Jake Hower, a seasoned expert in automated marketing. In this episode, Ash and Jake explore the intricacies of marketing automation, from its fundamental principles to practical strategies for implementation.
Discover how marketing automation goes beyond mere efficiency to become a catalyst for delivering unparalleled customer value and driving sustainable business success. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur seeking to optimize your marketing efforts or a budding professional eager to harness the potential of automation, this comprehensive guide promises to equip you with the knowledge and insights needed to unlock the transformative power of marketing automation.
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Ash Roy
Welcome to the Productive Insights podcast for entrepreneurs and professionals where we discuss how to leverage your business online and how to maximize your profitability. This is Ash from productiveinsights.com. And I'd like to welcome someone who's extremely knowledgeable when it comes to automated marketing. He's more than your average Wiz kid. He's created the fused app and these days he spends most of his time on his website called increcio.com, spelled incresio.com. So I'd like to welcome Jake Hauer. Welcome, Jake.
Jake Hower
Thanks, Ash. Great to be here.
Ash Roy
Let's talk a bit about how marketing automation applies to businesses and why business owners should see marketing automation as a critical tool. And actually, before we do that, let's just talk about what marketing automation is exactly. Cool.
Jake Hower
So marketing automation, it's a term I guess, that has obviously been popularized by the marketing automation platforms. I don't really see it. I think that's a pretty bad term for it because I guess automation implies, you know, robotic, it implies lower levels of service. And the reality is that these platforms can actually enhance the service you're providing to your clients. So a typical business owner will see marketing automation as sort of like a scummy and a lowering of service, but you can actually use it in a way and set up in a way where it actually enhances the service. So think of marketing automation like, I guess, a business systems improvement.
Ash Roy
Okay, what we're talking about here is like the Mercedes Benz of marketing.
Jake Hower
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yep. That's exactly right. So I think what's really important to understand anybody looking to actually utilize any type of like automation or systems in the business is actually to not hide behind the systems and to not become robotic. I think as a business owner, I guess the key to success is providing higher levels of service. The way a lot of business is going now is going down that, you know, hiding behind call recording software and, you know, like having like automated answering services and hiding behind email and, you know, just literally hiding behind systems. Systems. So I think small businesses and in fact, all businesses can have a lot of success if they try and put themselves and their company front and center and not hide behind these things. So it actually works better. If you understand how you can utilize these platforms and these systems to actually enable you to spend more time servicing your customer, then you're really going to see great results from that.
Ash Roy
You make a really good point. I think that Apple has really done that very well. They've created design, as Jony Ive says, our design should be so good that it should be invisible when it comes to the customer and it should just relegate into the background and just present the customer with a perfect experience. And that's what I'm hearing you're doing with marketing automation. Is that correct?
Jake Hower
Spot on. Spot on. So it's creating simple systems, simple, powerful systems, I guess. Really working towards the goal. The customer having a great experience of you having a great experience with your business, and also very importantly, with your staff having a great experience.
Ash Roy
The marketing automation facilitates an outcome rather than becomes an end in itself. It just invisibly sits there and delivers. It helps the business owner get to a result.
Jake Hower
Yep, exactly right. Exactly right. So yeah, you're implementing so that you can actually get, get the systems working harder for you so that you've got more time to be out at front and actually spending that, you know, wowing your customer.
Ash Roy
Actually something that would be fantastic is talking in terms of a case study.
Jake Hower
Cool.
Ash Roy
Absolutely.
Jake Hower
We'll use a membership site as an example. And so this is somebody, let's call him Kevin. And he's got an active community. Is relatively new using Aweber, just for my listeners.
Ash Roy
Aweber is an email marketing provider and it's a solution that helps automate the emailing process.
