MARKETING AUTOMATION FOR SMALL BUSINESS
Bonus Audio
MARKETING AUTOMATION FOR SMALL BUSINESS
Bob The Teacher, Manager of Marke1ng Educa1on at LeadPages®
BONUS CONVERSATION: INFUSIONSOFT Bob The Teacher and Paul Sokol Note: The following transcripts have been created to assist you in implemen:ng the lessons of this course. Since they are essen:ally verba:m, these transcripts should be read with a “speaking” English perspec:ve, as they may contain slight gramma:cal errors due to the nature of recorded training.
Welcome to this bonus module of the Marke7ng Automa7on for Small Business course. This is Bob, the teacher, the manager of marke7ng educa7on here at LeadPages®, and I'm excited to bring to you this conversa7on with Paul Sokol, campaign builder, mad scien7st over at InfusionsoG. Paul is going to share with you some insights that are going to blow your mind around campaigns, and what are some of the best prac7ces of automa7on that a lot of business owners simply aren't geHng right without this informa7on. Let's jump in to this insighJul conversa7on. Bob:
Hey, Paul, thanks so much for joining me for this bonus module of the Marke7ng Automa7on for Small Business course.
Paul:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm definitely excited to chat with you today.
Bob:
Excellent. Now before we dig too deep into some of the ques7ons I have for you, I would love to know what gets you most excited about marke7ng automa7on.
Paul:
What gets me most excited about marke7ng automa7on is experiencing it, but like a good experience. You see this with a lot of the newer start-‐up leader companies, like Uber and recently I've been geHng emails from Fitbit. It's just really cool when there's good, targeted automa7on that provides value. That excites me, because I know that someone sat down and inten7onally created an experience. It's just not like some crumby transac7onal plain text email that looks like a robot would have trouble reading it.
Bob:
I love that word inten7onality. I think we'll probably hit on that a couple of 7mes through the conversa7on today.
Paul:
Oh, yeah.
Bob:
Before we get into some of the best prac7ces and challenges, and things like that, I'd love to know, over at InfusionsoG, what are some of the ways that you and your company are benefi7ng from marke7ng automa7on.
Paul:
We have a en7re demand genera7on team that heavily leverages marke7ng automa7on because there's a finite number of human resources. There's a finite number of sales reps, a finite number of lead development reps, and we're geHng way more leads every single day than is realis7c to call every single one of them. Plus not everybody is all qualified to even have a conversa7on with that either, it being a waste of their 7me or a waste of our 7me, or stuff that's both.
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Marke7ng automa7on allows us to bubble up people that are truly engaged, and there's a good probability we may actually be a good fit for them. That saves man hours, saves 7me, and in the end it ... In theory, it should be crea7ng a be\er customer experience, and that's something that we're always looking to improve, is crea7ng those one-‐on-‐ one rela7onships at scale, no ma\er how big that scale is.
Bob:
A running theme in the course and these bonus modules has been that idea of emula7ng the one-‐on-‐one communica7on, so I'm excited to hear that that's happening for you and your team as well.
Paul:
Oh yeah.
Bob:
Talk to us a li\le bit about some of the cri7cal challenges that you're seeing business owners face. What are they running into, geHng stuck with, when it comes to marke7ng automa7on?
Paul:
Here's where we'll come back to this we're inten7onal here. I think where most people fall down and skin their knee is they're trying to automate something that they're not even clear on. They'll say, "Oh, I want to automate my sales process," and then so you get into it. "Okay, so what's your sale process?" "Okay, well we collect a lead and then we call them and we close them. Automate that." We're like, "No." There's way more to it. In order to automate ...
Automa7ng anything, automa7ng a process, a process has specific steps in a specific order, and where I see people falling down with marke7ng automa7on is they do not know what their steps are, and/or they do not know what order they're supposed to be in. They're trying to automate something that they're not even clear on, and then they wonder why the experience is bad or why it's not working. It's because you're not inten7onal about what your process is. You don't understand it enough at a really deep, in7mate level, to be able to automate. Think about how car manufacturers work. They have those robot welding machines. You've seen those, right, Bob, or at least you know?
Bob:
Yep.
Paul:
Those giant robo7c arms that are spot-‐welding. Engineers didn't just wake up and say, "Hey, here's a spot-‐welder." That's supremely inten7onal. Those are tolerances of tenths of a thousandth of an inch, so that's how they can automate because they understand that. They understand exactly what steps, in what order, and then they can build an automated car crea7on machine. Most small businesses have never thought that far deep into that process, because it's all tribal.
