How to Increase Attendance at Any Event with Jarrad Markel

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Ryan Chapman: Hey, this is Ryan Chapman, and today I have back with me Jarrad Markel. You'll remember Jared was on a couple episodes back, and at that time we talked about a number of really valuable topics, but we've got two more that we wanted to cover because you know, if you've ever done podcast, you know how this goes. You're going and then you turn off the recording and then you have your post episode chat and inevitably something good comes up and you're like, are we still recording it? The answer was no. So I was like, okay, well we got to have you back Jarrad. So we're excited to have you back today.

Jarrad Markel: Well, thanks for having me back, and maybe I did that on purpose just so you'd invite me back. I don't know.

Ryan Chapman: I wouldn't put it past it you. You're pretty skilled at this stuff. Well, one of the things that came up, and let's just jump right into it for everybody, is, you guys do these live virtual events.

Jarrad Markel: Yup.

Ryan Chapman: I know that, you know, having a one to many sales opportunity or a teaching opportunity online is a really common, experience [00:01:00] these days, but always the challenge is who shows up. Right?

Jarrad Markel: Oh, for sure. Yeah. You get a ton of people to register, especially if it's a free event. Paid events are a little bit different, but even if with paid events, I mean, we, we don't really do any free live virtual events anymore because we learned that you, you get what you pay for when you come to these things. And so if we offer free events, people don't get as much value out of it because they don't assign the value, if that makes sense. And that could be a whole nother topic in itself.

Ryan Chapman: Well. Yeah. You know, I've, that's been my experiences. People rarely value what they get for free. I mean, we give a bunch of stuff for free at a Fix Your Funnel. And I don't think there's many people that really take us, take advantage of all the resources we make available.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. I know I don't, there's tons of stuff that I didn't even know you had available. And then you were telling me, I think it was Jared Chapman. I guess he's probably one, huh?

Ryan Chapman: Yep. He's my son.

Jarrad Markel: That's awesome. Family business. But, I was talking to him and he's like, Hey, did you know we have this, this, and this? I'm like, Oh no, I didn't, but thank you.

Ryan Chapman: I [00:02:00] mean, the fortunate thing for you is that you've kind of naturally gone and done a lot of the strategies we've talked about. That's why I'm so excited to have you talk today. But yeah, that whole situation of whether it's paid or free, getting people to show up is the real challenge. So you mentioned you get a 70% attendance, is that on the paid events?

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. Yeah. And the paid events, like I said, we don't do many free events anymore. But with the live virtual events that we do, it's, we. Essentially pick a topic that we can teach, and then we have people show up to essentially a webinar. But what I like to call it as an interactive webinar, because during the class, you know, we teach the class, we teach the material, and then, and then at the end we give everybody an opportunity to raise their hand and say, Hey, I have this question. And we let them come on live. So we do it on Zoom right here like this. Oh, very cool. And we let them, we unmute them and let them actually ask their question, because [00:03:00] have you ever been on those events that are seemingly live and they're talking about these questions that are being answered and then you never get your question answered? So I wanted to make sure that people know with our event, that is actually real and we're, we're really, really there.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. So, so what do you guys doing to get that high? And then you guys do some neat things with upsells too, that aren't perceived as being weird. So I like to talk into that too. But first, how do you get 70% to show up?

Jarrad Markel: So easy, that's communicating with them. And so we actually use emails, which kind of work, but text messages are, what did the trick. And the last one that we did, we actually had a hundred percent attendance rates for people that paid and people that showed up, I was blown away. I was like, Oh man, 100% of the people are here, and...

Ryan Chapman: Let's talk about that campaign between registration and show up.

Jarrad Markel: Okay.

Ryan Chapman: Because there is a sequence there, right?

Jarrad Markel: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

[00:04:00] Ryan Chapman: For me, what I noticed a lot of people do is they don't, they pay attention to getting people registered. And they pay attention to the presentation that they'll give when people get there, but they kind of neglect the in-between.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. And I think that that's because a lot of 'em, they're like, Oh man, this is going to take so much time. But really with marketing automation the way it is now, you can set everything up prior to even launching the event. So you're, you're, you're kind of like after you launch registration, you're physically neglecting the, the followups, but it's automatically happening because you previously set it up, so you don't have to be there unless they send a reply or whatever. But you don't actually have to say, okay, it's two days before the class, I need to send this email or this text message. It's already done because you set it up.

