Ryan Shank shows how service businesses use cheap automation to give value before selling. Drip campaigns on day 0, day 1, day 3 deliver useful content on schedule. For a chiropractor: text reminders cut no-shows, post-visit surveys build trust, automated messages teach patients about covered services.
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What's up guys, this is Ryan with PhoneWagon and we are on day 9 of our morning updates. So thanks for joining us. Today we have Starbucks for the second day in a row, no blue bottle coffee. I don't know, I think we're seeing a pattern here. And also, by the way, I keep getting oatmeal and the ratio of the water to oatmeal is really off and it's more like oatmeal soup. and I'm not really sure what to do. It's like, do I tell them, or do I just let it happen? I feel like I should tell them so they can fix their mistake. I'm sure that they don't know that it's like soupy. So anyway, that's kind of what I'm battling recently. But also, so what I want to talk about today, and I read a blog post last night on Groove, which is like an online help desk similar to Zendesk. Where you can submit support tickets and stuff, but they have an amazing blog, tons of good content, and one of the things in their blog was, I guess the whole blog post was about 3 inexpensive things that you should be doing right away that will help you grow your business, okay, and the main one that I saw, obviously, you know, I do them all, but one of the ones that it seems like they do really, really well is with their drip campaigns, okay, and what that means is you can set up in pretty much any email provider, MailChimp, a lot of people these days are using, Can't think of the name of it, but I also know that Intercom even has its own, and you can even— if you use Intercom, you can do it on event-based email triggers inside of your application or something else. But anyway, whatever email service you're using, you can send emails to your subscribers based on certain triggers. A lot of times it's by, by day. So like, right as soon as they sign up, day 0, hit them with this. Day 1, day 3, day 5, hit them with different offers. You're giving them content. The whole idea too is Give them content, give them content, value, value, value, and then ask for something. And that's sort of what we talked about yesterday of creating this content. Yesterday we talked about how, you know, are you creating content for your end customers and giving them something for free, becoming the expert in the industry, so then when they do need something and do need to hire someone, they're going to hire you. But what I do want to talk about with what Groove was saying is like, you know, they're hitting them with just articles, they're hitting that, hey guys, do this, this, this, boom, boom, boom, and then there's the ask. And there's actually a book by Gary Vaynerchuk called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook where it's like boom, boom, boom, value, value, value, give, give, give, then ask and then people are going to want to give because they are going to feel like, hey, you've given me so much, you're asking me for this little piece, this little sale, this little whatever it is, they are going to do it because you've given them so much value. But that's the secondary point. The first point is being able to use automation inside of our business lives. So for instance, if you are If you are a chiropractor, right, you maybe— you obviously are going to have appointment reminders, text message reminders, email reminders, calendar events. All of those are trying to get the customer to actually show up. I read a stat yesterday that billions are lost on an annual basis from healthcare no-shows. So that's a crazy stat. So there's a lot of things that people are implementing right now to make sure that the no-show rate is as low as possible. So you're going to do a lot of automated things there to remind them— phone calls, voicemails, whatever it is. but also, you know, are you sending them, you know, post-visit surveys? Are you sending them post-visit, just maybe even value, maybe if you're a chiropractor, hey, you could do this for your back, hey, did you know that, you know, with your chiropractic visit you actually are eligible through your insurance, so it's effectively free to you, to receive a 20-minute massage at our partner masseuse right next door, and a lot of chiropractors do that, by the way, which is kind of cool. So just educating your customers with a lot of this stuff, but doing it in an automated way, right? So when they sign up for an appointment, subscribe them to your email list. You know, even if you have to get them double opted in, that's fine. I'm sure they would be willing to do it, especially if you're going to be giving them value. But be overly transparent. Tell them what you're going to give them, and then give it to them, and then overdeliver on what you're going to give to them. And don't ask them for something. Don't try to get them to come in 5, 6 days a week, you know, for like 8 weeks if they don't need that. And sometimes that does happen, and then that completely loses trust from the customer and the service provider, the chiropractor or whatever, right? Tell them exactly what's happening. Give them options. Tell them, hey, if you want to continue to do this, this is what I would recommend. Unless they do have to, and then just give them value, show them what they can do on their own, show them they can do those little, you know, with the bands or whatever, they can like crack their own back if they can, I don't know, but point is, automate a lot of it, deliver them a lot of value, and then, you know, you can ask for something in return, maybe a referral at the end, maybe a review which will then lead to additional referrals, but automation, deliver content, deliver value, and then ask for something later. Thanks guys, it's Friday, it's beautiful by the way, in Techstars headquarters right here in New York City. So hope you guys have a great day. Love you.
