Dave Granfield:
Did they start? We are technically live now, but it’s going to be a bit of a delay so we can have a bit of a chat about this.
Jay Janus:
Well, it will still come on regardless.
Dave Granfield:
It’s still going to come on-
Jay Janus:
It’ll just come on a bit later.
Dave Granfield:
It’s still going to come on and we’re still going to be talking to ourselves right now, but I can’t add the details into the conversation just yet. All right, let’s turn gallery view so everyone gets to see your pretty faces.
Dave Granfield:
Hey guys, we are technically live on YouTube now, so we should probably start talking like we are live. Callum, your hair’s a little bit out, mate. Do you want to just fix that up before we go any further or…?
Josh Oastler:
Looking pretty good.
Callum Von Blackensee:
I’ve a dishevelled look, yeah.
Dave Granfield:
Yeah, we’ll just turn your camera off, mate.
Dave Granfield:
All right, so today we’ve got Jay Janus, everyone knows who Jay Janus is. He’s the backbone of BidPixel. Myself, Dave Granfield, we’ve got Josh Oastler who is the brains behind all things website funnel-building, lead attraction… Actually Jay, Josh is probably the backbone of BidPixel.
Jay Janus:
Yeah, technical mastermind.
Josh Oastler:
We should, we should.
Dave Granfield:
And we’ve got Callum who is one of the backbones of BidPixel who runs the day-to-day advertising on Facebook and Instagram for some of our best and greatest customers. Some of you few we will talk a little bit about today. So Jay, we’re going to talk about how to leverage contact details of your customers. What’s a bit of a synopsis on what we’re going to cover today just based on the current economic and virus climate?
Jay Janus:
So I took a bit about customer lists, what to do with them, where to get them, how to leverage them, and just basically how to use the number one as a communications tool to your customers, current customers, new customers, future customers, and touch by some or a few of those points.
Dave Granfield:
Yeah, awesome. So Josh, someone that you know very well and we’ve had on our podcast episodes in the past is John Dwyer. What does he rant about and what’s kind of the number… some of the industries that he talks about customer acquisition and just how they aren’t recording customer details very well?
Josh Oastler:
Yeah, so I guess the big key takeaway from this is you need to capture your customers’ contact details or prospective customers’ contact details. That is kind of the key. There’s so many different businesses that just don’t, there’s so many… Restaurants is a massive industry, right? How many restaurants are there that, cool, they might serve a couple hundred people in a night, but how many contact details of those people do they actually gather so that they can follow up and actually market to again? About null point null one per cent. I was just mentioning before that there are a couple, particularly some of the bigger chain stores, so like your Hog’s Breath Cafe, there’s another chain store called Rashays that does a pretty good job. All of them still kind of have a higher barrier of entry where you do have to buy some type of membership so that you get 20% off your meals for the year or something like that.
Josh Oastler:
So it’s still a higher barrier, but there’s just so much potential for restaurants if they were to capture contact details of people that they can just market on so many different platforms and get them back in. And particularly in this season that we’re going through, 99% of restaurants, if not 100%, are closed, at least for dining in, when this is all over and there are these big grand openings, all these things, everyone’s going to be wanting to go out to restaurants, right? That’s what’s going to happen. But the ones that are going to win are the ones that are going to show the grand opening events or live music and whatever else that they’re actually promoting because they’re actually going to be able to get that message to the people that they’ve collected the contact details of. So it’s such a simple concept, but some industries, particularly restaurants, there’s a bunch of others… But yeah, they just neglect this for whatever reason.
Dave Granfield:
Cool. So Callum, what about some of the traditional businesses? Like we talked about one before we came on Live now that was Direct Grains. What kind of business are they and where does a repeat customer and where does a database of customers come into play for Direct Grains?
Callum Von Blackensee:
Yeah, so Direct Grain being cattle or livestock feed and getting that out and around Australia. So a repeat customer, obviously very important, maybe an initial first-time customer could be a little expensive, but the lifetime customer value of that sort of client and having a database of being able to continually sell and get feed and product and that sort of thing to those people, really important. That’s the lifeline of the business, really, having repeat customers. Yeah.
Dave Granfield:
So it’s repeat customers, but it’s also maintaining that customer data, right? There’s plenty of bricks-and-mortars or traditional businesses out there that their database of customers is a Google spreadsheet or an offline Excel spreadsheet and/or some chicken scratchings in a notebook.