Jake Hower
Yeah, exactly. It's a, it's an email platform. And basically, I guess he was looking for a solution which is, number one, going to deliver more customers. Number two, was going to improve the experience for existing customers if we break down the components of a successful membership community. So you've got, number one, you've got a way to actually get people into the community. Number two, you need to have some way to, you know, onboard and I guess integrate a new user into the community so that they keep coming back. Number three, you need to, obviously you want to try and minimize refunds or decline transactions. So there's a relatively simple campaign you can put in place to actually remove that or, you know, to help improve the conversion rate from that perspective. And for those that do leave, you want to understand why they're leaving so that you can incorporate some of those reasons into either your sales sequence or sales funnel and also into the onboarding experience so you can, you know, counter some issues that people are having. Hopefully to avoid that same issue arising for new users. So the four components that we really focused on within CrescEo for Kevin is, number one, we created a nice simple sales sequence to actually encourage people who are visiting his website to sign up. Then we created a very simple onboarding sequence to encourage interaction and stickiness with the user. We installed a decline card campaign, which is very simple to do, and then also just a really simple cancellation sequence, which really was the purpose of that was to extract information from the user and find out why they cancelled. I'm going to get relatively meta here and explain pretty much exactly what it was so that the listener can go out and implement this. The good thing is that these sequences are actually very applicable to most businesses, and I'll try and give you some perspective as to how you would implement them in the majority of businesses as well as we go along. So the cancelled user sequence. So this is really, it's as simple as basically when someone cancels, then generally what you'll need to send them. Obviously it's just a confirmation message of some sort to let them know that they've cancelled, generally within a period of 24 hours. It's great to send a more sort of personalized email and just really just asking one question. It's like, hey, I saw you cancelled. Do you mind letting me know why or how I could improve? And all you're trying to do is you're trying to, you're not trying to put words in the user's mouth, so you're just trying to basically extract from them their real reason for why they cancelled. So what you can do with that information is you can put it back into your sales copy or your webpage before someone signs up, you know, answering questions or improving the experience. That one simple sequence which takes less than a couple of minutes to set up, when you're using the right program, it generates big results and they're compounding results. So working backwards from there, the decline card sequence. Now typically what I've seen is that roughly 20% of subscription accounts will actually decline each month. So if you've got 100 users who are paying you x amount of dollars per month, then up to 20 of those people will actually have a decline transaction for some reason. Now often it's not because they've got sufficient funds on their card, but it can be for reasons like expiring cards. It can be that a lot of people now are using debit cards and then just topping up their account rather than it being an actual credit facility. So this is really common, and if you let it slip, you'll actually see people basically would churn out of the community or just basically leave the community simply because they haven't known to update their credit card.
Ash Roy
Right. So I can see how this becomes a very valuable customer retention tool. And in fact, you know, in this particular situation, it's not even like the customer is leaving because they want to. It's just clipping through the cracks and your software fixes that.
Jake Hower
Exactly. So typically a lot of platforms will be able to send an email once when a transaction declines, for example, they may be in a situation where they can view an email but can't enact on it. So for instance, I'll get up in the morning, the first thing I do is check my emails before I get out of bed and then I'll, you know, go through and I'll delete and then I'd come back to a lot of emails. So other situations might be you're waking up, you've got, you've got the, the kids interrupt you or you're standing in the line at the bank and you're browsing through your emails and then obviously your turn to come up to the counter comes across and so you've basically forgotten. So typically what will happen is that your email, they will have every intention of responding to, but then life gets in the way and then they receive more emails and then they just don't get around to it. It drops off the front page of the inbox and they just don't ever get back to it. So by adding in, I generally recommend another two reminder emails and generally I space them out about two or three days between each other. They serve literally as just a prompt. And what you're hopefully doing with those emails is just getting the user at the right time where they do have the ability to actually action the update of the card information and the probability.
Ash Roy
Is higher that you will if you're giving them two or three reminders as compared to if they just had.
Jake Hower
Exactly, exactly. So what I find again, 20% is probably the capture rate of emails that go out for every additional email you add into the sequence. So you'll pick up 20% more users who actually do update their details for each email that's sent out.
Ash Roy
Okay, so the decline card sequence, automated emails reduces the amount of leakage of customers that, you know, just forget or don't get around to renewing their service. And the cancelled user sequence gives you information about why a customer left. And that helps you create better copy around, overcoming objections.
Jake Hower
It does exactly right. And the other thing, the key thing it does is it removes, removes the amount of effort that someone on staff has to go to to manually follow up with those decline cards to pick up the phone or to send an email manually, or it just adds in an extra step that your staff just don't have time to actually do.
Ash Roy
Yes, and as I said in my interview with James Schramko in one of my earlier podcasts, it's nine times as expensive to acquire a new customer as it is to retain an existing one. So, you know, it makes a lot more sense to retain them. And this is what marketing automation can do.
Jake Hower
Exactly. Most declined cards aren't because someone doesn't want to be a user. They're simply because there is just some sort of little issue that just needs to be rectified and they just need to be prompted and hit at the right time in order to get that, get, to get that fixed up and out of the way. So you can either choose to ignore it completely and you lose good customers, or you can, you know, plug the holes and keep or optimize the amount of customers you have.
Ash Roy
Okay, so we've talked about the cancelled user sequence and the decline card sequence.