Ryan Chapman: So what's your camp? What's your sequence look like between?

Jarrad Markel: So our sequence, it depends on how long the, so the last one we did, we had two weeks between sign up and the actual [00:05:00] event.

Ryan Chapman: I'm glad you bring that up because that's really important. A lot of people don't realize that the length of time changes your strategy.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. And so we'll, we'll if it's a long period of time... Like we actually just sold a live training class that is going to be take place in Wyoming in the end of July and the beginning of October. So that's a few months away. Well, I've got automated sequences and that's when, where people actually show up live. It's not a virtual event. Yeah. And I've got sequences there that check in every two weeks or once a month. I can't remember which one it was. I think it's every two weeks or, or once a month, until three months before the event. And then it's every two weeks. And so I just check in with them. I send them the information for the class. And this is universal between the live and the virtual training events. So across the board, any event that we do, I say, okay, where in the process of them waiting to show up to the event do I need to contact them and say, and just kind of keep it on the top of their brain? So if [00:06:00] we have an event that is, we open up registration and it's two weeks later, I'm going to contact them two to three times a week until the event happens. And then without failure, every single event they get three days before, two days before, and then two, yeah no, two messages the day before, and then depending on what time the event takes place, it's either three the day of, or if it's an a morning event, just one.

Ryan Chapman: It's the buildup to that. What kind of messages are you putting into those? Cause now we know mechanically you've got messages going out on these dates or this timeframe. What's, what's the content like?

Jarrad Markel: The content is, I always, I just, ah, man, this is, this is difficult to explain. So in the email or the text message, text messages are a little bit more concise because you have a character limit, right? So you have to be more direct and to the point. But [00:07:00] in both types of communication, I always tell them like, Hey, this is what I'm doing this week, or, you know, this is what's been going on in my life. And if you preload these, then you can just talk about stuff that's going on right now in your life because it did, it has already happened and you haven't told them yet. So, I try to add a personal spin there, but I also give them information about the class. It's like, Hey, remember your, you know, your classes, your Legion of Michael class, for instance. That's our virtual event is, is starting next Sunday at 2:00 PM. And so, and here's the link to all the information. So I make sure I give them something to click on to go see more information and kind of remind them, okay, I need to show up at this time. I need to bring these things to the class. You know, most of the time...

Ryan Chapman: You're essentially reselling them on the event or some form of content. When we did Short Sale Genius, which was our training company when we first started using Infusionsoft. We were pushing to a free live event. So we were trying to get [00:08:00] them to leave their house or office and go there. And what we found is that we would do the same rhythm two or three per week, you know, depending on how far out. We usually didn't start advertising until two weeks out, because before that was, didn't make sense anyway. And then we, we would had it so that depending on where they come in, they would get, you know, the right messages, but two to three per week, as many mediums as we could. So in our case, because it was free, we really had to work extra hard to get them to attend. So we would have, I would have them and the cause, they're showing up in person. I'd have the printout, the thank you page, which I put a fake barcode on and made a ticket. And then the add an ID number in which was their contact ID. And I said, you've got to bring this to show up, put it on your desk in front of your computer, because I wanted to escape the electrons. Get into the physical world as quickly as possible. So I've seen some people will use like a worksheet, like a pre training worksheet or a workbook or something where the [00:09:00] person's got to do some pre-work to kind of get them engaged in the training as well.

Jarrad Markel: Yup. And that's another thing we do with the virtual events is every virtual event has some kind of physical product attached to it. Most of the time it's a book, and so we tell them, we send them a physical thing that'll be a reminder because they'll, they'll get this package.

Ryan Chapman: That's great. I was going to ask that, but didn't want to put you on the spot.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. Every product that we are ever, every package that we send has a handwritten note in it from Zach, the shipping ogre and swag stuff, and then the product of course.

Ryan Chapman: So people don't realize how important even that name, like Zach the shipping ogre is.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah, it's a persona.

Ryan Chapman: It's, it's internal language that only those who are in the know know. and so it creates some unity between everybody that attends because they have inside information that others don't.

Jarrad Markel: Exactly.