It's all in their head. They know how to do their sales process because it's just been done for the past whatever, 2, 3, 5, 10 years. They've never sat down and been, "First I do A. Why am I doing A? What's the point of A? Okay, that gets me to B. What is B? How do I do B? How do I track if that's effec7ve?" I see, I guess the Twi\er version is people fall down because they're trying to automate something before they even know what that something is.
Bob:
The big lesson we're hoping to convey to people in this course is don't automate things that you haven't tested yet, because there will be automa7ng mistakes, and there's probably nothing worse to scale than your mistakes. You don't want that to get bigger.
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Paul:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Garbage in, garbage out. If you automate a bad process, you're just going to get more bad processes.
Bob:
Indeed. Talk to me a li\le bit about some of those key opportuni7es that business owners are facing. What's available to them that they may not realize that they can automate?
Paul:
This course I know has been primarily focusing on marke7ng automa7on, and so that's a lot of the front end of the funnel stuff, the discovery, where they become a lead and then we sell them. But what a lot of small businesses in par7cular don't realize ... A lot of corporate businesses get this because they have to understand this, but there's the internal process automa7on, or the streamlining of it. You can use marke7ng automa7on to streamline your hiring process. Give people a couple of hoops to jump through.
Maybe they have to give you their email and then confirm it, and then they can answer a couple of ques7ons to finish their interview. We've got a free campaign in the marketplace called Easy Hiring, which does exactly that. I think looking at the staff from 2014, it successfully weeded out 1/3 of applicants that couldn't even follow basic instruc7ons. I'm like literally basic like go to your email and confirm it. One of every 3 people that applied, across all the customers, didn't do that. What kind of employee do you think they would be? They'd be a bad one. They can't even log into email and confirm it.
You can use it for things like billing collec7on. It's real easy when a billing a\empt occurs and it fails, kick out a task for somebody to call them and say, "Hey, let's get a credit card," or whatever the case is. Look for areas of automa7on across your en7re business, not just the whole marke7ng and sales piece. Yeah, that's important but that's where people get blinders. They forget that there's the en7re opera7on and fulfillment and financial side of their business that can also benefit from, maybe not the exact same automa7on tac7cs, but certainly similar ideas.
Bob:
I love that idea. I know that we do have a module that touches on the internal aspect of things, but a lot of people do focus on that external, and I'm glad that we're able to marry the two together. To me it's all about leverage and saving 7me, and doing the right things at scale, so that's a great, great, great point. Talk to us a li\le bit more about best prac7ces of marke7ng automa7on. I know you and InfusionsoG, you have a lot of customers that are successfully puHng together campaigns, and puHng together sequences and things like that. What are you seeing amongst your customer base that people are really nailing it?
Paul:
That's like asking what can you do with a hammer and nail. There's just so many things. One best prac7ce is always puHng yourself in the shoes of whoever's receiving this automated experience. Because that's really where we're talking about high leverage. It's automated experience design, so I'm designing this automated lead [inaudible 00:07:24]. I'm designing this automated product fulfillment thing. You always want to put yourself in the shoes of whoever's receiving that experience.
Make sure that it does not feel synthe7c or robo7c, because that just takes away from it. The whole point of automa7on, it's there to enhance those rela7onships. But when you do poor automa7on, it actually takes away from it. I think you men7oned earlier to where people are trying to ... What did you say? It's automa7ng bad stuff. When you're
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designing automa7on, always do it from the recipient, the end user, the customer's experience first, and make sure that that's clean. Then it doesn't ma\er how messy it is on the back end or under the hood, as long as it gets that experience.
Another thing is humanize it. Write your messages like you're talking to your friend. When you're siHng down and wri7ng an email, pretend that you're wri7ng that to a single person, who's a decent friend of yours that has gone through a certain pathway to get to that point. Let's say it's an email trying to get somebody to download a lead magnet that they just opted in for. What would you do if your friend did that. "Hey, what's going on, Bob? Here's that lead magnet that you wanted. Hope you like it. Oh, by the way, check out on page 3, there's something really cool where I talk about blah."
Then if you're doing a follow-‐up email for people that have not downloaded it, again, how would that sound? "Hey, Bob, I saw that last week you requested this, but you didn't download it. That's cool. Hey, here's the link again." Obviously, depending on your own businesses, show some tone and the language that you use, maybe it's a li\le more or less casual than that. It's a human. It's a one-‐to-‐one rela7onship, so write it for a human. Make it fun. One thing that I love to do on my ... I've got a newsle\er and it's got li\le header images in it. The alternate text says, "Turn on your images."
