Personalizing Automation with Lindsey Ardmore

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Ryan Chapman: Hey, this is Ryan Chapman with the Fix Your Funnel interview series. I'm really excited to have Lindsey Ardmore with me. Lindsay, it's been a while since we talked. I think we talked last about three years ago and you left an impression on me because you were so good at paying attention to detail. I mean, it guess it makes sense that you do the work that you do today.

Lindsey Ardmore: That's so nice, thank you.

Ryan Chapman: But I, I noticed that you were really attentive to detail and you're just very quick at picking up on strategies. Maybe some people think that that comes naturally, but I really feel like that is a developed skill. Pick up on a strategy and not just see the strategy, but the actual implementation plan because it's really easy for someone to say, okay, I get the strategy, but I don't know what to do. And I think one of the skills that I noticed in you, even back, you know, three and a half years ago, was the ability to take a strategy and translate that into action. So it may explain why you're, you're doing so well at helping people today.

Lindsey Ardmore: Thank you Ryan, that's so nice.

[00:01:00] ( Ryan Chapman: ) So at the center of... 'Cause you work with principally, is it women?

Lindsey Ardmore: Yes, and some cool dudes.

Ryan Chapman: And some cool dudes. When we were talking before we started recording, you referenced your ladies a lot. And so you're working principally with women or some cool dudes that have, have a company that they're running, they're, they're getting some good revenue, but they're also at the end of their rope.

Lindsey Ardmore: Oh, yes. So most of my girls, they come to me. I'm always so impressed to know their revenue numbers. As little infrastructure as they usually have.

Ryan Chapman: So it's scraps of paper and maybe a notebook somewhere. And between that and their memory there, they're keeping the business afloat.

Lindsey Ardmore: They rely on their brain way too much, usually.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. It's interesting. I've talked about this a few different times, but usually what I see in those kinds of scenarios is feast and famine, [00:02:00] where there's moments where they're having great revenue and then moments of nothing to be found. And so they go through this process of hustle, deliver, sigh, and then realize they're starving again.

And so the money flows at that, and it's really just this reflection of our human nature, right? Our inability really to juggle a ton of different things. And that's why we use technology to make this difference for us. You and your crew do agency type work for these ladies. But you also teach them some of the philosophical and foundational concepts needed for making automation a relief instead of an extra job.

Lindsey Ardmore: Totally, yes.

Ryan Chapman: What is, what is at the center of that philosophy? I mean, what is your approach?

Lindsey Ardmore: Our biggest philosophical reason for doing this is we are constantly told more leads, do this, bring in more hustle, hustle, hustle, you know, like all this force and grind.

And that's just not, I just can't work like that. [00:03:00] And I find most of my ladies can't work like that either. So what we work really, really hard to do is take and capitalize on everything that's already coming into your business. Maximize that. Make, make every single lead prospect invite count and do something with it instead of just relying on your brain and scraps paper. And really take them to the next level that way.

Ryan Chapman: I found the same thing. If you, if you find someone who's doing, you know relatively well with no systems, they're probably sitting on two to three times as much money as they realized.

Lindsey Ardmore: Amen. Amen. And the fact of the matter is, when you talk to somebody, and a lot of times business owners will tell you that, like, I just need more leads. I just need more leads. It's like, no, honey, you don't need more leads. Can you take the leads that you have and actually do something with them? And then when you, when you help them mind- map that out of where all the leads are, or if you have them go and dive into their booking system, if they have one or into their calendar, into their planner, their [00:04:00] paper planner, into their email, you can find, you know, 10, 15, 20 from the past couple of weeks even. They haven't done anything with.

Ryan Chapman: So your first phase then is really helping them recognize, Hey, there's some, some things that you're relying totally upon yourself that we could let a machine do.

Lindsey Ardmore: Exactly. Yes. So what we typically do is when somebody comes into our world, we make a really concerted effort to not only get them to shift and realize, Oh my gosh, I don't need to go run a massive amount of traffic and pour a bunch of money down the drain trying to bring new leads in, what we actually need to do is implement some, some systems inside of the business that can actually do all the heavy lifting for us so that these girls and our clients can, you know, capitalize on everybody that they have coming in already. Make sure it's optimized, and then turn on the traffic.

Ryan Chapman: But I love that philosophy and approach. In fact, before we started recording, we're kind of talking about this a little bit, and I know that some people [00:05:00] listening may go, okay, well, I hear who Lindsey is talking about, that's not me. I'm already using marketing automation. I don't need to listen to anymore.

