The Importance of Asking Why with Shaun Whynauht

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Ryan Chapman: Hey, this is Ryan Chapman with the Fix Your Funnel interview series, and I'm privileged to have Shaun Whynauht with me from Blue Cow Marketing. Welcome to the podcast.

Shaun Whynauht: Thanks Ryan for having me.

Ryan Chapman: I think people have already picked up on this by now, but I'll just say, you know, we chat before we start recording here and you know, we go and kind of like get aquainted with your story a little bit more. But your story is pretty interesting. You have kind of this journey from what you studied in college to what you actually do now. Would you mind walking us through that because I think it's interesting.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely. So when I went to college I was dead set on being on the radio. That was my big goal. And a week into schooling, I switched from radio to television production. And then two years later got my technical television diploma and left college and started working in the television industry. Immediately after that, I also created a video production company because in high school I was a DJ. So it was a natural progression for me to start to videotape the weddings that I was [00:01:00] deejaying at. And, that was my first step into that. Over the years, that evolved into, you know, doing video production for businesses, and then taught myself web design. Then nine years ago, got introduced to Infusionsoft as a customer first, fell in love with the automation world, and then decided to become certified and up to the present day now still hold that certification , still working with HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign are the three main platforms that I do. And also I'm very entrenched with paid traffic, Facebook and Google ads.

Ryan Chapman: Very cool. It's interesting cause that my entry into the infusion soft world was as a customer first too, and just kind of became thrilled with the idea of being able to implement systems without humans messing it up too much.

Shaun Whynauht: Yeah. And actually my first time, cause I was very reluctant to buy into what they were trying to sell me. And I was, you know, it wasn't until I started to [00:02:00] look at independent reviews from people on their blogs about how the system actually worked. And then my first campaign when I went through my onboarding was a 10 step learn Facebook basics that was geared towards teaching just people how to use Facebook on a personal level. And then the very end, I post one question by email that was, you know, did you find this useful? Could you see this working in your business if you had one? And I had about 60% of those people reply back and want to talk with me. And that's how I actually doubled my business with that one 10 series campaign.

Ryan Chapman: You know what's really fascinating too, is you used email and the way that it was intended to be with that question, like, I think that was, that's the biggest missed opportunity in most people's automated email campaigns is just asking a question, starting a conversation. I mean at its core, that's what Fix Your Funnel really [00:03:00] what we teach day in and day out is people just ask questions, start a conversation. Because the quickest way to turn a prospect into a customer is to have a conversation.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely. And any type of email that you're sending out, whether you're sending it yourself or you have a system that's going to send it to you, you need to make sure that that email is positioned in a way that somebody can easily hit reply and respond back to you and you're monitoring it. You know, you're not sending it from an email that's unmonitored and it's the same success that we've had with working with clients for texting as well as sending out automated texts. You really want people to be able to text back and continue that conversation. It's more of a primer than it is a automated conversation.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. I think text is even more that way. Where you could get away maybe with not having emails with replies, you cannot get away with texts without replies. You just can't do it.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. But I'm glad to hear that you had that success with email, that [00:04:00] just from the very beginning, well, at that point, you must have been pretty much hooked.

Shaun Whynauht: I was that, that alone in that first year was what made me look into becoming certified and, went down to, that was back when they were doing the certifications down in Arizona and their actual office versus online. And it was just amazing at what it was and what it could do. And being in far Eastern Canada, you know, technology has always been four years behind getting here than it is in you know, the Southwestern side of of the US so I was in this position to be able to bring technology and tactics to clients here that they didn't know existed yet. Yeah, it was a great position to be in.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, I can imagine, especially nine years ago, I mean, today the world has changed a little bit. I think marketing automation is a little more common, but I think one of the benefits you have of having been through the whole journey of using marketing animation is you've come to a different [00:05:00] destination. At least this has been my experience with all people that really, you know, really get into it, is you end up at a different place. That was one of the first things you mentioned before we started recording, which was you simplify systems. Tell us a little bit about that. How did you get to that point? Did you have to go through a place where you overcomplicated things to get there, or was that like a natural thing you fell into?