We do a lot of business in the car dealership world, and it’s amazing that a car dealership has platforms that they’re paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for to maintain customer databases. Yet there are old-school sales guys to be using pieces of paper and pens and paper on their desk. And that information never gets to the database where it should.
Or, you’ve got your junior sales guy who makes a note in his phone about that person, and it never gets to the database. And I think the big thing about never getting to the database is you don’t have that power, like you just said Callum, that you can’t get back in front of those people, right?
Dave Granfield:
They’ve shown a high intent. They’ve shown promise to purchase or act on something that you’re selling or marketing. And if you don’t retain them or if you don’t have a way to get back in touch with them, it’s a wasted exercise, right? So Jay, it’s been one of your frustrations for the years of being in marketing is that we drive hundreds and hundreds of leads to someone’s business, whether it be via email or a Google sheet, but they don’t follow up on it. What would you say is probably a good ballpark timeframe of getting in front of a customer who has made an inquiry? How long should you wait, or how long shouldn’t you wait? And then how do you follow up with that person? What’s some really simple ways to follow up with someone who’s inquired with your business?
Jay Janus:
Timeframe? Five minutes. So there was a Harvard Business School review, which tracked… It was based around the timeframe of getting an online lead and contacting them. And it talks about how quickly people drop off. And I think after 15 minutes, there was about a 20% drop off of potential conversion value.
So… And ideally within the first five to 15 minutes. So for any of our clients, when we send you a lead, get on the phone, straight as soon as that email arrives, give them a call then and there, especially at the moment, in the current climate where everything… so many things are moving online. If I… Right now, I’ve got Google Chrome open in the background for work stuff, and I would have no less than 16 tabs open on my Google Chrome account.
Dave Granfield:
You’re cutting down at the moment, mate.
Jay Janus:
Yeah, yeah.
Dave Granfield:
We put window on, and you’ve got 10 windows open.
Jay Janus:
That’s right. But whenever… When I go and make a purchase, I research and… Oh, me and Josh, just before we came on live, was talking about his speakers in the background, which I’ve got a similar pair, the Yamahas, and I jumped on and I looked at Yamahas, I looked at Rokits, I looked at Evans and Adams and all these different brands, and I’d sit there in my office and I’d just search and I’d go from tab to tab to tab and manufacturer to manufacturer and make inquiries, and people are doing the same thing. When someone’s reaching out, say it’s your business, you might be in childcare, and they want to inquire. They’re also, I would… I’d say 80% sure that they’re jumping on and looking at every other daycare in the area at the same time as you. Yeah, as they’re looking at your daycare. So if someone’s inquiring, get back in touch with them. Data is king, especially at the moment. Follow up, follow up, follow up.
Dave Granfield:
Harvard University has come out and said anything after 15 minutes is you’re really losing the attention span or you really drastically reducing your chances of signing or talking to that person. We try and practice five minutes. If someone within the agency who… If someone inquires with the agency through a contact form, it’s mandated that we get back in front of them as quick as we can. And I’ve got a builder, Eric, I’m reaching out to him in an hour’s time. I originally talked to him on Wednesday at 4:30 PM. He filled in an inquiry and within five minutes, I had Eric on the phone and had an hour conversation with him. He was blown away by the fact that we were attentive enough to actually give him a call. And I started that call with, hey Eric, it’s Dave. I don’t have a lot of time right now, but I just wanted to let you know that we’ve got your message and we’ll be in contact shortly.
Dave Granfield:
An hour and a half later, I actually got off the phone with him, and I’ve got the call with him this afternoon to close his business and start working with him, right? He was blown away by the fact that that simple phone call of, hey, I just want to let you know that we’ve got your information, we’re going to be giving you a callback… You could do that through an email, you could do that through a text message, you could do that through a quick phone call. But in the world of instant gratification and people surfing around online, not doing that could cost you that business real fast as they go to another Chrome tab and purchase from someone else.
Jay Janus:
I don’t think a lot of… I guess some of the more traditional salesmen are realizing that the level of instant gratification that people are purchasing with and they’re even aware of like, if you sell… If you’re a car salesman and someone’s made an inquiry on your website to look at a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser, there’s every chance and every likelihood they’re looking at the Toyota dealership in the next suburb as well.
Jay Janus:
Or if you’re looking for a used car, they’re looking at every other used-car dealership in the same town. And if you’re not getting straight back in touch with them, they’re on the phone to the next dealer and you’re not only trying to win for that, win that client and win that sale, you’re now directly competing to open conversations that they’re having with other salesmen.