And I would say, hold your horses there for one second because we were talking about the whole reality of email, right? So if you're predominantly emailing your marketing, then you may be doing the exact same thing. It's just at a different level. So the lady that is keeping track of all her leads on paper or a planner or email and something is letting leads slip through because she's not reaching out to them.

And then if you said, okay, I'm going to add Mark Animation, you, you go through it. But if they went through your course, Lindsay, they'd learned about using multiple medias to get ahold of people. So this wouldn't apply. But they would know, okay, I need to start following up. And so they put a couple of systems in place, and for most people using InfusionSoft or Keap, what they'll do is they'll go principally email at that rate. But what they don't realize is that email has about a [00:06:00] 50% success rate, and that's on the generous side. It can be as low as 5%, 10% so what that means is that if you've got a hundred leads that come in and you go send an email sequence to those a hundred leads on the high side, 50 of them are going to see that and interact with it in some way. On the low side, it could be 10 to 5% interacting with it, but regardless, you just gave up half of your leads because you tried just to communicate through one medium. What's an approach that you use to enhance this one medium issue, which is, you know, I mean, agreeably it's much better than doing nothing, right?

Lindsey Ardmore: Oh, it's, it's all about layers, right? And building blocks. So I think if, if you're starting out and you have email, that's amazing. A lot of humans don't even, like business owners don't even have that in place. But then if you really, really wanted to take it, you know, to the next level, what we do is we've actually incorporated text messaging [00:07:00] into our campaigns and our, in some of our followup sequence to help encourage that engagement, help encourage the sales conversation, and you know, get a more personalized approach to them because most people are attached to their cell phone in some way or another.

Ryan Chapman: It's unfortunate, but true. I have a son who recently saved up money. He wanted to buy a smart phone. He's had a, you know, a dumb phone for a while, and so we're like, okay, maybe, we put good parental restrictions on it so don't worry. But he was really wanting the smartphone, so he earned the money for it. He did some entrepreneurial things to earn some money, so he got the phone.

I'm like, okay, here's the deal though. If I see you on all it the time, we're going to have to take it away cause you can't, you can't get addicted this young. Yeah, he's 13 so he's not terribly young, but still pretty young. But for most of us, even though we may not want to admit it, we do check our messages quite frequently, especially text messages. So that is a [00:08:00] huge upgrade from just email alone. But you don't stop sending email because you add texting, do you?

Lindsey Ardmore: Oh no, I like to do, I mean wherever I can be, Ryan, I want to be.

Ryan Chapman: I think that's really important too, cause some people can take things the wrong way. And I'm not personally a huge fan of email. I work really hard to try and keep up with it, but it's not something I enjoy at all. We've almost gone too far the to just using the bare minimum of email and our marketing automation campaigns. I'm not anti-email. I think it has a place, and I know there's some weirdos that love it, you know, so I keep on sending them their emails.

Lindsey Ardmore: I think there's like a, a big, I don't know what the why this is, but I have a really good girlfriend who is a massive messenger bot strategist. She travels around the world talking about this stuff, and she constantly is saying like, you don't need email. You don't need an email. You don't need email. And it's like, why would you not [00:09:00] be every single possible place they could be? You know, in a really peaceful, nice, nonaggressive manner to make sure that your prospects are getting your information that you want them to take action on. 'Cause, like you said, Ryan, people, I mean, some people won't check their emails. Other people, you know, just ignore text messages. People don't message like they, you know, their messenger bots, whatever.

Ryan Chapman: That's the, and I think that's the big message for people to take away listening to this. You use as many mediums as you can. Be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each and what can each one do.

Like for example. I can totally sell on an email. Oh, totally. I can write some great long format copy. Put that in there. If I tried to take that and put it in a text message. Fail. Nobody wants to read a marathon or you know, just a big, huge lecture inside of a, a text message. Text is really good for driving people to places. Terrible medium for selling in. So I haven't haven't, like I'm running an ad right now to our users cause I want them to see it. [00:10:00] And then, okay, so right there is a perfect example. I can email, I can text and I can run ads. I'm running a texting campaign, dollar users, I'm sending emails, but I'm also running Facebook ads to our users to educate them on particular strategies I know people haven't gotten yet. One of them is don't sell by text message, which was totally conflicting with what we're talking about here, but you could never sell on 160 characters, and so you'd got to know... Go ahead...