Jake Hower
There's two more. The next one, I think that's quite important is the onboarding sequence. Now, for a membership site, the goal of this sequence is to, I guess, to highlight everything that the membership offers or the forum offers and to encourage the user to engage and start communicating inside of the community for another business. Now this might be, or most businesses have a certain set of information that they need to share with, with somebody when they become a customer. So whether it's talking about next steps in terms of, like, who's going to contact them next and how the process is going to flow for the product that I purchased, or, or maybe it's even, you know, educating the customer about your company and about how you work and a philosophy, you know, just to create a good experience for them. Or it may be that you've got something else that your customer may be very interested in potentially buying, that you can just highlight this in the, in the onboarding sequence. So if they purchase product x, then you might want to recommend product y. And so this sequence typically is relatively short, between a week and two weeks. It can be as simple as one single email, or it might be multiple emails, or it might be some, you might be sending some physical mail to them. But typically most businesses don't do this in a consistent way. So the experience for a user or for a customer in your business will be very haphazard. One customer may have a completely different experience upon becoming a customer than somebody else would. The idea with this sequence is you're trying to standardize it so that the experience someone's having is very similar. Okay, that's relatively straightforward. That one. The last one for the membership site we implemented was basically creating a nice sales funnel so that we're maximizing the sign ups from people visiting the site. And this is relatively easy to do. The community that Kevin had built already had fantastic material in it. And so what we did is we pulled out three of the top material in the community already. So we focused on, he has some training products in the community. So we, we pulled out three of the best training products and pulled out the best module from each of those. And we added each of those into a hidden page on his site. And we created an email sequence which pushed people to each of those videos over the course of two weeks. So the idea of this was that basically we'll giving the potential user a preview of what they'll receive when they're a full community member. And so we highlighted how valuable the training was and then encouraged them to come along and purchase and sign up.
Ash Roy
Okay, so it's starting to become a lot clearer to me now. Hopefully my listeners will start to get a feel for exactly how marketing automation really creates a Mercedes Benz experience, or even a Ferrari experience. Through cancelled user sequences, decline card sequences, we are minimizing leakage, overcoming objections, understanding what issues customers are facing, and feeding that back into the business through better copywriting. We're using onboarding sequences and simple sales sequences where we are helping the customers interact with the best content and give them a flavor for what they will get if they join the membership site.
Jake Hower
Exactly, exactly. So we're using automated means to actually encourage someone to become a user.
Ash Roy
So it's actually improving their experience overall because they're getting the best of the best information targeted to their needs, helping them make decisions about whether to.
Jake Hower
Exactly. I think the big roadblock for them is creating all the content that they need to put into their sales funnel without realizing that they've already done it. They've already done put in the hard yards, they've already got the content, and all they need to do is highlight it.
Ash Roy
And you know what? Actually, I think I need to do the same thing.
Jake Hower
All you need to do is invest a couple of hours. As I said, these sequences are incredibly simple. They require a very limited amount of copywriting in terms of creating the content for the email, and you're just highlighting your best content in a way that it encourages them to become a customer.
Ash Roy
Cool. Well, you know what? Maybe we can do it as a mini case study and we can come back and revisit this sometime. I'll try and implement what you've said and see how I go.
Absolutely. Probably good for you. The listener. Now to understand what platforms they can do this in, simply. So there's three that I recommend. The first is active campaign, the second is infusionsoft, and the third is entreport.
Ash Roy
Okay, well, I've just moved across from Aweber to activecampaign, so I'm really delighted to hear that. Now, infusionsoft, I believe is for relatively larger businesses and has a little bit of a learning curve. Activecampaign is fairly quick and economical. There's not too much of a learning curve and I don't know a lot about entreport.
Jake Hower
All three have their advantages and disadvantages. You'll be able to make all three work. I'm an infusionsoft user, but I use activecampaign and entreport in other businesses. I guess if you're already using something like Mailchimp or Aweber or campaign monitor or something like that, an activecampaign is a pretty seamless switch at a very comparative price. So that's probably the easiest switch that somebody can make.
Ash Roy
And the interface is really simple as well.
Jake Hower
Yep, absolutely. For businesses with revenue already and with the team, then entrepreneurial infusionsoft are probably going to be a better solution, potentially. As you said, they have a bit more of a learning curve and you'd probably anticipate spending a couple of get that integrated into your business. But on the flip side, the value you're going to get immediately from it is well and truly going to cover any expense to actually install a platform.
Ash Roy
Okay. And I believe you know a lot about Infusionsoft and these various automated marketing services, is that right?
Jake Hower
Yes. We've had to use them for the last two years with fused, but Crescio now focuses on right campaigns to install for a business to, I guess, to make the biggest differences, which platform is the best for particular use case.
Ash Roy
So if somebody comes to encresio.com and says, hey, this is my business, can you tell me what's best for me? You will have a look at their business and then you'll recommend whatever's best.
