the last 21 years since you first started doing that. But the same thing I think is about to happen and is happening with sms. And I say this only, you know, I'm listening here and doing this because I actually want to learn more of what Amanda knows how to do because I mean, you know how much I utilize audios on text and just one on one and how many millions of dollars I've literally brought in using text messages because. And even with direct mail, there's less noise in people's mailboxes. So there's a advantage if you know how to use direct mail. Well, the same thing with an overcrowded, constantly changing all kinds of filters on email. Not based on what you guys were talking about earlier. It's certainly not dead. I mean, it's how many people, it's their password mechanism to get into almost everything. There's this other thing Though called their phones, which is completely open territory for reaching people. And there's ways to do it in a very offending, obnoxious, annoying way where people will hate you as a marketer. And there's other ways to do it on how to add value in how to communicate to people. And not only is Amanda really great at that, but she also just her understanding of optimizing any sort of website or anything that you would have on your phone, from the load speeds to how much you should say to how it looks and how people experience that, those are the things I want to kind of jump into. And the reason I went on that whole rant was I'd like to get Amanda from you. You said it earlier, the mother of invention is a necessity. So you had to figure out a way to communicate with people. The part is, how do you think about this? Why this delivery system? Why have you fallen so in love with it to the point where you actually have broken it down, studied it, learned it, figured out what works the best and are now teaching other people how to do it? What is it that's so important that people need to know?

So sms. For me, when I think about SMS as a program and how successful SMS programs are built, if you're a scammy marketer and you just want to blast these people with text messages to monetize them, I don't recommend SMS as a channel. It is the most direct communication method possible. On average, we check our phones 85 times a day or every 17 minutes. These people, you're disrupting their day. It's extremely direct. My recommendation to anyone who wants to get started with SMS or business, an SMS program is make this a value added service. Don't make this like just a monetization strategy. You know, think of delivering products this way, making an SMS program part of your product deliverables. So for example, like in the financial space, if you've got like trade alerts or something like that, make it an added bonus for your prospects or your buyers to be part of your SMS program. Don't just look at this like if you're building this just to hammer these people with messages day in and day out, just to monetize them, it's not going to work for you. Your unsubscribes are going to be really high. Like this is meant to be something that people want to be part of, give them extra value to be part of the program. And as far as like actually spending time and building this out, I just did it because of the Freaking potential. On average, right now, when I was running my Q4 numbers with some of my SMS clients, they're seeing between three to five times the EPC earnings per click when I'm sending a text message versus what they're seeing in their email. And then just to put that into a little bit of perspective for you, I have clients right now that are running email programs. And when we're calculating, I always calculate based on earnings per subscriber rather than earnings per click or any of those other really vanity metrics because I like to look at my list health and the quality of my subscribers. For example, in their email list, they're seeing between 20 to 30 cents earning per subscriber per email send. So that's for every subscriber they have on their email list. That's what they make per subscriber on every send. Now when I actually ran those same campaigns through text messages, we're seeing anywhere between $1.40 to $2.15 earning per subscriber per send. So the revenue for us is so much higher. The average cart values are becoming so much higher on text message offers. So for me it just seems like, why the heck aren't people doing this yet? Is this just not been a thing yet? Have people just not been doing this the right way? It was worth me investing my time, energy and effort because SMS is really cheap to do if you're doing it correctly and the results are just blowing every other communication channel out of. And it's not like I don't think email is important because I absolutely think that email is critical to every marketing program. But SMS is a really, really great way to actually fuel the fire when it comes to your email programs. And what I mean by that is if I'm seeing an email campaign, I'm all about email deliverability and making sure my email program stays strong. So if I notice an email isn't doing that well, the first thing I do is log into my SMS platform and send a text message out to everybody saying, hey guys, I just sent you a really important email. I want to make sure you see it. Go check your email right now. And I know that that's going to give me a huge boost in numbers. And the next day my deliverability is going to be even better than the day before. So when we're thinking about all of these different platforms and why we should get into them, I really want everybody to start thinking about leveraging one to make one other better. So I want to make sure that my email performance is up because I'm using SMS to leverage it. I want to make sure that my Facebook groups are growing and keeping participation through email or through whatever channel. So SMS is a really great way to keep people engaged and to help build out those other platforms and bring attention to them and increase their performance.

Well, I think it would be really valuable for people is to really make it practical now and maybe talk about a couple of use cases. Like what would be the most practical baseline thing that somebody thinking about whether this could work for them would kind of say, oh yeah, I could do that. Or what kind of advice would you have for somebody thinking about it?