Dave Granfield:
Yeah, totally true. So I think Facebook’s study, we’ve got a data sheet on this that we can maybe put in the description. Josh, can you make sure the girls put in the description cause I’ll forget. Facebook came out and said, I think that… Car shopping alone, I think this… It was a bare minimum of eight different websites people are researching before they decide on a car, and Jay’s right, like they, could go to every Toyota dealership. They… We were just looking for a car for me, and we were looking at dealerships in Melbourne when that manufacturer’s got a dealership a kilometre away, and I was prepared to jump on a plane and go to Melbourne for the right car and the right deal.
You need to be attentive to those people when they get to you because instant gratification is a big thing. Josh, in your expertise, mate, the backbone of BidPixel, can you talk to us about how and why you would gate your content or gate your contact information gathering and defining… Tell me what a gating it is, right? Because some people aren’t going to know.
Josh Oastler:
So gating is… It’s basically having a bunch of value that you can give to someone, but having an exchange. So I’m happy to give you this guide that’s actually genuinely really going to help your business. But in return, I just want to get your contact details so I might reach out to you, we can have a chat, see if there might be something we can do together, see if I can help you in any other way. So it is an exchange.
Businesses are in the business to make money and so to contact cold leads and try and warm them up a bit, that’s the idea of the gated process. Now with what we do here at BidPixel and what a lot of other businesses try and do, the ones that really understand this concept properly is there are different barriers of entry, and that’s for two reasons.
Josh Oastler:
The first and main one is to understand the interests of the prospect. So for example, if someone comes to our website, they might download a free resource, which again, totally free.
We just get their email address and so we can follow up and ask them if they got any questions about it. Whereas if they’re trying to book a strategy session, we’re going to have a questionnaire with a couple of different particular questions about maybe their revenue, what their goals are, what marketing they’ve done in the past so that we can get a better understanding of their business and see if we’re actually going to be a good fit for them.
But also make sure that, if they’re a startup or someone with an idea in their head for a business but don’t actually have anything practical yet, that we’re not wasting hours and hours of our time in research and trying to help them if there isn’t going to be a business relationship there. So that’s one of the reasons why we do have those different gate levels.
Dave Granfield:
So is gating content is… It’s still a transaction, right? We’re looking to swap something of value for their contact details, which are of value to us. And if the consumer, who is in this instant gratification bubble, doesn’t believe that that transaction is going to be fair or just, they’re not going to give you their contact details, right? Or you’re going to get a bogus phone number and email address.
So while gating contact details or gating content is fantastic to get it, you need to make sure that that transaction is actually valuable for that consumer, otherwise, they’re just not going to do it. Jay, can you tell us a little bit about Infamous Swim’s gated content and how they did that discounting, cause we hate discounting on advertising. How did Infamous Swim do that over the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and what was the general idea of why they were doing it?
Jay Janus:
Yeah. So that was a great concept. And so as me and most people know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the whole cyber week is ridiculous… is just a crazy time of… for online stores, where there’s huge amounts of purchases, a lot of sales happening, a lot of promotional codes and discounts and all that. So these guys jumped on that bandwagon and what they wanted to do was offer a very special discount, but that discount was only available to their subscribers. So if you wanted to… I think it was 20% off or I can’t quite remember the number-
Dave Granfield:
That was like, they kind of started doing like a 12 Days of Christmas almost. So every day there was a massive deal. So someone would get something for free, they’d get free tote bags, they’d get a discount off their order, they’d win a holiday like every day was something different, right? It was enough value to make that transaction happen.
Jay Janus:
Absolutely. And… But the way to get that was to jump on their website and sign up for their email list and become a subscriber. And then as soon as you did that, you received an email with that current code or primary code or coupon, which you could then use instantly. So it was a great way to build a list very quickly.
Dave Granfield:
So I guess in the Facebook and Instagram and Google and YouTube advertising space, we genuinely try and take care of the funnel, right? We would, in that instance, we would be, or most businesses, we spend a lot of money on brand awareness or website traffic and then we nurture them and educate them and put them through retargeting to get them to purchase. In that particular instance with Infamous Swim, we kind of cut out the remarketing, cut out the nurturing.