Ryan Chapman: And that's a really important part of creating community is the language of the [00:10:00] community.

Jarrad Markel: Absolutely. And we, we always joke that if you order from us, the shipping ogre will touch your package. And people love that. People love it.

Ryan Chapman: That's great.

Jarrad Markel: But that goes, you know, the strategy there is a to give them the information. Cause the book is information that will help them also. Yeah. But it's also a physical reminder that they can set, you know, at their house and their desk , the thank you cards that can hang up on the refrigerator. We've got pictures of that before. And so every time they enter that space in their house in their real life, they think, Oh man, those guys at, at Student of the Gun are a really great people. Or those guys, you know, with MMCG, I send a, a welcome kit to all my clients. It's got some pretty cool stuff in it. I don't want to reveal what it is, but some pretty cool stuff in it that they can hang up and it's very visually attractive. And so I do that because I really appreciate my clients and I want them to have this thing because it looks nice and, it's just kind of a gesture of goodwill, I guess. And then, when [00:11:00] people, you know, and whenever they enter the space, wherever they hang that thing up, they're like, yeah, MMCG sent me that.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. I don't think it can be overstated how important it is to get into their physical environment. There's so many things competing for the attention of your prospects and customers. So many things. And so if you rely just upon digital and as good as texting is, it's still digital. It's on the device, and so if you can give it to the physical environment where you create a physical reminder, I like to tell the story about Dan Kennedy talks about how he would teach people. They'll always back into their parking space as part of his training. And then every time somebody did something as mundane as parking, they're being reminded of him. So, you know, there's, there's different ways that you can get into their lives on a regular basis. But physical products or papers or whatever is a good one, and you, you guys have a [00:12:00] system internally that you do all your shipping through. So it's an internal fulfillment of that. Some people get intimidated by that. I know what we use as Rocket Notes for like our brownies, cards. So that kind of stuff where I don't want. We just don't have the bandwidth to handle all the stuff that we need to do all, I'll let Rocket Notes do that and just do an HTTP post, but for sending our books, we actually have, I'm going to have to, I don't know, I'm gonna have to come up with a name for him now. Tyson on our team sends out the books. I just got to give him a nickname, like you guys. I didn't do that, but he sends out the actual physical books on some regular rhythms, so we've got a process for that. People don't realize how valuable that is, and so they're like, Oh, that sounds like a lot of work. That is the most valuable stuff that you can do that in my opinion.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. I was just going to say it's a lot of work because it has a lot of value. Anything that actually has value and you could tell me if I'm wrong, but like in my head I'm thinking, okay, the things that have given me a lot of [00:13:00] value in my life took a lot of work. There's nothing that I can think of that was easy, that gave me a lot of value.

Ryan Chapman: I mean, there's certainly some things that, yeah, I would just agree. Yeah.

Jarrad Markel: I feel like the message is more important. Yeah, sure. So, but if anybody here is, is really concerned about fulfillment services. That's something that we can do. You ship us your products, we house it here and it's by the shipping ogre. Yeah.

Ryan Chapman: I had no idea.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah, we do that. And he does a fantastic job. You know, the system exists. We've really leaned it out cause that's one of my favorite things is process mapping and process optimization. And so we've leaned the system out and we've figured out how to make it relatively inexpensive for other people to utilize it.

Ryan Chapman: So very cool.

Jarrad Markel: Something that we would people to optimize.

Ryan Chapman: Oh good you mentioned that. Maybe we'll have your shipping ogre become our shipping ogre.

Jarrad Markel: There you go.

Ryan Chapman: Tyson would probably be thanking me so he could worry more about customer support and less about shipping books. [00:14:00] Well that's very cool. Yeah. I just, I think that's an under appreciated thing. The thing to look for in that kind of scenario, no matter what, what it is, is do you have enough time between when they register and before the event to get the mail through? As long as you do, I think it's worthwhile. Even if all you did was a letter, you know, or a card. That would be far superior to just relying upon emails and text messages. Although those are both good text, obviously being more valuable than than email alone, but I didn't realize that you were using all that and that's great because I feel like that is really where the secret sauce is when you realize the value of a customer, you can start doing these things, right?