If you're wanting to get into sms, there's a lot of ways that you can do it really quickly and easily. I always start by mapping out my existing traffic channel. So I'm looking at my blog. You know, what space do I have available on my blog? Can I do an exit pop on my blog where rather than entering their email address, they enter their phone number? Or can I add books? Another really easy way is putting SMS on your existing offers. Now this is a disclaimer. Make sure that you're split testing this because I don't want to have you guys all adding SMS opt ins to your order forms and decreasing conversions. And I'll give you a little trick on how you can do that without harming conversions too much. So what I like to do is on order forms. I love two step order forms because two step order forms will allow you to do not only email card abandon campaigns but also SMS card abandon campaigns which for most of my clients is making up for 20% or more of their media spend ROI. So when you're collecting a phone number you have to have consent. You can't just start throwing people because you have their phone number into an SMS platform and start sending them messages. They have to consent to it. So what I like to do is I like to add underneath the phone field just a little checkbox where when they are completing the purchase I usually do something sneaky. So what I'll do here is I'll put a little message there that says I certify I'm 18 years or older and I want to receive marketing messages. Just double check on your compliance to make sure you know it fits your business. I don't want to tell you all the legalities that'll be in the course, but just for the sake of the podcast, just make sure that you're letting them know that you're going to be sending them marketing messages. That little Disclaimer that I certify at 18 years or older makes it feel mandatory. I'm getting 70 to 80% of people are checking off that box. But then I have the ability to actually follow up with them for either upsells that they didn't take or complimentary products to whatever they're buying. So your existing order forms are a really great way to, to actually add that and start building that SMS list. So those of you who are doing a lot of lead generation of prospects as opposed to buyers, I like to collect an email address and then add an extra incentive for a phone number. So for example, one of the most successful offers that I've been able to add SMS to is actually for a survival company. And on that survival company, one of our best performing offers is a gear review offer. So in order to become a, to get free tactical gear and become a gear reviewer for that company, you enter your email address to register. But then we also put a little checkbox that says highly recommended if you want to be alerted when free gear becomes available, because it is first come, first serve, enter your phone number and we'll text you alert. And when they check that little box, that's a little micro commitment. And the phone field actually opens once they check that box. And the reason we did that was because they've already checked that box, they've already made the micro commitment and it doesn't look like any extra work at the time. There's no extra fields or anything. And the expectations there, obviously they're checking something to do with text messaging. So they're going to have to enter a phone number, but they're already like what we call in poker, like they're already committed once they check that box. So on average we're getting about 70% of people that are opting in, opting in with a phone number. So that gives me a really easy way to collect a phone number and an email address. And when we actually added that little checkbox that way we didn't decrease conversions at all. It had zero effects on the actual page conversions itself. So I wasn't losing email to gain the SMS to gain that text message phone number, but that was the key which is not making that form field appear until they check the box. Now on your order forms, if you're collecting the phone number anyway, it doesn't work. So I do that more on the lead generation side versus on the buyer side. But those are just a couple of quick examples of ways that you can integrate SMS into existing things. You're already doing right now to start building that SMS list in terms of.

Like a small business owner, let's say a carpet cleaner. Amanda. And I've got, you know, because you shared with me a lot of things about different uses of sms. You know, email performance increases, customer service, delivery notifications, appointment reminders, concierge contacts, all this stuff that you, that you actually teach people. Let's say someone has a carpet cleaning business, how would they use SMS for.

Something like a small business? I love using SMS programs for things like appointment reminders and click to call campaigns. For example, when you're collecting SMS phone numbers. I've seen examples before where I've got a local business here, they're a car detailing business. So they collect SMS phone numbers through a contest that they have on their Facebook group. So they've got a Facebook cover photo that has people text in with a keyword to enter a contest. So once they've got those leads, what they're doing is they're sending out broadcast text messages right after, you know, I live in Canada where we've got salt on the road all the time. These car deal detailing business, they're sending out text messages after a big snowstorm where they know the salt is going to be all over the road, they know cars are dirty, texting out coupons for a detailed car cleaning or if they've got a canceled appointment, they're texting out notices saying like we're offering this discount because we've had a cancellation. So this discount is available for the next couple of hours. And I think something really similar would apply for other businesses like electricians for carpet cleaning. There's a lot of applications because I think the stats are somewhere around 55% of people would rather do business with a business that they can text versus call because the reality is less and less people are wanting to spend time on their phones. And the other thing is teeing up phone calls. So rather than just like when you get a lead cold calling, send them a text first. Hey, I'm going to be calling you in a couple of minutes. Just want to make sure it's okay. That really permission based. Being mindful of the fact that your prospects and buyers have a life, they have other things going on. So rather than calling them when it's inconvenient or when it's unexpected, send them a text message. Because people are like 40% more likely to call back or to answer a phone call if you've sent them a text in advance. And if you think about this, both in business and in personal life, the same is true. I hate getting phone calls, even from my closest friends out of the blue. But if they text me and they're like, hey, I need to talk to you, are you free? Then I'm way more likely to respond. So when we think about business that way and really putting the customer first and making sure that we're adding value to them as opposed to being a pain or a burden them, small businesses can really benefit from that.