I think I saw that from Frank Kerr many years ago, and that's just a neat li\le way for the machine to have some personality. "Hey, you're not seeing these images. Why don't you turn them on?" Then best prac7ces, I'll throw one more at you, is leverage the 7me of day and the day if possible, especially where we're talking about automated emails from sales reps. If you're having an email that goes out at 8 a.m. don't just say, "Hello first name," literally say, "Good morning, first name."
You can do that because again, being inten7onal, you know this email's coming out at 8 a.m. just as if the sales rep sat down and actually typed it at 8 a.m. Write the email like that. "Hey, good morning, first name," and something that's really cool is merging in the actual day of the week as well, which some systems can do. "Hey, I hope you're having a great 'day of the week' morning." It just humanizes it. Good automa7on should not feel automated. It should actually feel completely relevant to exactly what that person has done or needs to do, and any experiences they've had up to that point.
Bob:
Those are fantas7c insights, Paul, and I think there's a lot of gold in there, so we'll definitely want to read the transcripts of that again a li\le bit later on. What I'd love to know now is we've talked a bit about some of the elements of best prac7ces and what people have in front of them today, at this moment. I'd like to see where your brain goes for the future of marke7ng automa7on. It's not enough, I think, for a savvy business owner to just do what's possible today, but also keep on the radar what's going to be coming down several months from now, a year or 2 from now. Your role at InfusionsoG and as a major player in this industry, what do you see happening in the next year or so that people should be thinking forward to?
Paul:
That's a great ques7on. I love that. Everything is focusing around the consumer these days. Really the consumer has all of the buying power and the consumer owns the experience. Look at the auto industry. It's such a legacy, good old boys, old-‐school business model that doesn't work anymore. I hate buying cars, just because it's a bad experience. It hasn't evolved. Then you have companies like Tesla, that are directly selling to the consumer and it's a good experience. Then of course, those two are
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figh7ng and all that jazz. But the point is it's returning back to the individual rela7onship and that has to be front and center.
The challenge is doing it front and center across all channels, because again, we're just automa7ng rela7onships at scale. Let's say I'm a sales rep, and I'm talking to you on email, and then maybe I'm tex7ng you or whatnot. I need to know that informa7on all at once. Maybe I had a chat with you on Facebook or something. That's where the future is going. It's being able to munch together all these different interac7on points and using all of that informa7on to make the best decision, being able to see, "Okay, this person leG 4 likes on my page post within the past month and leG a comment, and then they sent me an email."
I need to be able to know all of that and leverage that. It's geHng rid of this whole cross-‐channel, omni-‐channel no7on, and just realizing that there is only one experience. It doesn't ma\er. Consumers don't care if they texted you or they sent you an email, or they sent you a le\er. They don't care. They communicated to you. It's your responsibility as a business to know that that happened. They don't care if your system can't do Instant Messenger, it can't do Facebook. Too bad, and that's where the technology's going.
It's this ability to, across all channels, not only pull in this data, but intelligently analyze it and say, "Hey, you should probably pay a\en7on to this person. They're 30 days due but then they just leG a really nega7ve sen7ment comment on your Facebook page. You got to do something about it." As far as the automa7on piece, then that's where we can be even more targeted, because automa7on isn't just about geHng the right message to the right person at the right 7me. It's actually about geHng it to them on the right channel, too. Somebody's got a bill that's overdue and then they're leaving a poor comment on Facebook, being able to automa7cally reply to that with a relevant comment is very handy.
That's also where we're going to start seeing more natural language processing too, so not just sen7ment analysis, but being able to really understand what is somebody saying here. I know that's super heady and way out there, but that's where it's going. Also voice automa7on, too. That's the next major thing. I've seen this in some consumer products like Fire. I don't know if you remember. There was the commercials with Gary Busey. He's yelling at his TV and it's hilarious, but that really is where it's going. There's something like theory, that next technological step. We're going to start seeing more of that. In theory you should be able to, with automa7on, do something from that.
Bob:
I love this. There's no too heady for this course, so as much as we want to geek out about it as possible is certainly okay by me. I love how people can see, from what you just said, that a year from now, maybe 18 months from now, the things that they are wowed by from bigger players, like Amazon Fire, can be at their finger7ps because of the cost of marke7ng automa7on really equalizes the playing field. How cool will it be for someone to have, not just voice prompts, like they do with call centers right now press 2 if you want this or press 3 if you want that, but a real dynamic voice recogni7on conversa7on with their customer base that gives them more fluidity and more flexibility of what they want to implement.