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. And it's, it's really interesting to me because as we're talking, I'm like, Oh yeah, we do all these things that are, that are technically tactics, but we just do them because it, we wanted to, right? It just...We didn't think like, Hey, can we sit down and how can we get more, you know, how can we do this? We just wanted to do [00:15:00] it for the customer, and then it turned out to be a tactic. So...

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. No, I think that's great. And you know, as long as you know what the value of your customer is, and then you know how much you can spend, to get them. And if you know what your initial purchase prices and then the ongoing longterm, now you can start making investments. On one of our previous interviews with Craig Jacobson, you talked about, when you find that moment when marketing becomes an investment instead of an expense, that's when everything changes for you because you realize, Oh, okay, spending this money in this way produces money for me. And that's an important transformation is when you go, okay, how much can I spend? How much do I have to spend? And so that's, that's really what you're looking for in your business is getting to that point where you go, okay, how much can I spend of the revenue we're generating so I can generate even more revenue?

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. And what you just said is, is kind of how I try to live my life. Because you could say, you know, I like to go [00:16:00] to the gym and I'd do barbell training, and so I could say, man, I have to go to the gym today. Or I could say, I get to go to the gym today. And there's two totally different mindsets to those different statements.

Ryan Chapman: There is.

Jarrad Markel: And so your output on the end of, of those statements that you're making to yourself is going to be affected by how you viewed the task that you're doing.

Ryan Chapman: And that's not 100% right. I agree. Okay. Well, I think we've, we've hit that. Is there anything else that you're doing in the live virtual event scenario to get to this? Oh, I know we talked about all the factors to get to the 70% or 100% of attendances in your last one, but what do you do at the those events to increase the value of the customer that is not perceived as being sellsy or pushy or anything like that.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. So one thing that I can, I can bring up that it's not salesy at all. It's just because it's a cool thing. They like to, they like to, they liked the sales pitch, which really wasn't a sales pitch. [00:17:00] And that the certificates that we, we give, you know, every person gets a digital certificate that they can print off themselves. Or we can do a physically shipped certificate in a, an a certificate holder that has the Legion of Michael logo on it. And so we, we ran that and people were super excited about their certificate holder and I was like, I didn't even think that people will be this excited and it doesn't crease revenue, but it also gives them something physically to hang up on their wall, to remind them, Hey, that came from Legion of Michael, you know, I put a lot of effort into this course and I came out on the other end, with this thing.

Ryan Chapman: That's very cool. You talked also about insurance. That like it's a natural progression of the training that you're doing. How did that come about? How did you guys discover this natural thing that would, it's a no brainer for the people that are going through the course.

Jarrad Markel: I don't know. That's a really good question. I guess when I set up these courses or when we as a team set up these [00:18:00] courses, we think, Hey, you know what, what could we do to improve the experience of the customer on this course? And then after we say it, we come up with this list of things. Then we say, okay, well what's the cost of this and what would the cost to the customer be? And there's some things that were like, Oh, that just wouldn't make sense there. You know? Even if they did pay that much, it's just going to be not worth it for them. We rule out something, some ideas that we come up with, but things like a certificate for instance. That's just it, it just fits, because you just did a course. Most courses, if you're doing live training, you always hand them a certificate. Some training classes don't, but most do. And then, so I'm like the virtual events, I just tried to kind of make very much as much as I can, like a live training event. And so everything we do there, it's like, why can't we do that online?

Ryan Chapman: That's interesting to you. So you guys brainstorm ahead of time when you're thinking about, okay, here's the class, what are the natural things that that would go along with [00:19:00] it? If you have finished this course, what else would I probably need to have?

Jarrad Markel: Right. And I guess I should be clear. That doesn't happen. The first course we, we do minimum viable product where biggie, really heavy on that. Yeah. You launch it and then you're like, okay, with the minimum amount of ideas that you can get to make...

Ryan Chapman: Is the market interested in it.

Jarrad Markel: Yes. And then once you do that, when you're doing the second class, you say, okay, you know, what was the feedback we got so we can improve that stuff, but how? How else can we make it?