You know what, I don't know if you remember this, Dean, but It was like 2011, 2012. We were doing the I Love Marketing conference for many of your real estate people and my professional cleaners. That was one of the last times we actually did one of the big events for the service businesses together. And then a lot of my emphasis became just doing genius network events and whatnot. And I was, you know, I had the very first iPhone the day that they came out. I got one in now, I think it was in 2007. And that totally changed. First off, people's addiction to, you know. Yeah, was started there. And it's like, because I remember prior to that, tried to do a text message with a thumb. He had to like click three times to get an A, then a B, then a C. One of the things that we had. It's so funny. I'm sitting here, I'm sitting here. Did you hear that beep in the background? So I've got an iPad up because I will take notes occasionally on my iPad and it's connected to imessage. And Joe Sugarman, founder of bluebacher Sunglasses, is calling me right now. I bring that up simply because Joe's a bargaining legend and it's kind of cool. But also. So Joe is in his mid to late 70s now and he would never think the text like, hey, are you free right now? It's just different generations have different ways that they communicate. And he's just still like, you make a phone call if you want to talk to someone, you don't text them. It's not a social media thing. So I think that's pretty funny. But anyway, so going back to my story is that me and Dean Amanda have taught people to use hotlines and 24 hour free recorded messages. And I mean, we're totally about automation and scaling your automation, which is exactly what you're talking about using sms. And so we had all of these clients for years that we've taught how to automate their communications to people via starting with direct mail can and clone yourself through a Sales letter can and clone yourself through a video can and clone yourself through a free recorded message can and clone your messaging through SMS or podcasting or whatever. One of my clients actually came up and said, yeah, you know the whole thing where you give people an offer if you have any openings in your schedule, I've started to text them. Remember that person that like they were using text messaging and this was either in 2011 or 2012. And whenever, like in the morning, if they ever had a cancellation or an opening, they had a group of clients that basically they had asked, would you like us to text you if we ever have any opening at the last minute? Because we'll give you a special offer. And they would fill up their schedule all the time. This was even when it was more difficult now and we'll talk about maybe services later, like what company do you use, that sort of thing. It's so much easier to do this today than it was back then. But the point is it just works in any service business. Any person that has any sort of thing that you're offering that people, oh, I happen to have an opening right now and you're not doing something like this. You're literally just leaving money on the table because we know this works.

I was going to say that exact thing about the scheduling. Like if you've got some last minute opportunity or any availability. I was thinking about a massage therapist.

If you're in the middle of your.

Or you're starting your day and there's been days where I would think it would be cool if kind of mid morning my massage therapist would text me and say, you know, I had a cancellation this afternoon or I've got two appointments available this afternoon, would you like to come get a massage? That would be awesome. Because often you don't think about being able to get that at the last minute.

Right?

You think, oh, I got to remember to whenever I have the idea that I want to get a massage, I'm going to book one for tomorrow, you know.

Yeah, text message gives you that immediacy too. Like when you look at statistics, it takes on average it takes four minutes for an SMS text message to be open and action taken on it versus 48 hours an email. So it gives you that ability to be that like, hey, I've got an opening this afternoon and you're not going to get emails a few days later being like, oh, I didn't see this, like people are going to get messages. Deliverability on SMS marketing is 97% and on average 35 to 60% click through rate on text messages. So people are curious, they want to take action on text messages. So just a little caveat on that is I learned this lesson really early on. The first text message I ever sent, I was just playing around and I sent this message not realizing that it can take up to three seconds for a carrier to actually process a text message. So I brought broadcasted this to this massive list of people at like 7:00 clock at night. Not thinking like people aren't actually going to get this message until like midnight. So I've got some like, so just like keep in mind like timeliness like if that's something we can't control, like the phone carriers actually control that. So when you're doing broad, like if you, if you fit into the category where you're sending like I send hundreds of thousands of text messages at a time. So you know, if you're a smaller business you don't have to worry about that because you're wanting to keep it small, intimate and like you'll be doing more real time text messaging. But in these bigger broadcast programs, like just a little tip for me to use like it can take a while for the messages to send. So don't send anything, don't send anything late at night. Keep in mind like this is the people's lives. Like you don't want their phone going off at midnight because all you're going to do is just give them a bad impression of your business and that's not what you want to do.

That's really good advice. Amanda, can you break down maybe the anatomy of a campaign? Let's walk through. What do you say? How long is it if you're going to put a link, talk about how to optimize your mobile site. There are some things that you shared with me. Like 53% of sites are abandoned if they load in three seconds or more. So if you're going to put a link in something, it's not just sending it out. So let's kind of look at the before, during and after of sending out doing a campaign so that people kind of get it and understand it.