Lindsey Ardmore: It's just spammy.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. It always comes off spammy when you try and sell in a text.For some reason, the medium just hasn't been destroyed like email has. An email, we just, we expect it, right? So email has certain things it can do. Texting has certain things it can do. You know, ads through remarketing have things that we can do. But knowing each medium and what they can do is really critical in order to design a really good communication system, which is essentially what marketing is, right? So you gave an example though, [00:11:00] before we start recording of how you used. Multiple medias to enhance engagement with your coaching group?

Lindsey Ardmore: So we run boot camps a couple times a year. And they're just your traditional like five day challenges , but what we've actually decided to do was actually... All virtual. And what we decided to do is we've run them multiple times and have discovered that by the end of that five days, most of the people are not wanting to open their emails. They'll forget about it. They'll start, they'll put it into a different folder, whatever. We were just weren't getting the engagement that we wanted. So what we decided to start doing, for the past few bootcamps that we've run in the past year, is on our optin form we say, do you want to get text reminders about, you know, each and every day. And, most people have given us our number, their numbers. It's fascinating because if I were just to put like the field phone number, they probably wouldn't.

Ryan Chapman: Nobody.

[00:12:00] Lindsey Ardmore: Yeah. But since I said, Hey, do you want me to send this to you too? It was crazy. Like 90% uptake. I'm giving their phone number, which is just, you know...

Ryan Chapman: Can we just pause there just for a second because that's a really important lesson that you just explained in terms of if you give people a good reason, that's in their benefit, more than happy to give you contact information you wouldn't dream that they would give you.

Lindsey Ardmore: Totally.

Ryan Chapman: And what you did is you framed it from their perspective, which, it's a really easy mistake, dicey, a lot of people make, is they frame things, everything from their perspective as the business owner, and they forget that everybody is motivated and active based on their perspective and how they view things. So if you can make sure you word it from their perspective, you connected giving the the cell phone number to a benefit that they would want. And becuase of that you've got 90%, that was fantastic.

Lindsey Ardmore: It's, and you know what actually has happened since I'm able to text them. So every single [00:13:00] day they get an email and they get a text message and the email and the text message, they drive to the same page, right? We're just trying to direct them into their, you know, daily training. That also includes their homework. The people that click in the text message actually go on to do their homework and engage with me inside of the Facebook group that we have.

Ryan Chapman: You have tracking on both, so you can tell who clicks on, who clicks with the text.

Lindsey Ardmore: Totally.

Ryan Chapman: And text generated more engagement. You give homework in these bootcamps, right?

Lindsey Ardmore: Yep. Yep. So the homework. And so basically they're driving to a landing page that has a video and it has a homework action item. And the call to action is, tell me like, report on your homework for me. And the people that go through text, those friends, not only do they stay to the end of the week actually engaging with me, which is huge because if, you know, if you ever run a challenge, you know, by the end of the week, the numbers are way down. But they're actually going through and completing the homework, engaging on [00:14:00] the, on the, in the Facebook group. And are just creating a relationship instead of just reading my, you know, value emails or whatever.

Ryan Chapman: I think we mentioned it since we've been talking about how a lot of people, they think that the solution is traffic. Just send more traffic to my business. Give me more leads. And then it'll be all good, but you're like, wait, you don't have any systems in place. And so you put systems in place. Once you've got systems in place, now traffic is a good idea, but then you're in the kind of situation where you've got 90% of the people saying, yeah, text me, and then those people that you're texting or engaging at a higher, much higher level than just email. Now you're in a position where traffic is a good thing to add to that. If you had a ton of traffic in it, when you're just doing email it just would kind of fizzle.

Lindsey Ardmore: Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't make sense especially with how my bootcamps were running previousl y . It would never have made sense for me to add, you know, flames or like fire. What's the word? [00:15:00] Gas to the fire. It would have been a, it would've been a disaster actually.

Ryan Chapman: That's so cool. And with that enhanced engagement, the value of the prospect to your company is significantly higher, I'd imagine.

Lindsey Ardmore: Oh, well, those people actually go on to buy.

Ryan Chapman: Oh well that's the whole point, right?

Lindsey Ardmore: Yeah, exactly. Like if they're engaging to the end, if I can get them to the sales conversation, right? If, if they will engage through texts or, I mean, if they engage through emails to you, if they get to the end of the bootcamp, actually participate, have engaged, they've created a relationship with me and I have that sales conversation. It's not a wasted effort on my part.

Ryan Chapman: And then the other thing I want to point out too, for people that are just casually listening at this point, is that what is the result of you enhancing your communication ability by using the texting and the email. And it's not just that you did better, you got some more sales. Those individuals that you helped go through the bootcamp are better off [00:16:00] than when they came to you.