Ryan Chapman: I'd like to thank you for pointing that out, because I think what's really common when people are talking about what they've done is they cut out all the work phase. And it's like there's no, not even a montage. We just go from, you know, initial idea to final finished, polished product and it gives the wrong impression to people and so people can fall into that trap of, Oh, I got to get this thing polished before, you know, you've got to take into consideration everything that Ryan and Jarrad are talking about before I push anything live. Because even in my scenario with the training [00:20:00] company and when we had that campaign where we were sending direct mail and the text and the fax and the email, cause we had all those things to work with. The first version was just email. It was just something. And then we said, okay, how do we improve this now that it's working? So it's really important for people not to mistake that anybody that pushes out a fully polished thing that works.

Jarrad Markel: I've tried before and it never published, right? You know, a long time ago.

Ryan Chapman: If you did publish it, you'd be sorely disappointed cause it wouldn't produce the result you want.

Jarrad Markel: Exactly. Because it was the thing that I thought they wanted. It wasn't driven by the customer.

Ryan Chapman: You got to get the feedback from the customer. Even if you go to the customer first and say, what do you want? MVP. See what they say. If they really enjoy it and you're spot on, then do it again. You know? And then you can, as you're doing it again and again, you can refine with each phase, you know, learn something new and improve . Let's talk about [00:21:00] the, the live event. You guys to go to a lot of events where your sponsor or speaker of some sort. How do you guys make these events into the most profitable experience possible and the most engaging to retain customers and all that?

Jarrad Markel: So leading up to the event, I'll, make sure that we identify the people that are actually going to be there, that know they're going to be there. And inevitably, we'll always, we'll do this and then people will show up that didn't say, Hey, I'm going to be there. Cause it was a last minute decision. By sending out communications and trying to identify people that are, that know they're going to be there, then we can have that core group of people that we already know are going to be there so we can meet up with them.

Ryan Chapman: Okay, let's, let's get into that specifically because you know, tactically people need to understand how that's done because from a idea standpoint, it's like, well yeah, that's no brainer. Of course you'd do that. Tactically, how do you figure out who's going to be there?

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. So tactically, with [00:22:00] email, we send an email and they click a link to, I say, Hey, click here, if you're going to be at this event. And then that notes their account so we can identify him later. Via text message. We either do a, a link that adds a tag or we do a reply conversation.

Ryan Chapman: Quick question on that. Some people might think that, I would tell you go ahead and send the email and the text and the whole group, and if you want to know like how do, how do you do it? I'll tell you how I do it and you can tell me if you do it differently. My thought is a business owner is, I'll spend the money where I need to, but I'm not going to spend it frivolously. So I will send that email first because that's already wrapped up in my cost of everything else. So I'll send the email first to the group of people I'm trying to get a response from some way, click a link, that kind of thing, and then I'll give it like 24 hours sometimes, depending on how rushed I am, and then whoever didn't click the link in the email then gets the text messages. That way, I'm not [00:23:00] double spending where I don't need to. If a person gonna respond to email, I'll let them do it, and then the people that don't, that's then I'll hit them up with the text message. How do you do it?

Jarrad Markel: Same way. If it's a, if it's a big group of people like paying members that I'll just send them all a text message because it's an opportunity for me to talk with them, but they're paying me. So that pays for the text message.

Ryan Chapman: Sure.

Jarrad Markel: A list of people that aren't customers, and we do it the exact same way you just said.

Ryan Chapman: Okay, so email first and then, yeah, if I had main, like a main group of customers just trying to reach out, I'd just do a broadcast, probably from a broadcaster, that way it gets throttled out and kind of evens out the flow in response to. When, when we had the training company, sometimes we would do a voice broadcast, which you know, is basically like we, the way we did it, it was essentially the direct to voicemail method that we have available now.

Jarrad Markel: I love that, by the way.

Ryan Chapman: So we would do that. And then because they're real estate agents, [00:24:00] if they miss a call, they call you back. And so, we were doing, we said like three, 4,000 of these voicemails, and then all of a sudden our phone lines to go off the hook. Crazy. And our staff always hated us because there's all this title wave out and tidal wave back in, you know? And so, I really appreciate the throttling capabilities that the broadcaster offers because it can even out the response instead of getting everything all at once. Well, one, it wouldn't be delivered by the carriers as far as texting goes, but two, it it of evens out your response level so it's not so bad.