Sure. So when you're sending an SMS campaign, there's a couple things you need to keep in mind. First is segmentation. You want to make sure that you're sending offers that are valuable and relevant to the people you're sending them to. It works the same as an email list. The more detailed you can get and the more action based you can get with a campaign versus just broadcast. You're going to get better deliverability the same as email, and you're going to get a better response. The second thing to keep in mind is the length of your text messages. Some platforms allow you a little wiggle room, but for the most part you have 160 characters, including your URL that you can send out in a text message. Now, Android devices, after 160 characters, they break it into multiple messages, which is why some of the platforms will allow you to do longer messages. But it takes more SMS credit, so it gets to be more expensive. So you need to get really good at getting your point across in 160 characters or so. URL shorteners will become like your best friend ever because every character is going to matter for you. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see in text message marketing is that people aren't adding clear calls to action, so you can't force them to guess what you want them to do next. If there's a URL there, tell them to click it. If there's a phone number there, tell them to call it and tell them to call it now. Give them some kind of urgency. So make sure that you're super clear. And the majority of your text message is making sure that it's very clear what the next step is. So you want to use personalization in your message. So when I'm sending out a text message, it kind of looks like this. So there's a personalization, so a greeting. Hey Dean, and then your offer. I have a special offer for you. It's only available for the next 24 hours. Click the link here to claim yours. So I've got my personalization, my greeting. Usually I like to, before I get into the offer, I like to remind them who it's from. So. Hey Dean, it's Joe. I have this cool thing for you text here to claim it. Now that's kind of what the anatomy of a text message looks like. Some of the platforms allow you to use MMS marketing, so multimedia marketing allows you to do things, send things like images or short videos, but you only have one megabyte of space, so you don't get a lot of wiggle room there. But if you can't get your message across in a text message, you can also use a video with a call to action to get people onto your landing page. And I think that's the next important thing to talk about. That's not really being talked about enough. I'm obviously focusing a lot on mobile optimized landing pages because I'm Sending mostly mobile traffic. And I'm trying to monetize with sms. And interesting enough for a lot of my clients, I'm finding that mobile traffic has the best lifetime value and has the lowest cost per acquisition. So a lot of them I'm turning off desktop traffic completely and I'm only sending to mobile pages that have been fully optimized for conversions. I shared with you a couple of stats a little bit earlier about mobile optimization. Like 53% of sites are abandoned if they load in three seconds or more and your rate of conversion drops for every second. And then 40% of consumers, if they have a bad mobile experience on your site, they're actually going to your competitors. So you're basically just handing your competitors your business when you don't have fully optimized landing pages. And in 2018, 40% of all E commerce purchases were made on a smartphone. It used to be the case, and in some cases, in some industries it still is, but it used to be where people would do research on their smartphone and then actually complete purchases on their desktop or tablet. Facebook brought me up to their offices in July and I met with the Facebook team and was working with them specifically on mobile optimization and what that was going to look like for their advertisers. So and only about they shared with me only 35% on average of their advertisers are actually optimized for mobile. You're paying attention and you're actually focusing on the things that matter in your business, like making sure your pages are optimized for the way your users are consuming them. You have an opportunity right now to really get ahead of the pack and there's a couple of things that you can do to take some steps towards mobile optimization. There's a lot of things that go into this, but I'll share some of the big ones. So you to want, want to keep your primary calls to action above the fold. So above the fold just means it's the first thing that they see when they land on your landing page. There's no scrolling involved, there's no looking. If you're sending to someone to a landing page where they download a free report, you want to have a headline, a small image of the free report, and then a button. You want them to not have to look for whatever it is that they're on your landing page for. Make sure that that is the first screen that they see. On mobile optimized sites, you want to make sure that the font size is appropriate for that device. For those of you who don't know how to look at your sites on all the different devices In Google Chrome, if you right click you can click Inspect and then in the top left hand corner you can sort through all of the different devices and look at your offer on all the different devices. So pay attention to how your font is looking because if you have an older audience, for example, most of my clients are between 55 and 65 in the financial space. So I want to make sure my font size on my landing page. Yeah, and SMS is just as responsive. You know, we were talking about earlier being a generational thing and I don't always find that to be true because I find the value proposition for my SMS program, if it's good enough, people are engaging on their phones just as much as they are on any other device in that market. So I'm making sure that my font is like 22 to 24 point font depending on what the landing page is. But I want to make sure that it's big enough that people can actually read it. And I want to make sure that I consider like when I'm on my desktop device, I'm almost always at home or in my office and that's the same is true for most people. But when you're on your phone, you're out at the grocery store, you're at the park, you're doing all these other things. So high contrast colors on your mobile page make it easier in natural light to actually see the screen. And these are things that nobody's talking about. I like to use single column designs. A lot of our landing pages on desktop we have like the left column and where we've got our video or images and then we've got our right hand side which is our form field. On mobile you want to make sure that that all stays single column. So one stacks on top of the other as opposed to side by side. Because there's just not enough space on a mobile device to make that easy to navigate. And you don't want people to have to. That pinch to zoom thing is your enemy. That's a friction point. You don't want people to have to zoom in to actually see what they're doing. You can also do a lot of things with your copy on mobile. Obviously you don't want to take away from the magic of your copy, but you want to take out anything that's not necessary and you can condense some larger sections of copy down to bullet points. In mobile devices we're just taught to consume content faster and we appreciate shorter Content that's better spaced in shorter paragraphs on our mobile devices. Just because that's, you know, I want to go on and read a Wikipedia article. I'm not going to read it on my phone, I'm going to read it on desktop. And that's just how human behavior works. Anything that's not mandatory, it's like take out all the flags and just condense it as much as you can. For mobile things like making sure, like this is something else that I came across. When you're testing all of your mobile optimized landing pages on all of the different devices, make sure that you're actually planning that button placement or the call to action placement to where the thumb can reach. We've got all of these iPhone pluses where these screens are huge and I've got little hands. So it's like I have a hard time sometimes with some of these businesses trying to get to the button. So make sure that that's as easy as for people and it's actually designed for people like how people use their funnels. So I mean those are just a couple of really quick things that you can do. I go more in depth in the course, but those are a couple of quick things you can do right now to make the experience better for your users on mobile. Just keep in mind if you're sending text message traffic, you know they're on a mobile device. Give them the best experience possible. The information is out there. So there's no reason that they, the pages can't be mobile.