Jake Hower
Exactly right. And more importantly, what we'll do is we'll give a good assessment of where we think they're going to be able to most quickly and most profitably move the needle. So whether it's, if they've already got an existing sales process, it might just be tightening up that to actually make it work a little bit better. If they're already got some paid media funnels in place, then it might just be tightening up, though. So generally I tend to look at results and then simple things you can actually implement to actually get even better results.
Ash Roy
Okay, so it's getting a lot clearer to me now. You are helping businesses use their existing infrastructure, or the word is really leveraging and really driving up what they already have and delivering that to their customers in a far more efficient and meaningful way.
Jake Hower
Yeah, exactly. A lot of people tend to think that there's a shiny object and there's something, there's a magic bullet. The reality is that generally, as we said earlier, focusing on what you've already got in place now is where you'll get the biggest gains or the biggest and quickest gains.
Ash Roy
So maximizing your existing infrastructure, it's often in the form of content. And you're saying that you'll deliver the right content to the right customers for them to make better decisions. So we've touched on automated marketing, we've touched on in Crescia, we've touched on the various tools, which has been extremely useful. Let's talk a little bit about the main objections that you've seen. People typically have to marketing automation, bringing it into their business and how they can overcome them.
Jake Hower
One of them was complexity. People see them as quite complex systems to actually implement, and that is not the case if you know how to implement. That's what Inkresia really does. It's really simplified the process there. Another one is generally time. Most businesses don't have the time to focus on, you know, creating the content. So that has been a, a relatively common objection that I hear. And at the end of the day, you've got two things. You've either got time or you've got money. If you've got either of those, then you can certainly get something like this implemented relatively easy.
Ash Roy
Okay, so the biggest takeaway here then for the listener, is that the words marketing automation can sound a bit intimidating. It sounds complex, but it isn't really. You just need to go to somebody who knows what they're talking about, who knows what they're doing, and someone who can explain it to you in simple English.
Jake Hower
If you've got the time to invest in learning and making the same mistakes I did, then you can anticipate probably a 18 months to two year sort of learning curve. Or you could just, just go to the right people or go to the right resources to skip that learning curve. I've created a service that I wish I had two years ago.
Ash Roy
Right. And those often make for the best products, don't they?
Jake Hower
Absolutely, absolutely.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what actions a listener can take right now to get quick wins. I mean, one thing that's clear from our conversation already is for them to look within their existing infrastructure and think about what their audience wants and how they can get it to their audience in simple ways. And if they can start seeing benefits without actually investing anything apart from just being a little bit more targeted and sensible about how they're distributing their existing content, then maybe that will serve as a good starting point, a quick win incentive to actually look at implementing marketing automation into their business.
Jake Hower
Yep, absolutely. So the first thing I think you would do is look at your existing sales process and break it down so you understand what is going into the existing process. And then from there, if you can identify parts that are potentially being done already by someone on staff or areas for improvement that your staff just don't have the time or you don't have the time to actually do, and they're probably the points. We can utilize some of the marketing automation platforms to assist in creating a better experience, to assist in creating a stickier funnel. So that would be number one. And I'll just try and create something very simple to just, even if you start with just one additional email or replacing one follow up that your sales staff have to actually follow at the moment, and that's a great start. The next thing I'll do is probably the decline card. If you've got a recurring subscription business in any way, then I'd certainly plug the gap with the decline card sequence straight away. Okay. Onboarding sequence is probably where you're going to get the biggest wins as well. So consider what is your ideal scenario for what a customer should experience when they first sign up for you. Create a system for that.
Ash Roy
Okay, so there's four really good tips. Look at the existing sales process and think about areas for improvement. Create a stickier funnel by exploring your declined card sequences. Also provide the ideal content to your customer when they're on board. And that's probably the biggest winner.
Jake Hower
Yep, that's great.
Ash Roy
So if there's one thing a listener can take away from this podcast, it.
Jake Hower
Is probably the most important thing is to keep things simple. Limit the amount of different systems you're using and keeping as simple as possible so that everybody in your business and also your customers can understand what's going on.
Ash Roy
Awesome. We've talked about why we have marketing automation, what it does. We've talked about some key objections that a business owner might have and how they can overcome them and what actions are they can take to get quick wins in their business. If a listener wants to get in touch with you, how do they get in touch with you?
Jake Hower
I make myself readily available, so you can just send an email to jake@inkresio.com. On Facebook. Just search Jake Howe in Google and you'll find me everywhere. It's very hard to not get in contact with me. Okay.
Ash Roy
And once again, for the listeners, it's increcio.com, spelled incresio.com. So it's jakerescio.com if they want to get in touch with you and learn a bit more about automated marketing systems. So, Jake, that brings us to the end of the interview. Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Jake Hower
Cool. Thanks very much, Ash.