Lindsey Ardmore: Totally.

Ryan Chapman: Amongst those who buy, you're also going to create a better outcome for them than they would have on their own. Then you've got that benefit for them and all the people that they serve, as you know, as a small business. So there's a huge kind of rippling effect all the way through this. But even those people that went through the challenge and maybe didn't decide to do business with you now, are better off than they were before because they actually did something.

Lindsey Ardmore: Yeah. And they actually got the content that they wanted to get, right? They actually were able to see it and digest it, and if, if that's what they needed at that point in time, they didn't need to take the next step. You know, they, if they actually engaged.

Ryan Chapman: And a lot of people don't think about the fact, but those are called seeds, right? When you help somebody along the way, it doesn't matter how far. Maybe they don't go all the way with you, right? Maybe they don't take that journey all the way to where you could lead them. But they take some portion of that journey. What happens is it creates Goodwill within them about you or towards your company. [00:17:00] That Goodwill is what feeds a bunch of other people deciding to do business with you eventually, because when your name comes up, someone can say, Oh yeah, I went through their bootcamp. That was really good. I didn't end up actually working with her, but the boot camp was phenomenal because I did this, this, and this. You actually helped me get results. So even these little things that we do as part of our. You know, our lead generation as part of our nurture that don't turn into business. When we do it right, when we have the good communication that's occurring, that establishes that Goodwill, which is invaluable. It's something people can't really easily quantify, but you can know for sure when it's missing.

Lindsey Ardmore: Yeah, I, I train on this all the time. We call it the Law of Reciprocity. And that's exactly it. Like planting these seeds, making sure people feel very loved and supported and cared about. And if they come, they'll circle back around or they'll help somebody circle back around to us. You know?

Ryan Chapman: I mean, there's a lot of people that I haven't [00:18:00] personally done business with, but I've sent people to because you know, I had such a good experience with them. It felt so positive about what they were doing. I could recommend them in good conscience and say, yeah, that's a great person. You should be looking to do business with them. So you said also that you've been using some texting to enhance your onboarding? What are you doing there?

Lindsey Ardmore: Okay, so we actually have a fully automated from cold traffic to program purchaser. It's completely automated. Hands off by me. What that creates though is there's a little bit of relationship gap, right? 'Cause they haven't had a chance to talk to me yet. So what we've implemented is, is when somebody purchases our automation foundations program, they actually get a text message from me automatically. And it's like, Yay, I'm so excited you're here, sparkles emoji. You know, it's all like very much love you all the way. And it creates this conversation [00:19:00] back which is really fun with people I haven't had the pleasure of talking to yet. So it's an immediate kind of like wow factor. And that's the, that's the response that I get and the feedback that we have gotten is, I can't believe Lindsey texted me after they've, you know, completely cold traffic coming in, buying through a webinar. And the response is, I can't believe Lindsey texted me. That's so nice.

Ryan Chapman: Well, that tells me a couple of things. One, it tells me that your messages is written to one person. You didn't think, Oh, let me put this in the most corporate speak ever. It's not, you know, thinking, okay, this is going to go to a bunch of different people. You were thinking about one specific person when you wrote that. If you don't do that, you would never get the kind of response that you've received.

Lindsey Ardmore: Exactly.

Ryan Chapman: The other thing that that tells me is that this is, and I think from my perspective, this is the big shift that has to happen inside of a business owners head, in order for them to really benefit from automation. [00:20:00] Automation ought to mitigate the impact of human nature and enhance your humanity. And so in this scenario, what you're doing is you're saying, okay, as a person. Chances are that if, if somebody poked me every day, that I got a new lead in the funnel, or every hour or whenever it happened, and I said, Hey, you're supposed to send a text message to this person. I'd probably forget to do some. Eventually I might start to ignore the poke, you know, I would become deaf to it, or you know, something important would come up and I just wouldn't get around to it, even though I knew that was important. Something else seems more important. So it would start to pile up and then we would create this feast or famine cycle. But because you put it into automation and it's not cold because you personally thought about each individual that comes through. Just having the machine implement that initiation of conversation, you're, you're letting the machine [00:21:00] mitigate the impact of your human nature. The tendency to forget the delay, to miss, prioritize all that stuff, but you're not cutting out your interaction with the person because if the person responds to your personal message. You actually get it and you can reply back, right?

Lindsey Ardmore: Exactly. So it just, it, it does that first step for me because if I were, was expected to go and do that on a larger scale, I imagine that would be quite, I would just not do it, knowing me, like you just said. But when they respond back to me, that opens a whole door. Like the whole conversation for me is then totally personal.