Dave Granfield:
And the number one goal for us was just to drive traffic to that signup form, right? And then the email sequence was what took over that. So Gemma from Infamous Swim paid to acquire that customer the first time and get them into the email list. But the beauty about that is now she’s got a lifetime database of emails who are highly interested in their product and service. She doesn’t have to pay to acquire them again, which kind of segues into what I was about to ask you, Callum. Why is acquiring details once a lifetime accomplishment? You can pretty much just repeat what I just said.
Callum Von Blackensee:
You only need to acquire it once.
Dave Granfield:
So how do you have that conversation with customers on the Facebook advertising side of things, mate? You do have a couple of lead generation customers. What’s… How does that conversation go, and how do you educate a customer who’s advertising on that the cost of acquisition at the front end can be a little bit higher if they sort out the back end.
Callum Von Blackensee:
Yeah, well it’s really just about looking at those numbers and whether you’re looking at purely at the cost of that initial acquisition and that on its own might look scary per new customer, but obviously just having a quick look at the lifetime customer value of maybe some existing customers or just sort of running some figures over a bit of a timeline. It’s pretty easy to see, especially depending on the business and even jumping back to Direct Grain, you can imagine that if that was a little bit to get that initial customer but you’re talking like feed for entire farms, whether it’s dairy farms or sheep or whatever it is. Over the lifetime, that’s worth so much to that business versus that… what might initially look like a high cost per acquisition for that customer. But over the lifetime, it’s huge. It’s worth so much.
Dave Granfield:
So let’s talk a little about daycare centres again, we’ve got a few of those. So the fees ongoing for daycare centre throughout three or four years of retaining a child at a daycare centre, when we talk to these centres, it’s a real conversation of, what is that lifetime value of having a child in and then that lifetime value also factors in referrals. If you’ve made a good customer experience, they’re going to refer someone else. And also, is there another child that’s going to grow up and become a student or a child at that daycare centre. So suddenly the lifetime customer value in that daycare owner’s head is exponentially bigger, right?
Dave Granfield:
So where they might have said to us, we only want to pay $20 to get a tour through the daycare centre, like, okay, so what if you paid $50 but you got two children from that household, that family was really ecstatic about your service, they told three neighbours about it, then that went on to three neighbours and three neighbours, right? Paying $50 at the front end to acquire that one child or that one experience is the true lifetime customer value, right?
Dave Granfield:
Jay, childcare centres, let’s wrap this one up cause it’s actually nearly half an hour now.
Jay Janus:
Oh wow.
Dave Granfield:
COVID-19, coronavirus, childcare centres… The government did just come out in Australia with some legislation changes yesterday over all of this and childcare centres are now allowed to just charge the bare minimum, which is the subsidiaries or the government-subsidized rate, which means families are not really out of pocket anymore. But until that notification yesterday, a lot of childcare centres were seeing people just completely unenroll their children because they were locked down at home, right?
Why would they be paying for their child to be enrolled when they can’t even go? Because in Australia, if you’re not watching from here, you pay regardless if your kid’s in there or not. What are you building out for Smartland Daycare Center now, helping them with the foresight for that lifetime customer value in the future?
Jay Janus:
Yeah so working on some chatbots at the moment, just in order to get contact details of people, moms and dads or parents, carers who, once this is all over, have children that are due to go to daycare or need to go to daycare for work purposes or whatever reason. So we’re trying to, right now in the midst of all the current climate, is build up really strong lists of those people. Cause people like Dave said, have started pulling their kids out of daycare. Some of them are just completely unenrolled. So there will be a little bit of an open slather on where those children get reenrolled and maybe not every childcare centre will be even be able to open again. So the ones that have that foresight are really going to be able to capitalize on, for lack of a better term, on the current situation and get leads so they can fulfil that need in the months ahead.
Dave Granfield:
So Smartland is going out there now and farming their area, right? They’ve got four centres in Australia. They’re going out there and farming that area knowing very well that they could potentially pick up families who’d never used to come to them. They’ve got amazingly presented centres. A lot of them have been refurbished and they look great. Now’s the time to get in front of these parents because they’re building a database or building an audience of their prospect customers so that when the timing’s right, they’ve got an on-tap list of people. Now Smartland’s doing that. We’re encouraging them to do it a little bit differently and a little bit creative. So their target audience is young moms, essentially, right? Young moms spend a heck of a lot of time, sorry for discriminating, spend a heck of a lot of time on, say, Instagram. Scrolling through Instagram accounts, looking at Instagram feeds.