Shaun Whynauht: When, when the technology came out? It was always the novelty of let's automate as much as we can because it's going to make our life fantastic and we won't have to work as much. And in reality, you then lost touch with your clients and your customers. So yeah. Over the last, I would say, five years, you know, things have taken a change where, you know, the consumers, they want that personal touch. And a lot of times the sales process deems that necessary to have a part of it, you know, to be personal and, [00:06:00] and the other parts to be automated.

Ryan Chapman: How do you say which part should we automate and which parts should be human touch?

Shaun Whynauht: So what I look at that as, you know, and let's list out all the things that you would do in your process. So you know, for a client to understand what their sales process is first, we can't do anything until we at least know that. So either they know what it is or we help them develop that and that's what are all the things that absolutely need to happen or be done from the moment somebody hears about you to when you close that sale and even ask for referrals down down the road. So let's map it out.

Ryan Chapman: So frequently that's just something that they're doing. Cause you said about 40% of your people have no automation at all going on. The other 60% have some, which you could deem as automation, but usually it's rough. So you're having to extract out of them, what is it that you're actually doing that creates a successful outcome?

Shaun Whynauht: Usually what it is, is asking them the same [00:07:00] questions multiple times. So you know, for example, I will ask initially, you know, do you have a sales process? And they're like, no, not really. I'm like, okay, well that's, that's fine. That's fair. So just walk me through what you do when somebody. Calls you or comes to your place of business and then they'll start to tell you, and that ultimately is their sales process, right? So then when we start to map it out, then they look at it and like, well, yeah, I guess, I guess we do have a process. So you know how many of those things are either you absolutely love doing them and, or they are getting you cash, like you're making money off them. You know, if those things are you love doing them and you make money off them, let's not take the personal touch away from those. If there are things that you don't like to do and they're not making you cash, can we automate them? So you don't have to do them, but they, it's still need to get done.

Ryan Chapman: Must be done but don't really want to do them.

Shaun Whynauht: That's right. That's right. [00:08:00] And then, you know, in the middle of the road is, you know, they compliment getting to making your money in your business, but they don't necessarily need you to be doing them. You know? Right. So, you know, anything like, you know, nurture campaigns and things like that, you know, they need to be done. They need to nurture and stay in touch, and the content has to be great, right? So, you know, that's, that's a part of the elements that you can automate. But if it's, you know, reaching out to clients to, you know, check in on them and see how they're doing, you know, especially in these times that we're in right now, it's absolutely crucial. And a lot of our clients that, and even prospects who were dead set against going automated and technology and they just want it to you know, stay in the old ways of doing things, now they're using technology a lot more effectively, they're using online calendars for people to book, you know, they're doing those virtual meetings and being able to check in one on one that way. So it's a great [00:09:00] merger of, of those two different elements that we're seeing now. And I don't, I think this whole crisis that we're in is going to change the entire world in the way that we interact with each other.

Ryan Chapman: Well, it's kinda interesting. It's going to kind of force the use of some technology. And I think what's interesting is that there, I think there'll be a number of people that will make mistakes and they'll over automate in the process. And that's where I feel like somebody is really benefited by having somebody with your level of experience down this road is you have that perspective that allows you to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary. So what is it? Just, you know what, that's not even gonna make any difference at all. Let's not worry about that part. Let's just focus on these parts that actually make a difference.

Shaun Whynauht: That's right.

Ryan Chapman: You know, in software there's something that's called feature creep, and if, you know, if you're hiring somebody to write some software for you, [00:10:00] inevitably they're like, Oh yeah, we can do this. No, yeah, we can do that. And so you add all these extra features that end up being pretty much pointless and almost never used, because it's, it's kind of like an afterthought instead of the main thought. How do you prevent that from happening as you work with clients where they're like, Hey, we could automate all this. How do you, how do you keep them in check so that they don't end up wasting time and resources on things that won't produce any results for them?