We know they're on a mobile device anyway. Even at the opt in level. Just looking at one of my Facebook campaigns today, I've got one book campaign going. I've had 62 opt ins today. The placement ratio is 60:1 mobile news feed one desktop newsfeed. So it's like 60:1 to 1 on 62 opt ins just today from mobile versus desktop. It's where everything is. It's not. It's like you're saying now like it used to be that, you know, mobile adaptive or mobile responsive was kind of like required, but now it's, you really almost have to think mobile first.

A lot of these page builders they call mobile responsive. But mobile responsive and mobile optimized are different and I want to make that distinction. Mobile responsive basically means the page bends to whatever device size it's at. But that doesn't give you the control over things like when I mentioned, when I was talking about a single column design and when I'm talking about mobile optimization, I'M looking at how the page stacks. What I mean is, rather than having all of my images pulled together, which is what happens with mobile responsive versus being able to put copy appropriately in between my images and actually have the pages appear on a mobile device exactly the way that I want it to is mobile optimization. So mobile optimization, nine times out of 10, if I am even bothering to build a desktop version of a landing page, I build mobile first and then backtrack and then build desktop after. Because desktop to me are less valuable clients and I just receive less traffic. So I build mobile like I build the whole mobile experience before I look into.

And Dean, that means you're going to have to go through a lot of your sites and just fix them based on what you said.

Honestly, it's one of my favorite things to do. I love to do page audits for clients where I look at the first thing I do and they're always like, why do you do that? Because the first thing I do is look at their page on mobile and then I show them their Google Analytics account where it's like, oh, hey, 67% of our traffic is coming from mobile. I'm like, have you looked at your offer on mobile recently?

You know what?

And the response is hilarious. Because page designers are so in this desktop universe, they don't even think to look at it. So when they do for the first time, they're like, oh crap.

That's the beauty of actually knowing a particular area really well that is often either new or neglected, which we could always find. I mean, anyone can go into anyone's area depending on their. When I say anyone, I don't mean anyone. I mean people that really have knowledge and expertise and go into anyone's business and find all these holes that things are happening and how to plug them up. And that's the beauty of having skills that are awesome. You said a couple things I want to touch on here. You said earlier that 40% of all E Commerce purchases in 2018 were made on a smartphone. Was that during the holiday season or just in general for that period?

The 2018 holiday season.

Okay.

From Thanksgiving through to New Year's.

Okay. So that is like a huge thing to highlight of just how much. Because everyone that's going to be wanting to use what we're talking about here, what you're talking about here, for business and commerce purposes. That's a lot to be said about how consumers are actually buying things. And I imagine that's in America. Or is that America, Canada? Or is that, I mean, that's in.

The U.S. that's in the U.S. okay?

So that alone is enough to say, wow, I really should, you know, optimize my mobile.

And it shows us intent too. Like, people aren't just buying in mobile devices for themselves. Like, this is. This goes to ordering gift baskets. You know, we're in this whole world of apps now where we're ordering things. Like I use Shutterfly to order a bunch of stuff for Christmas this year. Like, we gotta broaden the way that we look at how those transactions are happening and the context in which they're happening. We're not just buying for ourselves on mobile anymore. We're not just logging onto Amazon prime and ordering the things we need. Like, we're purchasing gifts and ordering services and stuff for other people using our mobile devices as well.

When do we actually send messages? What is the timing?