Dave Granfield:
One of the big things about that demographic is they love sharing all those funny memes and the… just silly things like…
Jay Janus:
Oh, I like sharing that stuff too.
Dave Granfield:
Mom stuff at freaking 10 o’clock in the morning, they’re sharing it, right? It’s funny, it’s humorous, they share it and they interact with each other and they tag each other in on it. And it’s all those funny kind of mommy sort of memes that this Smartland is now going to turn into a quiz or a questionnaire. So essentially, it’s going to become a questionnaire of what kind of mother are you, right? We’ve seen questionnaires for lead generation in the past: What kind of pizza are you? What type of pet are you? What type of onion are you? Let’s turn it into the what type of a mom are you, but let’s make it memorable and shareable. And also, as Josh was telling us, let’s make it gated.
Dave Granfield:
So as I go through this chatbot, they’re asked a series of funny questions, they’re looking at different funny memes that are all shareable content, and at the end, to genuinely find out what kind of mommy they are in humour, they have to give up their details to find out what type of mommy they are. And with many chats and a chatbot, it’s as seamless as clicking yes to a phone number, yes to an email address. That’s it. They find out what type of mommy they are, but then the team of building on that virality to share what kind of mommy they are on the back end of it and reshare the original post and get some virality about the advertising. So Smartland’s going to spend a minimal amount of advertising dollars to get in front of their target audience, to engage their target audience how they like to be engaged, to gate the content, to get their details. Then to get them to share it organically and bring that lifetime customer value to a whole nother level, right? Acquire one and let it grow by itself.
Jay Janus:
One thing I like about that’s extremely powerful, and I know several businesses are looking into at the moment, is, and one of our platforms that we’ve done as well, where the power of having a list, say… use a daycare for example, and say it goes viral, and there’s a bunch of people in Punchbowl, Sydney that have responded but there’s no daycare there. How powerful is it to kind of actually say we’ve got 50 people who are currently really interested in attending one of the daycare centres that we don’t even have in that area. Let’s build one.
Dave Granfield:
Goodstart and ABC Learning when it was… what it was back in the day, used to have teams that would just heat map Google Map data and Google Map information to find where there was a high concentration of the demographic and where there was too many people for the sentence that were there. So this is a smart way of doing it, but you’re also engaging that audience and that list that you’re building, you could activate and turn on whenever you want through more paid acquisition or through emails or through SMSes or however you want to do it. Josh, any closing remarks, mate?
Josh Oastler:
Just, I guess really… [crosstalk 00:24:13].
Jay Janus:
… live long and prosper.
Josh Oastler:
Yeah, that’s good, live long and prosper. May the force be with you. No, no, no. Just going back to the getting contact details, like have a think about what type of business that you are, how can you actually start genuinely giving valuable content to your customers and to prospects so that you can actually capture their contact details so that when… I know that you guys talked on the last Live, Jay when you’re walking through the shopping centres and every single shop, all the big ones, they’re all just closed. If they haven’t even thought about an online presence cause they’re a bricks-and-mortar store, they’re starting from ground zero, they’re starting with nothing. So actually building up to something that is not just purely on Facebook or just on Instagram or just on Pinterest or just on one platform, if you can capture email addresses and phone numbers and first names, that’s kind of the Holy Trinity of being able to actually utilize and cross-platform.
Callum Von Blackensee:
Yeah, bangarang.
Dave Granfield:
Awesome man. Thanks, guys. Thanks for sharing this Live with us. If you’ve got any questions, comment below on YouTube. This video will go as a normal video once we’ve got off Live. I’m sure the team will syndicate it across Facebook and cut it up and use it on Instagram, so if you’ve got any questions about this, if you’re in a business and you genuinely don’t know how to navigate this period or if any of this lead generation and gated content and getting back in front of a list, if it’s all foreign for you, ask a question in the comments, and we’ll work through this with you and help you through it. We can always produce another piece of content which answers your questions directly.
Dave Granfield:
And hey, unashamedly, if you think it’s right for you, if you own a daycare centre or a grain business or a display home centre or whatever you own, and you know that you’re not generating leads and nurturing them well enough, we’re your men, right? We’re your men. So reach out to us and we’d love to help you and talk you through that process. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Callum. You are-
Jay Janus:
Thank you, Dave.
Dave Granfield:
You’re all amazing. Thank you, mate. Peace, guys. Talk to you soon. Have a good weekend!