Shaun Whynauht: I actually have a recent example of that where I had a client who wanted to do, you know, take his offline events and bring them online. And this was before the whol e social distancing part that we're experiencing. But now he was seeing people using text messaging and text opt-ins and you know, webinars and all this stuff cause it was in the industry he was in, but he wasn't doing it. So when he reached out to me and he's like, this is what I want to do, I want to do, you know, I want to do live webinars and then I want to give them a code that they can text to get a free download and all this stuff. [00:11:00] And I kept coming back saying but, why? Like why do you want to do that? Like, do you, do you think there's a benefit to getting somebody to text while you're already currently talking to them? And once we started to position it that it's a distraction from the actual purpose of the messaging you're doing is, you know, then he started to understand that . And every technology has its place, and a lot of times we get caught up in the, the shiny fish syndrome that I call it is, it's like, you know, the shiny object and you know, you know, when you're fishing you see it, that kind of thing, right? It's like, no, this is so cool that you can do that. And, you know, ringless voicemails and all this stuff that people you know, are hearing about, and they want to do it, but why? Like what is the why? What is the reason for it?

Ryan Chapman: Right. Yeah. I hope that people, when they hear you asking that question, recognize that you're not saying no, don't use those things, but rather [00:12:00] have a purpose that's actually thought through for using it, not just using it for the sake of using it.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely.

Ryan Chapman: Because when you use it judiciously and with some purpose behind it, then you're actually going to create the result that you're looking for.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely. A lot of times when we're doing any kind of automated campaign or somebody has registered for something, let's say an event, and there's this a timeline where you're going to send out maybe, you know, the schedule of events or directions to the event by email or along those lines. It makes sense to, if it's very timely, also send a text message that says, Hey Ryan, I just sent you over an important document about the event tomorrow to your email. Just want to make sure you got it. Or you check it, because text messages, as you know, and you know, most people in the marketing space know are read lot more promptly and at a higher rate than an email [00:13:00] is, and emails can go either into the spam, they can go not checked for a while. So if the method is a service to the other method, then it's a good way to compliment the two of them together.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, I mean, when we talked about effective texting, there's three types of text messages we talked about. One is, which we've already covered, which is the conversation starter. So you're sending from a campaign of texts that will initiate this conversation that can lead to sales. The second one is the one you just mentioned, which is referring back to an email enhancing the overall deliverability of the email at the same time as allowing email to do what it does a little bit better than texting, which is giving a little more information, you know, and then the final one is just delivering some sort of content when I, I think that's really cool cause we didn't talk about that before to this. But you are organically doing those things that are most effective.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely.

Ryan Chapman: That's really cool.

Shaun Whynauht: Right. And I'm like we mentioned at the beginning, [00:14:00] my background is in video. I'm still a big supporter of video in marketing and you know, with the technologies out there to be able to track oh, how far along has somebody watched one of your videos? And being able to position your videos, you know, in more of a longer form content where it's educational base to know that if there's certain topics that you shift into, you know, at the three minute mark or the five minute mark, that if they haven't made it to those milestones. That you can follow up accordingly to either get them back to that point or reference something that you know, that they have seen, and give them more information along those lines versus, you know, just tracking. If you sent them the email with the video in it.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because video is the most dense method for communication. I think people maybe don't think about it all the time, but when we're communicating, like if we, if we're just sending text messages back and forth, you know, it's a [00:15:00] short little bit of information. It's good. It's good for starting conversations. But, you know, we're not really relaying emotion effectively. We're not be able to pick up on, you know, unconscious concerns about things like we do on a phone call. So here we're in audio. You, you can pick so much up from just my inflection of my voice and you know, whether I'm interested, disinterested, there's quite a bit I'm communicating as I'm speaking. And you know, same for you, but video just adds that whole layer of the visual on top of that audio, which is so quick, you know, to go back and forth. And so the video is just so powerful as a medium. I think it's frequently misunderstood how, how effective it can be to move the way that somebody sees the world when it's done right. Which is probably why you were so excited about going into video.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely. And you know, to add to that, anytime you're sending, you know, just the written text word through email or text message, it is being consumed and or read [00:16:00] however you want to position it, in the current state of mind that the recipient is in. Meaning if they're having a bad day and your message comes through, it's going to be interpreted. I mean, how many times have you been in a text conversation with somebody and it's, it's received differently than you intended it when you wrote it.