That varies on either weekdays or weekends. So when I'm finding so far on sms, when I'm sending them in the morning during the week, I think there's a. Between like 8am and 10am is kind of when I like to send messages during the weekday. That seems to be like when people are either on the train commuting or they're getting ready for work and they're just kind of killing time getting ready for work. They're not ingrained in their workday yet. Like I said earlier, I want to keep in mind that these people have a life and I don't want them to be like in a board meeting and I'm texting them stuff that they really don't care about at the moment. So I'm trying to get people, I'm trying to get people content to people when they have the time to consume it. During the weekdays, 8am to 10am in the morning is kind of what I'm finding to be best in the morning. And then anywhere between four and six in the evening is working really well for me. I really try and not spend any later. 9 o' clock at night is kind of like the latest. And that's generally for things like a docu series or something like that. When an episode is going live between 5 and 7 is really kind of where you want to be because that's when people are. They finally shut their brains off from work. They have a minute to consume content. You know, they're waiting for dinner to cook, they're sitting on the train, they're sitting in traffic. You know, these are when people actually have the time to consume content. So during the weekdays, I really like to send during those times. But I want to bring it back to the Facebook groups. If you already have a Facebook group, if you go go to Group Insights, you can also see what days of the week and what times of the week people are active in the Facebook group. And that gives you a really good jumping off point for starting to contact people. Because I know on average for my Facebook group, 70% of the group's use is on mobile. So if they're active, I know they're on a mobile device and Group Insights is telling me when they're active. So when I start a campaign, if I have no data on sms, I'm going to look at that stuff first to make sure that I'm sending stuff to people where they are when they're there. And then on the weekends it's a little bit different. So on the weekends I like to send between 8am and noon on Saturday. And that seems to generally be the time that people haven't actually started participating in their daily activities yet. They're not getting up to take their kids to the zoo yet or those kinds of things. They're still kind of in that leisurely state. And the same is true for Sundays. Now, I do want to mention I made the mistake once of sending a text message, like during the time when people were in church and I got some really angry messages back. It was like my phone's going off in church and it was some stupid text message. So keep in mind, like, if you've got like a, like a really religious crowd or you know, you've got a crowd where, you know, they have things that are common in their life, try to avoid interrupting those kinds of things. So Sunday is between 4 and 7 are a really great way. Like that's generally when people are done their Sunday events and they're at home dreading Monday coming up. So they're scrolling through their Instagram, they're scrolling through their Facebook, they have their devices in their hands. So Sundays between 4 and 7 are a really great time to send. And a sneaky little trick is something I do with email programs as well as SMS programs. I love to send on Thursdays. Thursdays are the most common payday in the us so when I'm sending either an email campaign or an SMS campaign, I like to send them offers when they have money in the bank. So the first and Thursdays of the month are generally paydays. So I want to make sure that my biggest ticket promos go out on the first and third Thursdays of the month. And then the second and fourth of the month I try and send my lower dollar offers or like tripwire offers just to keep the buying pattern moving. So those are a couple things just to take into consideration when you're trying to decide when to send a text message.

Gotcha. She's quite a clever gal.

Deep, smart.

She loves sneaky things.

I'm either I'm either really, really smart or I've made a heck of a lot of mistakes and learned really quickly from them. A little bit of category A and a little bit of category B. I've made a lot of mistakes and I sent a lot of messages and a lot of campaigns to figure this stuff out. But I'm more than happy to share the things that I've learned because I want everybody to set up campaigns that are successful because I really think that SMS is a really great way. And if it's like I said earlier, a good campaign is never invasive. People say I don't want to set up SMS because I think it's invasive or annoying. But a well thought out campaign is not invasive or annoying because it's expected, it's wanted and it's valuable. If you're not setting up your program and your campaigns that way, you've already.

Lost the game in your talks. When you give talks on this, you have 21 SMS opt in placement ideas and there's a whole bunch of them. Look, you mentioned you have a program, so I'd like you to talk about that. When's that going to come out and all that jazz. One of the things that you do mention though, of all the different ways where you can place an opt in so that you can start collecting stuff. One of the things is podcast announcements, podcast descriptions is exit pop ups. There's a whole bunch of stuff that you got. You got top of site banners, exit pops, all that stuff. What I want to do is build this in for. I love marketing. There's a, a lot of things here that we're not leveraging that we could be doing for our very own podcast. Had I thought more about this and it was really. It's actually both your faults. I don't want to take any responsibility for this.

I'm used to taking the blame. I'll take.

Right.

I'll take one for the team. I got you, Dean. I got you. I'll take.

Thank you.

Thank you. I'm in awful trouble. What would be some examples using say, me as the dummy who didn't have all this stuff set up? Had I really thought about how to utilize this in this context and going forward, using the I Love Marketing podcast as a thing to tell people about what are some things that I could or should do that we can.

Well, first of all, me being the smart cookie that I am, I knew that you would do this. So I looked at your blog site for the I Love Marketing podcast before we got on the podcast. You guys on a podcast, you've got a great value proposition because people love your podcast, you've got a really loyal following and you've got new episodes all the time. So your value proposition of like get instant notification when a new podcast episode becomes available is a great way for you guys to keep people engaged and want to be part of your SMS program. So if I were you, I would have like a nivi. Like if you've got a recorded intro, some podcasts have music or like a recorded like, hey, you're now watching the I Love Marketing podcast. I would include in there like a keyword, like if you're going to love this episode, if you want more episodes like this, text a keyword into and make sure you get a short code that's a really easy to remember short code, like a five digit number. So your short code like it's going to be texting like I love marketing to this number. Easy to remember and an easy to remember phone number. So people can get opted into your podcast SMS list through the introduction. And then the second thing you get do is actually putting it in the podcast description. So when you're actually listing the episode information on the site or on itunes or wherever you've got it, you can put a little text keyword into the actual description. But you've got to have a value proposition. So for a podcast, having a new episode is a really great way to do that. You could also do a contest. So if you want to put together like five of Dean's books and put it together in a bundle like hey guys, we're going to be talking about text messages, message marketing, for example. Like if I'm going to give away the course, like hey guys, for the I Love Marketing podcast subscribers, I want to give you guys a chance to win a free course. I'm going to have you guys put in that keyword with my short code into the description. So people who haven't watched the episode yet or are just getting to the episode can actually opt in for that contest or whatever the value proposition is and get onto your SMS list. And then once they're there, I mean you guys can monetize with courses that you you sell. You can also send affiliate offers to your SMS list, but then on the site itself you've got a couple of email opt ins and if I were you, I'd follow up in that email campaign. When someone first opts into the I Love Marketing podcast email list, the first email that they get in an autoresponder series is going to be, hey, thanks for joining the email list. I want to make sure that you don't miss out on any episodes. Plus we'll be giving extra materials for POP subscribers via text message. So for example, like in email they're going to get a notification of a podcast, but for a value proposition on the SMS side, I'm going to say plus I'll also text you a lead magnet of some sort. So it's like the 21 steps that you can get started with, you can use to get started with SMS right now, but only text message subscribers will get that. So text in right now and use that kind of autoresponder email series to get them into the SMS program. And then you can also do what I mentioned a little bit earlier when I was mentioning the checkbox that allows you to also collect a phone number. You can do that as well on your site or on an exit pop to build out the SMS list. So there's four or five ways right there. If you've got a podcast that you can leverage text messaging on the podcast to build out that list and monetize it.