Jarrad Markel: That's a, that's a good tactic to use. I don't, I haven't done that, I've used campaign the whole time , but I just have three people that are, that are ready for the text message stuff. At least three people there. We do to our members, cause three people can handle the replies from our members.

Ryan Chapman: And you guys have pretty responsive members too?

[00:25:00] Jarrad Markel: Yeah. I just, I sent an email last week that I got a couple thousand responses from and I'm almost through. I replied to everybody. I tried to do that as much as I can, no matter if, if they reply to an email, it takes me four weeks to reply back, then it'll take me four weeks, but they're going to get a reply.

Ryan Chapman: That's great. So you know, it's interesting is so many people have trained their recipients of their emails that their emails are not to be responded to, that they killed the effectiveness of it. When you know, you actually could respond to the person a dramatically increases the engagement as a result, the community and the customer value and all that too.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. I actuall y , I went through the, my brother actually has put up links or, I'm stats for the past, since the beginning of the year emails that we'd sent and the ones with the reply button, about 30, what was the 36% Zach? So we'll, we'll go on that low end. Just say 36% of them actually replied to the message.

Ryan Chapman: That's great.

Jarrad Markel: I was like, that's [00:26:00] crazy. That's...

Ryan Chapman: I think that's an important lesson for people in a totally different subject, which is, I was talking to somebody else the other day about, it's not the size of list, it's the, it's the relationship with the list. And so you, it's up to you as a business owner to maintain the quality of your lines of communication. If you treat people like objects instead of humans, you're going to kill your lines of communication. If you keep those lines of communication open, respond to people like you're saying, now you're taking care of those lines of communication. Now you're going to have a great experience and relationship with customers and that's where you make or break a company.

Jarrad Markel: Yup. And I, after we did our last podcast together, I actually went in and I started looking at what I did when we first started. And I did it wrong for about, I would say almost a year and, and then I finally, you know, after that year period, I, either I reevaluated or somebody gave me some information or something, [00:27:00] but I changed and you can see the change and looking back at the broadcast and in the emails and stuff, you can see the change in the way that you talk to people. And so I think that everybody, that hasn't done, you know, that's a new business owner, or is it, it's kind of new at this, we all do it that way for a period of time until they realize, Hey, this isn't working. And then they sit down and they think, okay, how can this work? Or they get information from somebody that tells them that they should do it a different way.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, and that's why we send you the messaging connection when you sign up for Fix Your Funnel. If you just look at it... By the way, you got that audio? Last time we talked about? Good. That's great. Yeah. You have to get some, something has to change, otherwise you don't, right? You have to get some sort of new information. That's why I listen to podcasts like these can be so valuable and you can do this anytime. You can do it while you're exercising. And those barbells like you do, or you know, whatever, driving the kids to school, what have you. We keep it clean. All [00:28:00] right. So you get the people to raise their hand and say, yeah, this is me. I'm going to be at the event. Now what do you do when you're at the event?

Jarrad Markel: Yep. So when we're at the event, generally what we do is we have several places that we are scheduled to be for signing or whatever we're there for. And so while we're there, I'll send reminders about the event and generally I do that the day before. It's like, Hey, tomorrow we have this, you know, here's a list of everything. And then an hour before the actual event on the day of the event, and I'll send out a text message that says, Hey, don't forget, you know, we have this thing coming up. So meet us at booth number six, nine, six, nine or whatever.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. That's perfect. So how do, you obviously did, cause you guys have been doing stuff for a long time, you did stuff before you implemented that strategy. You've done it since. What has the difference been in terms of any, any metric that you think is important for [00:29:00] people to hear about?

Jarrad Markel: Oh, attendance is definitely been up way higher. I can give a specific example and I've got a picture to prove it, but you can't see it right now. If you want the picture and just text me and I'll send it to you. But I did a, an announcement at a show two years ago. So, my dad actually wasn't able to go cause he was going through some medical treatment and I went and when I was on my way, I was like, okay, I need to make this, one of the biggest announcements that we've made. And so I, I worked really hard to send text messages and emails and I actually used chatbots on that one too. Cause what you find at events is people check texts and they check Facebook messenger, emails kind of get ignored until after the event. So, I did that. And at the event there was it was an enormous amount of people that showed up at these, you know, these booths in the hallways. It was, I'd say probably a hundred people right there at this little corner booth. And I kind of felt guilty cause we [00:30:00] clogged the aisle sideways. But I was like man, this, this is great.