Paul:
Yes. Oh, man, can I share a mind-‐blowing voice automated experience with you?
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Bob:
Please.
Paul:
On this topic here, so I'd like to consider myself pre\y savvy. I know when emails are automated, when phone calls are automated and whatnot. I received a phone call from a standard number. I was having a conversa7on with a machine, but it literally took me like 2 minutes to realize what I was saying didn't ma\er. Again, back to this inten7onality here. There were certain ques7ons. They were generally like a yes or no ques7on and this machine would ... I forget what the topic was. I think it was something about lowering student loan debt or something like that. It was like, "Hey, I'm blank with blah, blah, blah. Do you have a couple of minutes to chat about your possible student loans." I'm like, "Yeah, sure. I guess. Whatever." Short pause.
"Great. Tell me about this." I gave it the touring test at some point because I didn't believe him. I'm like, "What's today's date?" Then it's like, "I don't understand your ques7on." I'm like, "Ah. I got you." But it got me. Who knows what it was doing again. I guarantee it was recording that audio, transcribing it and doing a quick processing on what I'm saying and going from there. We're just going to see a lot more of that and yeah, like you said, what's going to wow people in a year from now is going to be exactly available to small businesses too, which is very exci7ng. The playing field is totally leveled as long as you're strategically sound and being inten7onal about what you're automa7ng, what experience you are designing.
Bob:
I think that's the trick, right, is there's all kinds of bells and whistles of what is possible, but geHng really clear about what you want, what you want as a result is going to ul7mately drive what your choices are and what your implementa7on speed is.
Paul:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because automa7on is just there to get an end result, right? There's a McDonald's down here that will now automa7cally build you your burger. That had to be broken down very inten7onally. If somebody wants a Big Mac, what's the first thing that happens? Bo\om bun, and then pa\y 1, whatever. You've got to know what you're building and then design for that.
Bob:
Awesome. Well this has been very fascina7ng, Paul, and I'm looking forward to reviewing my notes on this par7cular training. I'd love to know if there's some resources you want to point us to where our listeners can go to to find out more about the way InfusionsoG looks at marke7ng automa7on and about this area of marke7ng in general.
Paul:
Yeah. My role is to ... Well, one of my roles here is to create free campaign models for different business purposes. The cool thing is that the strategies are plaJorm agnos7c. Yes, you install it into your InfusionsoG app, but the strategies, it doesn't ma\er what plaJorm you're using. If you go to marketplace.infusionsoG.com, there's a ... That's where all of our cer7fied partners and third party apps and things are. There's a campaign sec7on in there, and as of this recording, there's over 90 free campaign models that you can download for different purposes. I think I men7oned earlier is that easy hiring one.
You can take someone from one landing page to confirm their email address to another landing page and then and only then does a human actually get a task to follow up with them because they did it. Looking at something like lead magnet delivery, there's always some free report, free mp3, free audio. But again, the structures are all kind of the same. If you are an InfusionsoG user and you want to get a li\le deeper, specifically into my head and how I think, because I'm kind of a super-‐analy7cal, data-‐driven dude. I
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actually just wrote a book called The InfusionsoG Cookbook. It's available on Packt Publishing.
You can get it off Amazon or there's a lot of outlets out there. It's literally a cookbook. It is. For example, do you want to send an expiring credit card reminder to somebody? Go through these steps. It's just like a recipe. This, this and this, s7r here. Bake it 350 degrees for an hour and boom, you've got this end result. If that's interes7ng, you can go to ISCookbook.com, check it out. As the listeners, you can probably tell, automa7on's all based on strategy, and what you got going on here. We have a lot of resources on our blog, if you just go to the InfusionsoG blog. We're always wri7ng things.
Hey, here's 25 things you can automate that maybe you hadn't thought about, looking at how to automate for sales teams. Like how do you automate a voice to voice sales conversa7on? Well, you can't necessarily automate the conversa7on. You can definitely automate ac7ons that occur in that conversa7on. I would check out the InfusionsoG blog. We're always puHng out ideas. Again, the strategies are plaJorm agnos7c. You don't necessarily have to be using InfusionsoG because again, if you can write an email ... It's the content. It's the message of that email that's important and that's where the strategy works, not necessarily the tool. I can go to Home Depot and buy 40 different drills, but the end result I'm looking for is a hole in my wall.