When can you have all of that done? That she just said.

The great thing I was thinking about too is when to maybe put it in the your email super signature too that you could put something in there. You want to see something? Yeah. Want to see some new cool text marketing? Text this to this number and watch what happens. Because we're all marketers, part of our great thing that we have available to us is to be completely transparent about it. We're talking to marketers about how to market and it's one of those things where you've got the opportunity just transparently tell them, hey, text this to this and watch what happens.

We're doing this really cool thing with text message marketing, like click here to see what a campaign looks like kind of stuff. I love using email for this. So I love like content emails. I love to put either native ads or calls to action in our content emails. Like with value add stuff that's exclusive to text messages. But promo emails, you know, like our job in a promo email is obviously to get the click to the landing page But I have been testing lately and I had really good results putting coupon codes in PS lines. Coupon codes by the way through text Messages have a 10 times higher redemption rate than any other acquisition tool for coupons. So if you're going to get coupons.

Email, that could be the psych. Want a coupon code? Text this to this number. There's your thing, right?

And that becomes your value proposition for your VIP text message program, right? You get exclusive discounts and advance like if there's limited inventory or quantities you get first dibs, that kind of stuff. Like that's the kind of things that you need to be offering people to keep them interested and wanting to participate in your SMS program. But I love using that little bit, those real estate spots in your email programs to just like get that little, like just poke the bear a little. Just get that, get that text message, opt in in there.

Let's chose favorite thing to poke the bear. That should be.

No, no, I actually love it. You know, here's one thing I want to mention too. Like, so truerest.com, they're a float pod business where it's a. And there's True Rest, you know, started here in Arizona. Nick Janicki is like the top float pod probably in terms of known for like being one of the top people in the whole industry and what he's done to help bring float to the world. And so he created a franchise called True Rest. And if you actually have one in your area, I think they're mostly, I don't know if they're outside the country yet, maybe in Canada, but I don't think so. I think it's still us and basically floating is awesome. It's very meditative, great for relaxation, pain, injuries, I mean, you name it. It's just been very transformative to a lot of.

We still snuggle polar bears up here to achieve all those things.

Well, that's awesome. But here's the thing, they have their whole system though built in with sms. So if you want to schedule an appointment, just like you were saying, Dean, if you wanted to just experience it, like I'll tell you, like any marketer that's listening to us talk about sms. If you actually go through the system that he set up through all the French franchisees to schedule an appointment and how automated and it's done in just such an elegant way, I would highly encourage you. And if you've never tried floating before, I would just recommend it because it's super cool. But check out truerest.com and call them and see how they actually do their system and just listen to it and see how easy they've set it up for people to make appointments, schedule appointments, be reminded. It's actually really cool and you'll learn something about that too. So I wanted to mention I love.

That if you guys ever got a chance to look at my text message history, it's hilarious because I opt into every SMS program. Like I like whore myself out there when I'm trying to get like phone numbers because I want to spy and see what everyone else is doing, like how they're automating things. And sometimes I'll actually text back just to see like what programs they're using and how they're integrating things. Like I go that nerdy with it. So, you know, I'm seeing this more and more. I had a really great experience. I was staying at a hotel in LA working with a client a couple weeks ago. And when I checked into the hotel there was like a little signature thing I had to sign. I just signed. I don't even read it. So if you're ever doing work with me, like I just, I don't even read contracts, I just sign. Just kidding. But I signed up to receive, I signed up to receive text notifications from the hotel and when I get up to my room I got a text message that was like, hey, by the way, I'm so and so from concierge. Just want you to, you know that if you want to set up like wake up reminders or you want to order breakfast, you can do it all through text message. Just text me what you need and I'll get it set up. And it's like, I hate calling room service, I hate doing all of those things. So for me it was just a really quick text message and I'll stay at that hotel again just because that user experience made my whole stay that much better. And whether I use it or not doesn't matter. It's just for me, like just knowing that I don't have to pick up the phone and talk to a stranger makes me so happy.