Ryan Chapman: What happens when a crowd is created is everybody wants to know what's going on too.

Jarrad Markel: Exactly. So there's probably people there that didn't even know who we were and now they do.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. Well, that's fantastic. Hey, let's talk, if you don't mind, if you got a couple more minutes, I'd like to talk about, you mentioned chatbots. I haven't really been a big proponent of user chatbots, but it's not necessarily that I'm against them. I see some weaknesses and I also see some tendencies that I'm not, you know, thrilled about, but obviously it doesn't make the medium bad. How are you guys using, you know, social media chatbots? And what's been your experience?

Jarrad Markel: The game has kinda changed a little bit in the last like month and on March 4th is going to change again because the, the rules that they're setting, so make sure you're, you're keeping up with that, but how we've used them in the past and how I'm going to keep using them until it doesn't work anymore, is we'll run [00:31:00] ads for, let's just say training, for instance. And what I do on the ads is I actually connect the chat bot to the ad. And in the ad it says, Hey, comment below and Dirty Harry, who is our chat bot. Dirty Harry will send you a message with more information. And so people comment, they get an automatic chat bot message and then they have to reply to the bot to actually give you permission to send them notifications. And so as soon as they reply, it actually disseminates the information we asked for their email address and their phone number if they'll give it, I think. And, as soon as they give that information, it actually shoots over to our system so we can utilize messenger, email, and text message, assuming that they've given us permission to do that. And so we, we do that. So that's how we gather the information by using the ads to comment and then they get into the...

Ryan Chapman: I want to point out something that's super smart about that, that this is where I see a lot of people [00:32:00] mess up when it comes to social media chat bots like Facebook bots, messenger bots is they try to keep it all in messenger.

Jarrad Markel: Why though? That that was my question. I have had clients do that before. I said, well, why do you want to do that? And they'd say, well, that's where we got their information. I was like, okay, but don't you want to be where they want to be? What if you just caught them while they were on messenger?

Ryan Chapman: I think it's the same situation as those people who have like a YouTube channel and all they have are subscriptions. Yeah, it's great. As long as the company doesn't change the rules on you. Then, you know, cool, you know, do stuff. But you know that when there's one company in charge, they're going to change the rules. That's, that's the positive about emails, that there's not one company in charge. There's a, there's a few big players, but there's competition. And so they can't just run, you know, Raksha on ya and do whatever they want to do. Same with texting. You got the carriers that are making the call so they can kind of [00:33:00] group together and do some things. But it's a lot more difficult to get for big companies to get on the same page than it is one. And that's the danger I've always seen with, the messenger bots cause you know, marketer are gonna ruin it when they do, the company is going to respond. They don't have to go through committee or anything like that. They can just basically do it.

Jarrad Markel: I consider myself a marketer. You don't have to ruin it. No, you don't have to...

Ryan Chapman: But you know there's not as many people like you and I, unfortunately.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. Well, I would, you know, if, if you're interested in the information, you know, the tactics and stuff and doing it where it's not going to ruin these mediums, then let's chat. I'd love to do that because the more people that we can make do it absolutely get to...

Ryan Chapman: But I interrupted you. You're making a bigger poin t. You don't have to ruin it as a marketer.

Jarrad Markel: Oh yeah. You don't have to ruin it as a marketer. So, I don't know where I was going to go after that.

Ryan Chapman: Well, so what do you, what are you seeing with Facebook [00:34:00] messenger? Are you seeing signs that people are kind of ruining some things?

Jarrad Markel: Oh yeah. Facebook is changing. They, it's a whole new rule set coming in March, I think it's March 4th is the implementation date. So, that's a whole new rule set and then I have to assume that that's only because people were abusing the service.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. That's what I saw on a first came out because we kind of monitored it and we had people saying, Hey, will you do some stuff? You know, like you've done for texting for, for Facebook and you know, I knew our limitations. I knew that we didn't have the staff and the developers to keep up with what Facebook would do and which was inevitable is that they're going to be constantly changing the rules, we already have our Fix Your Funnel sync product, you know, that interacts with Facebook and it's bad enough cause you've got an update like every month just to keep up with their API cause they break stuff all the time and they don't really, they're not really great in their API about [00:35:00] explaining things. And so I just thought, you know, there's no way we could keep up with it and I don't want to really encourage that behavior. There's already people handling it out there. We'll let them handle it, but it's just on the front side where I see it being valuable the way that you're doing it, where you're having a very quick interaction to move them to a different medium, but you still have that medium available as long as the rules that allow for some stuff, right?