Bob:
That's over at leadpages.to/infusionso
MARKETING AUTOMATION FOR SMALL BUSINESS
Bob The Teacher, Manager of Marke1ng Educa1on at LeadPages®
BONUS CONVERSATION: INFUSIONSOFT Bob The Teacher and Paul Sokol Note: The following transcripts have been created to assist you in implemen:ng the lessons of this course. Since they are essen:ally verba:m, these transcripts should be read with a “speaking” English perspec:ve, as they may contain slight gramma:cal errors due to the nature of recorded training.
Welcome to this bonus module of the Marke7ng Automa7on for Small Business course. This is Bob, the teacher, the manager of marke7ng educa7on here at LeadPages®, and I'm excited to bring to you this conversa7on with Paul Sokol, campaign builder, mad scien7st over at InfusionsoG. Paul is going to share with you some insights that are going to blow your mind around campaigns, and what are some of the best prac7ces of automa7on that a lot of business owners simply aren't geHng right without this informa7on. Let's jump in to this insighJul conversa7on. Bob:
Hey, Paul, thanks so much for joining me for this bonus module of the Marke7ng Automa7on for Small Business course.
Paul:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm definitely excited to chat with you today.
Bob:
Excellent. Now before we dig too deep into some of the ques7ons I have for you, I would love to know what gets you most excited about marke7ng automa7on.
Paul:
What gets me most excited about marke7ng automa7on is experiencing it, but like a good experience. You see this with a lot of the newer start-‐up leader companies, like Uber and recently I've been geHng emails from Fitbit. It's just really cool when there's good, targeted automa7on that provides value. That excites me, because I know that someone sat down and inten7onally created an experience. It's just not like some crumby transac7onal plain text email that looks like a robot would have trouble reading it.
Bob:
I love that word inten7onality. I think we'll probably hit on that a couple of 7mes through the conversa7on today.
Paul:
Oh, yeah.
Bob:
Before we get into some of the best prac7ces and challenges, and things like that, I'd love to know, over at InfusionsoG, what are some of the ways that you and your company are benefi7ng from marke7ng automa7on.
Paul:
We have a en7re demand genera7on team that heavily leverages marke7ng automa7on because there's a finite number of human resources. There's a finite number of sales reps, a finite number of lead development reps, and we're geHng way more leads every single day than is realis7c to call every single one of them. Plus not everybody is all qualified to even have a conversa7on with that either, it being a waste of their 7me or a waste of our 7me, or stuff that's both.
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Marke7ng automa7on allows us to bubble up people that are truly engaged, and there's a good probability we may actually be a good fit for them. That saves man hours, saves 7me, and in the end it ... In theory, it should be crea7ng a be\er customer experience, and that's something that we're always looking to improve, is crea7ng those one-‐on-‐ one rela7onships at scale, no ma\er how big that scale is.
Bob:
A running theme in the course and these bonus modules has been that idea of emula7ng the one-‐on-‐one communica7on, so I'm excited to hear that that's happening for you and your team as well.
Paul:
Oh yeah.
Bob:
Talk to us a li\le bit about some of the cri7cal challenges that you're seeing business owners face. What are they running into, geHng stuck with, when it comes to marke7ng automa7on?
Paul:
Here's where we'll come back to this we're inten7onal here. I think where most people fall down and skin their knee is they're trying to automate something that they're not even clear on. They'll say, "Oh, I want to automate my sales process," and then so you get into it. "Okay, so what's your sale process?" "Okay, well we collect a lead and then we call them and we close them. Automate that." We're like, "No." There's way more to it. In order to automate ...
Automa7ng anything, automa7ng a process, a process has specific steps in a specific order, and where I see people falling down with marke7ng automa7on is they do not know what their steps are, and/or they do not know what order they're supposed to be in. They're trying to automate something that they're not even clear on, and then they wonder why the experience is bad or why it's not working. It's because you're not inten7onal about what your process is. You don't understand it enough at a really deep, in7mate level, to be able to automate. Think about how car manufacturers work. They have those robot welding machines. You've seen those, right, Bob, or at least you know?
Bob:
Yep.
Paul:
Those giant robo7c arms that are spot-‐welding. Engineers didn't just wake up and say, "Hey, here's a spot-‐welder." That's supremely inten7onal. Those are tolerances of tenths of a thousandth of an inch, so that's how they can automate because they understand that. They understand exactly what steps, in what order, and then they can build an automated car crea7on machine. Most small businesses have never thought that far deep into that process, because it's all tribal.