Well, let's do this then. One of the things that you've said in your presentations are best practices. Give value. Create a program for your subscribers or whoever that offers them some kind of value if they've subscribed and you're getting their text and then give them content. SMS product delivery is a great way to get an opt in and that sort of stuff. You teach all that, you talk about all this stuff and Then have a clear call to action. The things that you said, don't expect people to guess and tell them exactly what they need to do. So that's obviously important. There's so much value here in what you described for anyone other than just getting people to be seen. An open, available way to generate business and start communicating and interacting and bonding with your clients. I think this has been really, really valuable. Plus, you talk so fast that you actually give.

I know, it's awesome. Two episodes in one.

Yeah, no, it really, it really is. So for next steps and look, I think if anyone that's listening sees this as being. Yeah, I really want to learn this and you obviously just should do whatever. I know nothing about what you're charging for your course when it's available. So what's the deal with how people learn more about this?

The course will be available, I think in about three weeks time. I just got the first edits back today. So the course will be available in the next three weeks. And I'm hoping that my Facebook targeting is good enough that if you listen to the podcast or you follow, I love marketing. You're probably going to get a Facebook ad for it anyway, but I'll make sure that Joe and Dean get a link for the offer as soon as it becomes available for you guys to actually go through. There's a lot of really cool stuff in the course and I put together a quick start strategy. So if you're interested in SMS but you don't want to implement it in your business yourself, this is a guide you can pass off to a staff member or your director of marketing or whoever you've got doing that for you that they can actually just plug and play with that.

So you know what, whatever propaganda that you have, Amanda, that we could put on ilovemarketing.com Amanda, then get that to us and then what we're going to do is we're going to work with the elves easy lucrative fund is what I mean and we're going to figure out to how to get the little factory going here and set some stuff up so that we could be doing the things that Amanda is talking about here that we are currently not doing and just do better the things that we currently are doing and enhance it a lot more. Because that's the whole point of listening to I love marketing is to enhance and expand what you want to enhance and expand. What didn't we talk about or didn't you share that people should hear before we wrap this episode up?

Amanda, the only thing we didn't cover is I just want people to understand the different ways that you can get people, not mechanics like placement of opt ins. I would just want people to sit down and think about their businesses and think if SMS makes sense for their business and what assets you guys have that you can leverage to get opt ins. So just really quickly because a lot of the other stuff that we talked about will make more sense when you understand that you can get people to opt in two ways. One of them being a keyword where they text a word to a phone number, the other being a web form opt in where people just enter their phone number in a field and the compliance regulations for both of those things. Like the reason I put these, this is the whole reason I put together this course. Compliance is very different for each of those different opt ins. And I want to make sure that everyone's building compliant SMS campaigns because you can get in trouble in a big way if you're completing, if you're sending out messages to people you don't have consent from. So I really walk through that in that course hand in hand. But you know, if you don't go through the course and you still want to get started with sms, make sure you do your research on compliance. That's it. Like I want to like highlight, bold, underline, italicize, like make sure that you pay attention to that. So make sure that like however you're acquiring people, you're making sure that you're following all the guidelines that you have to, to actually have consent to message these people. So I mean, that's the last that we didn't really talk about, but I want to make sure it's a huge takeaway for people just making sure that that's all set up properly, otherwise you're going to get yourself in trouble. So make sure that you're taking the time and effort and making sure that it makes sense for your business and you're doing it in a compliant way.

Great, great. Yeah. And so what we'll do also on this episode and on even the ilovemarketing.com Amanda we will put a list of different companies and services that one can use for this too because you can maybe get us who people could use and should use. And I'll also add to their different services that we use for free recorded messages and some of the companies that we use ourselves so that people will know.

I put together a pretty comprehensive list of platforms that I use in a Facebook group. It's just a free Facebook group, but I can share that with you, Joe. And you can share that with everybody if you want to. That has a list of all the platforms that I use and why I use them.

That'd be wonderful. Perfect. Yeah, let's do that. And so, Dean, I don't even think you were needed during this episode. Really.

Yeah.

Dean is a beauty. Dean is what brings people in and keeps them engaged with his beautiful face. So that's all you had to do. You just had to just be here and be pretty.

No, you know, Dean's awesome. And Dean's a genius. And we're going to be together here shortly, Dean, doing our little email mastery workshop. And so this we may do. We may do one or two of those things this year. And so if anyone is interested in that, then I think you should probably let us know. But I don't know how they should let us know. Dean, how should they let us know?

Well, they could send a text to a keyword.

Yeah. If we did have that. So what we're going to do.

Texting is dead. Give us your. Text us your thing and we'll tell you why email is still king.

That is hysterical. No, but we're going to be doing some cool stuff with I love marketing moving forward in the future. And so when Dean is here, like, literally in a couple weeks, we're going to strategize kind of a launch of some stuff that we're going to be doing with I love marketing. So to all of our listeners, just stay tuned for all that jazz. Thank you for listening. And Amanda, you were great. Really, really valuable. That's it. That's all I got to say. So if you guys have anything else to say, then we're done for the day. And everyone go out and do good in the world and use everything that Amanda shared. Obviously powerful, effective, ethical, and smart ways to build and grow your business or your enterprise. And have a great day.

Thanks for having me, guys.

Sa.