Jarrad Markel: Absolutely. Yeah. And the change that's coming and it might already be implemented, I'm not sure, but I can ask somebody on my team if you want to know for sure, but essentially what you're going to have to do with Facebook chatbots is if they, if the person has not interacted with a message you sent within 24 hours, then you won't be able to send them another one. So what that means to me is that you've got to have either myself or somebody doing, sending a message every single day, which takes a lot of time. And, and I don't know...

Ryan Chapman: Which is going to burn a lot of people.

Jarrad Markel: It's going to burn a lot of people.

[00:36:00] Ryan Chapman: Cause they don't know how to communicate in an ongoing basis. It's tough. I, you know, I couldn't do it. Yeah. I can communicate daily with a whole bunch of people.

Jarrad Markel: You know, I could sit down and set up 365 days worth of automated messages, but you know, if they don't want a message every day, then why should I send them a message?

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. Well, that's the same limitation that we found about WhatsApp. So WhatsApp, you know, super guarded. They started to open up their API and their rules are the exact same. Basically, the rule is you can send messages of three types. It's like a notification, a delivery update, and an appointment reminder. Those are the three that they would allow, but that's it. And then you can interact live for 24 hours. And I think what we'll see over time is Facebook actually moving closer to the WhatsApp rules and WhatsApp probably not moving at all.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure if Facebook bought WhatsApp so they're [00:37:00] the...

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, they did.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. They figured out that, I guess that maybe works for the user. Who knows?

Ryan Chapman: Well, you know, the Facebook, if there's one good thing about them is that they're always checking. They're always doing split tests of some sort. And so I think what they've done over the last couple of years is they've run WhatsApp as one experiment, and Facebook messenger is another, and there's a lot of positive things about Facebook messenger. A lot of those things we're hoping to see come out in RCS, which is, it's the new texting standard, but we have to get iPhone, Android, and then all the carriers on board before we'll see that which will be real rich communication. That's what RCS stands was rich communications system. So you'll be able to do all the things you can do on a Facebook message inside of a text messages is what will come at some point. We just got to get a Apple on board. I think Android's, you know, been doing it for awhile now, but once they get Apple on board, then the carriers on board, the carriers [00:38:00] will do it. They'll charge a little bit extra because it's going to be a whole new system for them, but it'll be faster and better. And because we're paying a little bit more, supposedly the carriers will be better at delivery too. So you heard it here first, you know, that's, that's what's coming down the pipe for texting. Well, thanks so much. This has been really cool. I think that those two strategies can be real helpful for folks that are teaching and, you know, trying to get attendance up, or even if you're selling by webinar webinars or virtual event, if it's free, you know, we already talked about all the downsides, but you can mitigate a lot of those with the same strategies.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that the goal for a virtual event, there's, it's actually two fold for us anyway, it's that we want to disseminate the information to as many people as possible, but also the attendees of the virtual event. We want to convert them into attendees of live events. And so that's in that you can do in your business as well for those of you that [00:39:00] are listening.

Ryan Chapman: Well thanks a lot, Jared. I know you're at a hard break, you've got to go, and so I don't, I wanna respect your time. I thank you for being on again. Again, if you have not already reached out to Jarrad, you've got a really great document. You shared it with me and you can get it by texting "funnel" to (385) 217-6624 right?

Jarrad Markel: That's correct.

Ryan Chapman: So that'll be in the show notes as well. So if you want to go to the blog and see this post, you'll be able to get it there as well and you can text it over to Jarrad and get that resource. Thanks so much for being on again. We're going to have to do this again cause I can tell there's a lot more than what we've covered so far. But we'll give you a little break between now and the next time.

Jarrad Markel: Yeah. Give my brain time to relax, I guess. Well, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Ryan Chapman: Oh, it's been my honor. Thanks again.

Jarrad Markel: Yup, thank you.