Ryan Chapman: We have a rule with one of our developers that we can't have text conversations with them because unfortunately he just reads everything the wrong way. And so you've got to get on the phone with him if you want to have an effective conversation. You know, on the back on that video track, went we had our training company, we had people coming live to these different events, you know, all over the nation. But we knew that we had a number of people that were registering but not showing up. And so in, you know, you and I both know as being in, in marketing, you have to consider the fact that life gets in the way. The fact that somebody doesn't show up and do something that you're hoping that they will do doesn't necessarily mean they're disinterested. It just means that some other priority must have come up that was bigger, like [00:17:00] kid had to be picked up from school, or you know, someone got sick or they got an important phone call or whatever. So there's a number of different things that could happen. So we decided to do an online training. This was back in, I don't know, 2009, 2008 and so it was back when Flash video players were the biggest...to date myself. But, what we did is we took our three hour train that we're doing in person, and I broke it up into key segments. And then this goes back to your video tracking concept you're talking about. And what we did is we associated campaigns, this was back before Campaign Builder for Infusionsoft, it was just, you know, linear campaign. But we would associate campaigns with each section. So if they got into a section, it would start a campaign. If they got the next section, stop that campaign, start the next one, and you do that effectively in campaign builder now, much easier to see. It's all happening. But what we discovered was that we actually had better consumption [00:18:00] and better conversion of people that went online than came in person, which is really interesting to me because, you know, we were kind of nudging them along because three hours is a long time for video wouldn't you say?

Shaun Whynauht: Very long.

Ryan Chapman: And so, we kind of nudge them along. The other thing we did that I think helped with that was we charged them 25 bucks, whereas if they came, person was free. So they kind of have that investment in it, but we closed it almost double the percentage online than we did, in person. Part of it may have been because we had a consistent result, you know, in terms of the training. But it was really cool to mix tracking what they watched with the campaign so that the conversation could change as they progressed through the, the video. And it allowed us to really have a better conversation with people because it was applicable to where they were in terms of what they'd already consumed versus just trying to take a shot in the dark.

Shaun Whynauht: That's right. And one of the things also [00:19:00] is, is we, we hear all so often that, you know, our attention spans are getting shorter. And I, I think that's kind of a, somewhat of a false statement. I think our... the time we have in larger chunks is getting more sparse. So, you know, I may have, you know, 10 minutes between one meeting to the next where I could watch a four minute video. Right? But I'm not going to watch a 20 minute video. And the same thing when it comes to two emails. I mean, if I open up an email and I've got some time to spare and it's really long, I don't read it. It's gotta be short and concise, books the same way. Are the chapters short and concise? Can I consume them that way? That's, that's just me personally. But that's what I'm also finding when, if you're going to do a 10 minute video, you might as well do ten one minute videos.