It's all in their head. They know how to do their sales process because it's just been done for the past whatever, 2, 3, 5, 10 years. They've never sat down and been, "First I do A. Why am I doing A? What's the point of A? Okay, that gets me to B. What is B? How do I do B? How do I track if that's effec7ve?" I see, I guess the Twi\er version is people fall down because they're trying to automate something before they even know what that something is.
Bob:
The big lesson we're hoping to convey to people in this course is don't automate things that you haven't tested yet, because there will be automa7ng mistakes, and there's probably nothing worse to scale than your mistakes. You don't want that to get bigger.
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Paul:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Garbage in, garbage out. If you automate a bad process, you're just going to get more bad processes.
Bob:
Indeed. Talk to me a li\le bit about some of those key opportuni7es that business owners are facing. What's available to them that they may not realize that they can automate?
Paul:
This course I know has been primarily focusing on marke7ng automa7on, and so that's a lot of the front end of the funnel stuff, the discovery, where they become a lead and then we sell them. But what a lot of small businesses in par7cular don't realize ... A lot of corporate businesses get this because they have to understand this, but there's the internal process automa7on, or the streamlining of it. You can use marke7ng automa7on to streamline your hiring process. Give people a couple of hoops to jump through.
Maybe they have to give you their email and then confirm it, and then they can answer a couple of ques7ons to finish their interview. We've got a free campaign in the marketplace called Easy Hiring, which does exactly that. I think looking at the staff from 2014, it successfully weeded out 1/3 of applicants that couldn't even follow basic instruc7ons. I'm like literally basic like go to your email and confirm it. One of every 3 people that applied, across all the customers, didn't do that. What kind of employee do you think they would be? They'd be a bad one. They can't even log into email and confirm it.
You can use it for things like billing collec7on. It's real easy when a billing a\empt occurs and it fails, kick out a task for somebody to call them and say, "Hey, let's get a credit card," or whatever the case is. Look for areas of automa7on across your en7re business, not just the whole marke7ng and sales piece. Yeah, that's important but that's where people get blinders. They forget that there's the en7re opera7on and fulfillment and financial side of their business that can also benefit from, maybe not the exact same automa7on tac7cs, but certainly similar ideas.
Bob:
I love that idea. I know that we do have a module that touches on the internal aspect of things, but a lot of people do focus on that external, and I'm glad that we're able to marry the two together. To me it's all about leverage and saving 7me, and doing the right things at scale, so that's a great, great, great point. Talk to us a li\le bit more about best prac7ces of marke7ng automa7on. I know you and InfusionsoG, you have a lot of customers that are successfully puHng together campaigns, and puHng together sequences and things like that. What are you seeing amongst your customer base that people are really nailing it?
Paul:
That's like asking what can you do with a hammer and nail. There's just so many things. One best prac7ce is always puHng yourself in the shoes of whoever's receiving this automated experience. Because that's really where we're talking about high leverage. It's automated experience design, so I'm designing this automated lead [inaudible 00:07:24]. I'm designing this automated product fulfillment thing. You always want to put yourself in the shoes of whoever's receiving that experience.
Make sure that it does not feel synthe7c or robo7c, because that just takes away from it. The whole point of automa7on, it's there to enhance those rela7onships. But when you do poor automa7on, it actually takes away from it. I think you men7oned earlier to where people are trying to ... What did you say? It's automa7ng bad stuff. When you're
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designing automa7on, always do it from the recipient, the end user, the customer's experience first, and make sure that that's clean. Then it doesn't ma\er how messy it is on the back end or under the hood, as long as it gets that experience.
Another thing is humanize it. Write your messages like you're talking to your friend. When you're siHng down and wri7ng an email, pretend that you're wri7ng that to a single person, who's a decent friend of yours that has gone through a certain pathway to get to that point. Let's say it's an email trying to get somebody to download a lead magnet that they just opted in for. What would you do if your friend did that. "Hey, what's going on, Bob? Here's that lead magnet that you wanted. Hope you like it. Oh, by the way, check out on page 3, there's something really cool where I talk about blah."
Then if you're doing a follow-‐up email for people that have not downloaded it, again, how would that sound? "Hey, Bob, I saw that last week you requested this, but you didn't download it. That's cool. Hey, here's the link again." Obviously, depending on your own businesses, show some tone and the language that you use, maybe it's a li\le more or less casual than that. It's a human. It's a one-‐to-‐one rela7onship, so write it for a human. Make it fun. One thing that I love to do on my ... I've got a newsle\er and it's got li\le header images in it. The alternate text says, "Turn on your images."