Ryan Chapman: You just have to be present at that point.

Lindsey Ardmore: Yeah. And at that point too, if you think about it, when they respond back, they're not expecting a response right away. Immediately. Like within 30 seconds. Right. Because you've already initiated the conversation to them. So they respond back. You can, you know, we do it in batches. I check my text messages like maybe once a day and just [00:22:00] respond back and they're so happy with it.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. That's what I think. That's the great part about texts too, is it's a little forgiving, right? Some people get a little worked up, you know, I got to respond very quickly, but you actually don't. That's the joy of text is it's not fixed to a time period. Like a phone call.

Lindsey Ardmore: Totally.

Ryan Chapman: You know, if I get back to you in a reasonable period of time, people don't think anything about it.

Lindsey Ardmore: Exactly.

Ryan Chapman: Well, that's, that's really great. You know, I think that if, if people listening can think about that whole concept of how do I start letting automation set up these human to human interaction experiences, because that's where all the money is. Like, even though you're not selling in that moment of personal interaction, and I'm using air quotes for selling cause they're not like promoting and saying, go buy this now you are establishing a relationship. 'Cause relationships come through communication like anybody can tell you. In fact, have you seen the [00:23:00] movie called Call of the Wild?

Lindsey Ardmore: No.

Ryan Chapman: Just came out.

Lindsey Ardmore: I haven't seen the new one.

Ryan Chapman: So Harrison Ford, so without spoiling in the movie, the long and short of it is that, there's a relationship that's kind of breaks down because they don't communicate anymore. And then a new relationship is formed because communication is occurring. And it just really reinforces this point that sales, yeah, we have to be able to fix the problem that people have. Right? Ultimately, they're expecting us to be able to change this thing that they want changed in their life, and so we have to fulfill on that, but it choosing who we're gonna trust to let us, to help us with that fixing of our problem. It comes down to relationship. Establishing that relationship, having that personal touch will go a long way to separating you from anybody else that they could be thinking about.

Lindsey Ardmore: Exactly, I love it.

Ryan Chapman: That's great. [00:24:00] Well so, okay, so you work with people as an agency. You also have your course called Automation Foundations that lets people that are not quite ready to hire an agency, but want to learn the fundamentals of automation.

Lindsey Ardmore: Yeah.

Ryan Chapman: You have that as well. You, you actually are a big time user of Fix Your Funnel.

Lindsey Ardmore: Yes. Love it.

Ryan Chapman: And so you have a keyword and a phone number that people could use to get ahold of you.

Lindsey Ardmore: Yes, exactly! And I'll go to me.

Ryan Chapman: So look at that. If people would like to get a hold of you, they can text Tower. I would just tell them that it was related to this conversation that we had today.

So that will give Lindsey some context. That's what she's using a keyword versus saying, just text me the number cause she wants to know, you know, what's the context that she doesn't have to repeat things that you already know, but you guys can be on the same page and her number that you would text tower, TOWER to is (941) [00:25:00] 208-0799. And we'll put that in the show notes. That way you guys can see that the bottom and our transcription as well. Well, this has been a really great conversation. I really appreciate you coming on. Lindsey, is there any like final thing that you would want to share that you maybe didn't get a chance to?

Lindsey Ardmore: No, I just, I'm just so grateful to be here. Thanks for, thanks for having me.

Ryan Chapman: Like I said, when I first met Lindsay, it was a long time ago and it was through a conversation we were having for one of her clients. I can tell immediately that she's just super sharp. So Lindsey, you know, this is, you're the type of person that would I want any Fix Your Funnel user to work with because you pay attention to detail. You get the strategies. Obviously not only do you get them, cause I see unfortunately a lot of folks that do automation stuff that have leaky faucets. You don't let, you don't have a tolerance for leaky faucets obviously, because not only is your bootcamp. You know, but also in your onboarding, you're, you're [00:26:00] utilizing these technologies and these strategies to make sure that you have like stellar experience for your customers and your clients and for their clients. So I love seeing it when people eat their own dog food, when they don't just preach the thing, but they do it. And we appreciate that you are one of those people that walks the talk. Thank you.

Lindsey Ardmore: Thank you!

Ryan Chapman: Again, if you want to reach out to Lindsey, you can text TOWER to (941) 208-0799 thanks so much, Lindsey, appreciate you being on.

Lindsey Ardmore: Thank you so much. I hope you have a good rest of your day.

Ryan Chapman: Thank you.