Ryan Chapman: So here's what I've noticed is, and I talk about this in my book, The Messaging Connection is that there's an attention currency that we carry with everybody, and if they find value in what we do, [00:20:00] then we earn more attention with them. If they don't find value in some interaction, it doesn't matter which medium, as long as they associate it with the same thing, then there's a kind of a decrease in attention that they'll give in the future. And as I go through my emails, for example, you know, I always mocked the newsletter cause I was thinking, it's funny that some of the things, I want a newsletter, but I have actually one newsletter that, that I have subscribed to. That every time it comes in, I may not read it the day it comes in, but I will read it that week sometime. And I read the whole email. It's a pretty long email too. And then I'll click through to the links cause it's kind of a digest of different topics that I'm interested in. So it's kind of, that guy gives a little take on it and then he's got links to these different articles that he's, you know, just kind of aggregating for me, some information. And I always read that one. But there's a lot of emails. I don't even get past the subject line, you know, I'm just looking at the sender. Okay. I don't care about what they have to say. You know? Even though they're sending me emails every day, I'm just go, boom, boom, [00:21:00] boom, archive all those. I don't even get, I don't even really look at the subject line and I don't look at it because they've, they've just burned so much attention, currency that they don't get any of my attention. So it's really fascinating the way that that works. I think that that may be, cause I, cause it's interesting hearing you kind of talking too, cause it sounds like you're kind of still formulating that, that formula of what you think it is that drives someone to watch one video over another.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely.

Ryan Chapman: So I just was interested about that. What you would say, since you have such an experience with video, you said ten one minute videos. Is that kind of to earn the next minute is what you're saying?

Shaun Whynauht: I take it as to a more, you know, hyper laser focused on a specific topic. So, this is more on on that I do a lot with, with lead generation and prospecting and acquisitions with my clients. So a lot of times once, once they raise their hand and exhibit some kind of action that [00:22:00] justifies a phone call or booking a meeting, cause I do a lot in the professional services side.

Ryan Chapman: Sure.

Shaun Whynauht: There's not too much that's happening on, on the existing nurture once they're in their sales process. So you know, financial services. A prime example, a lot of these, these men and women that are doing this are used to holding seminars, right? And they like to talk long. So now we're trying to get them to think in that very single focused topics and let's create a bunch of different videos that we can serve out in different ways. You know, on your website, having multiple videos throughout it that are on specific topics, that people can easily consume.

Ryan Chapman: Just trying to make it easier for people to get the information that they want.

Shaun Whynauht: That's right. And you know, really there's two purposes is one, to get the questions answered, but also, you know how soon when somebody hears about you either being referred or comes across to you in a search, can we get them to see and hear [00:23:00] your voice. Like, what's, how soon can that happen? And you know, if it can happen on that first visit, meaning there's a video on the homepage, they can see you because you will build a, a level of trust with that person or likability with that person when you start to hear them and see them, you know, we all know people that we've heard and seen that we know that we're not going to get along with them, and we're not going to do business with them based on that. And that's okay, but there are people that you want to do business with that you get along with because they're like you and yeah. The written word doesn't get accross.

Ryan Chapman: I can think of several people that like I, I will watch their videos. Other people I'm tapping through if you know what I'm talking about. So do you have like a strategy that you utilize with YouTube? Is that part of your repertoire?

Shaun Whynauht: Not as much with YouTube at the moment just because my clients haven't wanted to go that route yet. I do it myself, but it's more so in. I guess more of the technical side of, you know, the proper [00:24:00] keywords and all those kinds of things. And, you know, having thumbnails versus not, and all those elements with it.

Ryan Chapman: But, for most of your people, they're looking for like ad. Spend type situations for their video where you're doing a Facebook ad or something like that.

Shaun Whynauht: That's right. So, you know, we're building, you know, different levels of trust building before we even make a, an offer or a pitch for, for getting a lead. So, you know, first they have to believe in you, which means that they have to understand that who you ar e and what you talk about. So, you know, we're building, you know, belief videos. Usually is what we call them. And there's no, there's no offer in...

Ryan Chapman: Expand about that, if you don't mind.