I think I saw that from Frank Kerr many years ago, and that's just a neat li\le way for the machine to have some personality. "Hey, you're not seeing these images. Why don't you turn them on?" Then best prac7ces, I'll throw one more at you, is leverage the 7me of day and the day if possible, especially where we're talking about automated emails from sales reps. If you're having an email that goes out at 8 a.m. don't just say, "Hello first name," literally say, "Good morning, first name."
You can do that because again, being inten7onal, you know this email's coming out at 8 a.m. just as if the sales rep sat down and actually typed it at 8 a.m. Write the email like that. "Hey, good morning, first name," and something that's really cool is merging in the actual day of the week as well, which some systems can do. "Hey, I hope you're having a great 'day of the week' morning." It just humanizes it. Good automa7on should not feel automated. It should actually feel completely relevant to exactly what that person has done or needs to do, and any experiences they've had up to that point.
Bob:
Those are fantas7c insights, Paul, and I think there's a lot of gold in there, so we'll definitely want to read the transcripts of that again a li\le bit later on. What I'd love to know now is we've talked a bit about some of the elements of best prac7ces and what people have in front of them today, at this moment. I'd like to see where your brain goes for the future of marke7ng automa7on. It's not enough, I think, for a savvy business owner to just do what's possible today, but also keep on the radar what's going to be coming down several months from now, a year or 2 from now. Your role at InfusionsoG and as a major player in this industry, what do you see happening in the next year or so that people should be thinking forward to?
Paul:
That's a great ques7on. I love that. Everything is focusing around the consumer these days. Really the consumer has all of the buying power and the consumer owns the experience. Look at the auto industry. It's such a legacy, good old boys, old-‐school business model that doesn't work anymore. I hate buying cars, just because it's a bad experience. It hasn't evolved. Then you have companies like Tesla, that are directly selling to the consumer and it's a good experience. Then of course, those two are
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figh7ng and all that jazz. But the point is it's returning back to the individual rela7onship and that has to be front and center.
The challenge is doing it front and center across all channels, because again, we're just automa7ng rela7onships at scale. Let's say I'm a sales rep, and I'm talking to you on email, and then maybe I'm tex7ng you or whatnot. I need to know that informa7on all at once. Maybe I had a chat with you on Facebook or something. That's where the future is going. It's being able to munch together all these different interac7on points and using all of that informa7on to make the best decision, being able to see, "Okay, this person leG 4 likes on my page post within the past month and leG a comment, and then they sent me an email."
I need to be able to know all of that and leverage that. It's geHng rid of this whole cross-‐channel, omni-‐channel no7on, and just realizing that there is only one experience. It doesn't ma\er. Consumers don't care if they texted you or they sent you an email, or they sent you a le\er. They don't care. They communicated to you. It's your responsibility as a business to know that that happened. They don't care if your system can't do Instant Messenger, it can't do Facebook. Too bad, and that's where the technology's going.
It's this ability to, across all channels, not only pull in this data, but intelligently analyze it and say, "Hey, you should probably pay a\en7on to this person. They're 30 days due but then they just leG a really nega7ve sen7ment comment on your Facebook page. You got to do something about it." As far as the automa7on piece, then that's where we can be even more targeted, because automa7on isn't just about geHng the right message to the right person at the right 7me. It's actually about geHng it to them on the right channel, too. Somebody's got a bill that's overdue and then they're leaving a poor comment on Facebook, being able to automa7cally reply to that with a relevant comment is very handy.
That's also where we're going to start seeing more natural language processing too, so not just sen7ment analysis, but being able to really understand what is somebody saying here. I know that's super heady and way out there, but that's where it's going. Also voice automa7on, too. That's the next major thing. I've seen this in some consumer products like Fire. I don't know if you remember. There was the commercials with Gary Busey. He's yelling at his TV and it's hilarious, but that really is where it's going. There's something like theory, that next technological step. We're going to start seeing more of that. In theory you should be able to, with automa7on, do something from that.
Bob:
I love this. There's no too heady for this course, so as much as we want to geek out about it as possible is certainly okay by me. I love how people can see, from what you just said, that a year from now, maybe 18 months from now, the things that they are wowed by from bigger players, like Amazon Fire, can be at their finger7ps because of the cost of marke7ng automa7on really equalizes the playing field. How cool will it be for someone to have, not just voice prompts, like they do with call centers right now press 2 if you want this or press 3 if you want that, but a real dynamic voice recogni7on conversa7on with their customer base that gives them more fluidity and more flexibility of what they want to implement.