Shaun Whynauht: Yeah. So there's, there's a method out there. It's not one that I've come up with called, BELT, belief, engage, lead, and transact. So belief being that you are talking on a topic and you're talking to a larger mass. So when we do pay traffic to run these videos, you know, we're trying to get the [00:25:00] largest pool of people possible and we don't narrow target by interest. Usually it's either geographic age range or whatever that case is, and we serve it out that way. The people that are going to be somewhat interested in that topic are going to start to watch that video or click on it. They're going to self identify and the idea is just to again, get you seen, get you heard, get them aware. If they engage with that, then we serve an engagement video, which is now talking more on a specific pain point and talking to the person, asking them questions. By engaging, it's again, it's not trying to send them somewhere. It's getting them to say, yes, that's me. You understand me? I want to know more. And they may go and look for more. But again, it's after they've consumed those top two levels, then we start to do the lead part, which may be, you know, a free download or, you know, a free video series or whatever it looks like in the business, right? It's not trying to close the sale. [00:26:00] And the last part is, you know, transacting so we've got clients that wouldn't do any kind of paid retargeting to sell a product or service in that transact phase, that's then relied upon in either email or text along the way, or the video may be delivered by email or text, not in a social platform, but the ultimate goal is what is that, that transaction phase where money is starting to become exchange or potentially becomes exchanged?

Ryan Chapman: Very cool. That's a great formula.

Shaun Whynauht: Right? Because we, we tend to, you know, over the last couple of years have been, you know, running paid traffic campaigns to, Hey, here's, here's an ad about my lead magnet, here's an ad about this, this free course, or whatever it is, and it's, it's like walking into a, a host party that you were invited to and nobody knows you. And as soon as you walk through the door, you're starting to show to everyone, Hey, this is who I am and this is why you need to be my friend, right? That's what it's ultimately is if you don't start to mingle around and just have [00:27:00] conversations and slowly start to be injected into the atmosphere.

Ryan Chapman: So how do you kind of structure your ad campaigns then when you start doing Facebook marketing for folks?

Shaun Whynauht: Yeah. So, you know, the highest level is, first of all, you know, we've got clients that are geographically based, so they only do business in a certain area. So we are are stuck by those boundaries. Obviously we can't advertise to the whole country.

Ryan Chapman: But that's nice because that gives you, you don't have to spend very much to be very effective.

Shaun Whynauht: That's right. That's right. So, that focus is first building that initial, interest list of, you know, you know, Facebook audiences.

Ryan Chapman: Do you have an ad type that you'd like to do for that? Because my personal preference, I like video view ads. I guess if I was following the format, I'd probably be doing something similar to like a belief type ad.

Shaun Whynauht: Yeah. So it, you know, the Facebook algorithm will, we'll optimize that [00:28:00] audience based on, you know, what that conversion goal is. So if it's a video of you and you have an audience of 10,000 people, it's going to first try to serve that ad to people who have exuded the behavior of watching videos because that's the easiest thing to do. Whereas if you run a landing page view or a traffic consideration campaign, but still serve a video ad, it's going to show those two people who are most likely to click and go to a landing page. So even though you may have the same 10,000 audience, you can run multiple ad sets or campaigns cause it's controlled different pain level to the same targeted group, but with different conversion types, but the same ad and you will reach different people.

Ryan Chapman: That's a good point.

Shaun Whynauht: Right? And then see what, what works best. Right? And Facebook is not a set it, forget it kind of. Platform. It's one of those things that you know, you need to be checking [00:29:00] daily and you need to be looking at it. And one of the biggest metrics if you are doing some kind of transaction is, is ROAS, which is your return on ad spend. And anything above a one means that you are spending less than you are making on it. So that's the best position to be in. So even though you may be driving people to book a consultation with you, you need to figure out what's the dollar value on that consultation and how do you do that? Well if you have a consultation and your sale out of that is a thousand dollars, and you know, you close one in 10, then obviously you're going to do, I think it's like a hundred bucks, right? My math is probably off, but you know, the value of booking one of those is a hundred dollars, right, of potential revenue.

Ryan Chapman: So as long as you're spending over a hundred dollars...

Shaun Whynauht: To book one of those, you're in a positive return on ad spend.

Ryan Chapman: So when you're getting set up with a [00:30:00] new client, you're, that's part of what you're doing is saying, okay, let's, let's see if we can keep all your dollars accountable.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely. Right. I mean, if I said to you. If you gave me a dollar and I gave you $2 back, would you give me another dollar? Well, I don't think anyone would say no, but we need to look at the way that we, we advertise this way that the exact same philosophy is, is in the initial stages, you are going to spend more than you're going to make in the first little bit just to get the pixel, your Facebook pixel and the algorithm to start to know who you are and your business.

Ryan Chapman: So there's some discovery there. I think you mentioned before that that's why you prefer to work with people already have sales processes in place versus just startups or you know, people that really don't have any marketing or sales going on.

Shaun Whynauht: Yeah. Because there's a handoff between marketing and sales, and a lot of times the work that I'm doing with clients is getting them a marketing qualified lead for their sales process to then takeover. [00:31:00] Right? And if they already know their sales process and what has worked and while we're doing is now injecting technology to amplify or multiply, then it's far easier than trying to develop a sales process at the same time.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah. That's interesting. We didn't talk about it before we started, but I just wanted to point out to people that are listening that you basically sang the same tune that I've been singing for quite a while now, which is utilize automation to mitigate the impact of human nature while augmenting the human to human interaction or augmenting humanity. And that's where we see the most success with marketing automation is when you can get someone that can help you get that balance right, of taking those things that need to be done, but frequently are not done because they're not enjoyable or people don't want to do them or whatever. Automating those things, but then keeping that human to human [00:32:00] interaction where it's really important. And if you do that, I guess, Shaun, you can, you can tell me your take on it, but I feel like if you do that, that's where you see the best outcomes from marketing automation.

Shaun Whynauht: Absolutely a hundred percent. And just going back to the financial services space, cause that's just naturally been an industry that's been attracted to what I'm doing is, you know, they're using technology for people to book appointments. Obviously their appointments are either in person or now online, but they're also using things like Loom or BombBomb or Vineyard to do these quick videos where they're talking to that client who just booked the appointment in a video that they made specifically for them and send it out to them. So they're finding their clients are becoming very much appreciative of that. They can personalize it, but they're distributing it through technology versus just a canned thank you email that would come out. They're taking the time to do that, and it's really complementing that effort [00:33:00] for them.

Ryan Chapman: That's very cool. Hey, this is kind of a side question, so I hope we don't catch it too far off guard with this, but have you, have you played with or used the Simple Surveys from Fix Your Funnel and, the Scheduled Text Message in the live texting?

Shaun Whynauht: I've, I've done the live texting, but the other two I have not.

Ryan Chapman: Okay, so in live texting, there's a feature that is called the schedule send where you can, in the app, you can write up a message and then you hit on the little clock looking icon below the words that you've typed in, and then you can schedule a time for that message to go out. That one might be really interesting for folks that you're working with that are having meetings, but then want to do a personalized text message later back, you know, kind of thanking them for the visit and stuff like that. We found that if you're doing it like a few hours later, it has a huge impact on the impression of that person. On [00:34:00] the company that just... it's like, wow, this person took the time to message me after the fact. So he was just like, Hey, it was great meeting with you. Really appreciate your sharing about XYZ. Something personal. Right? I'll be getting back to you with this, this, and this, and, you know, if there's something that they had to do and then just scheduling it, that's been, that's been a really powerful one that we've seen. The other one I, I mentioned was the mobile surveys. I was just thinking about as you're talking about all these videos, you know, individual videos that you're having your clients put together, how it could be powerful to have a survey early on in that interaction to be able to find out what are they most interested in and be able to utilize that to prioritize videos that if you're sending them out as part of trying to get them to engage in a conversation.

Shaun Whynauht: Yeah, absolutely. And, and one thing too, to just bring up...

Ryan Chapman: Maybe you're already doing that in some other way.