Paul:
Yes. Oh, man, can I share a mind-‐blowing voice automated experience with you?
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Bob:
Please.
Paul:
On this topic here, so I'd like to consider myself pre\y savvy. I know when emails are automated, when phone calls are automated and whatnot. I received a phone call from a standard number. I was having a conversa7on with a machine, but it literally took me like 2 minutes to realize what I was saying didn't ma\er. Again, back to this inten7onality here. There were certain ques7ons. They were generally like a yes or no ques7on and this machine would ... I forget what the topic was. I think it was something about lowering student loan debt or something like that. It was like, "Hey, I'm blank with blah, blah, blah. Do you have a couple of minutes to chat about your possible student loans." I'm like, "Yeah, sure. I guess. Whatever." Short pause.
"Great. Tell me about this." I gave it the touring test at some point because I didn't believe him. I'm like, "What's today's date?" Then it's like, "I don't understand your ques7on." I'm like, "Ah. I got you." But it got me. Who knows what it was doing again. I guarantee it was recording that audio, transcribing it and doing a quick processing on what I'm saying and going from there. We're just going to see a lot more of that and yeah, like you said, what's going to wow people in a year from now is going to be exactly available to small businesses too, which is very exci7ng. The playing field is totally leveled as long as you're strategically sound and being inten7onal about what you're automa7ng, what experience you are designing.
Bob:
I think that's the trick, right, is there's all kinds of bells and whistles of what is possible, but geHng really clear about what you want, what you want as a result is going to ul7mately drive what your choices are and what your implementa7on speed is.
Paul:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because automa7on is just there to get an end result, right? There's a McDonald's down here that will now automa7cally build you your burger. That had to be broken down very inten7onally. If somebody wants a Big Mac, what's the first thing that happens? Bo\om bun, and then pa\y 1, whatever. You've got to know what you're building and then design for that.
Bob:
Awesome. Well this has been very fascina7ng, Paul, and I'm looking forward to reviewing my notes on this par7cular training. I'd love to know if there's some resources you want to point us to where our listeners can go to to find out more about the way InfusionsoG looks at marke7ng automa7on and about this area of marke7ng in general.
Paul:
Yeah. My role is to ... Well, one of my roles here is to create free campaign models for different business purposes. The cool thing is that the strategies are plaJorm agnos7c. Yes, you install it into your InfusionsoG app, but the strategies, it doesn't ma\er what plaJorm you're using. If you go to marketplace.infusionsoG.com, there's a ... That's where all of our cer7fied partners and third party apps and things are. There's a campaign sec7on in there, and as of this recording, there's over 90 free campaign models that you can download for different purposes. I think I men7oned earlier is that easy hiring one.
You can take someone from one landing page to confirm their email address to another landing page and then and only then does a human actually get a task to follow up with them because they did it. Looking at something like lead magnet delivery, there's always some free report, free mp3, free audio. But again, the structures are all kind of the same. If you are an InfusionsoG user and you want to get a li\le deeper, specifically into my head and how I think, because I'm kind of a super-‐analy7cal, data-‐driven dude. I
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actually just wrote a book called The InfusionsoG Cookbook. It's available on Packt Publishing.
You can get it off Amazon or there's a lot of outlets out there. It's literally a cookbook. It is. For example, do you want to send an expiring credit card reminder to somebody? Go through these steps. It's just like a recipe. This, this and this, s7r here. Bake it 350 degrees for an hour and boom, you've got this end result. If that's interes7ng, you can go to ISCookbook.com, check it out. As the listeners, you can probably tell, automa7on's all based on strategy, and what you got going on here. We have a lot of resources on our blog, if you just go to the InfusionsoG blog. We're always wri7ng things.
Hey, here's 25 things you can automate that maybe you hadn't thought about, looking at how to automate for sales teams. Like how do you automate a voice to voice sales conversa7on? Well, you can't necessarily automate the conversa7on. You can definitely automate ac7ons that occur in that conversa7on. I would check out the InfusionsoG blog. We're always puHng out ideas. Again, the strategies are plaJorm agnos7c. You don't necessarily have to be using InfusionsoG because again, if you can write an email ... It's the content. It's the message of that email that's important and that's where the strategy works, not necessarily the tool. I can go to Home Depot and buy 40 different drills, but the end result I'm looking for is a hole in my wall.
Bob:
That's over at leadpages.to/infusionso