Shaun Whynauht: No, not, not in that way. But using your system, we utilize two of the features for clients about three months [00:35:00] ago. And they're in the, the acne space, in the US so very personalized industry where people are, you know, they're not as open to talk about their their situations, but they wanted to, to get some candid feedback and get the potential client to book a call with them to just openly talk about their situation. Right? It wasn't a sales pitch. They weren't selling them anything. It was just like, Hey, we want to get some feedback about where you're at and some of your concerns. We utilize the, what we call the ringless voicemail, which is direct to voicemail a message. So we had, we had numbers from when they opted in. The CEO had recorded a message, we sent it out and it went into their inbox. And 20 minutes later we sent a text message to that number saying, hey, you know, it's so and so, you know, I just left you a voicemail wondering if you had any questions or if you'd like to talk. Anyway, we did it to a test group of 10 people [00:36:00] because we wouldn't want to burn through a list just in 60 minutes, they had eight of those people book a call with them.

Ryan Chapman: Wow.

Shaun Whynauht: Like anyway, and then they rolled it out to the rest. But like, I didn't expect even that type of response, but it was something that they didn't use before and their audience hadn't been used to getting that type of correspondence, but it worked for them. Because they didn't, they didn't burn the technology. Right? That's the other thing is you can overuse a tactic very easily.

Ryan Chapman: Yes. Certainly. So that's a really cool story. That's a, that's neat. I think, a lot of people don't realize, you know, how powerful that can be when used, like you're saying sparingly in the right situation. I know some people can overdo it and they think, Oh, I'll just use it for every single call instead of making actual calls. But I think that goes back to the point you made at the, you know, earlier in the conversation, which is why? Why do you want to do this? And it seems like [00:37:00] if people will ask themselves that question, why is it that I want to do this specific thing? You know, cause sometimes we'll have people come at us say, okay, I'm going to send, you know, 50,000 text messages out once per week and stuff. And we go, okay, but why? What is it that you're trying to accomplish. And what's your message? What do you think is going to happen when you do this? And what's your relationship with...you know? Just ask a few of these questions will lead you to the right thing to do.

Shaun Whynauht: And the reason the why on this case was that the audience that they were targeting were younger and they'd found in the past that if they just called, they wouldn't answer anyway. They would let it go to voicemail. So let's circumvent the time of waiting, you know, manually having to call and dial and just give them the voicemail. Communicate by topic they'll respond to.

Ryan Chapman: Well done. Yeah, that's a great example of a good use of the technology. Well, I think this has been very cool. Thank you so much for your time today, Sean.

Shaun Whynauht: Thank you for having me.

Ryan Chapman: Yeah, well, it's been a pleasure. [00:38:00] We covered a lot of interesting topics and I think it will be really useful for folks that are thinking about their marketing, trying to think about how can they make it simpler and more effective, as opposed to getting into that trap of over complicated. I just did a, training in our user group the other day where I talked about one of the things that lean markets or shocked markets, which is what we're in right now, what they don't tolerate is complicated mechanisms. You can do sophisticated and not be complicated. And we've all seen those complicated campaigns where they've got the lines going everywhere. It's just like, okay, it's. Okay. I get what you're trying to do there, but you know there, I think as you simplify it down, get it to real structure. I think your questions of, of asking why are super key. So as people look at their campaigns, if they already got themselves in that position, they can go, well, why did I do it this way? Well, you know what? What are we trying to actually accomplish? And asking that you can print a [00:39:00] bunch of extra stuff out of your campaigns and be more effective. How does somebody reach you Shaun?

Shaun Whynauht: So my website is bluecowmarketing.ca. Or if you just Google blue cow marketing, all my social channels will come up as well.

Ryan Chapman: Cool. I bet there's quite a few blue cows in Eastern Canada.

Shaun Whynauht: Not as many as you think.

Ryan Chapman: Well, thanks again. It's been a pleasure.

Shaun Whynauht: Thank you.