Episode 214 – Below the Bottom of the Funnel the 3 R s Repeat Refer and Review

Ken

Hello everybody. This is Ken Tucker with Changescape Web. Welcome to today's episode of the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast. Today I'm joined by Ian Cantle in Canada, Jeff Steck in Central Texas, Paul Barthel, who's here with me in the St. Louis metro area. Welcome guys.

Jeff

You didn't see it, but Paul has hands too. He did, that's right, yeah, absolutely.

Ken

So today is a topic that I absolutely love. I think it's, it's such low hanging fruit and yet so many businesses leave so much on the table here. And we're talking about really the idea of what's below the classic vision of what people describe as the sales funnel. And that's really the three Rs, the repeat, the referral and the review. These are all post purchase marketing aspects. And so you know, we really wanted to dig in here especially as we're coming up on the holiday seasons for a lot of businesses, you know, this is a big time of the year to get a lot of brand new customers. For other businesses, it's a time of year to kind of get your act together and organized to prepare for what's going to be coming up in 2025. So I think it's a really good time to talk about this. With that, I'm going to start with you Paul. Just talk about the importance of post purchase marketing overall in regard to these three Rs that we, we're going to talk about.

Paul

Well, yeah, okay. So the, the three Rs that we talk about, you know, repeat, refer and review. And it, it matters because a lot of businesses, they, they do nothing after the sale. They, someone finds them, they contact them, they make a purchase and then the business does nothing. It doesn't follow up, they don't ask for reviews which are very important. They don't build that relationship. So the, that they're customers will refer them and you have to, you know, you can have a referral program. There's different ways to go about that. And that goes back to, that goes to customer retention versus customer acquisition. It costs a lot more to acquire a new customer than it does to, to retain an existing customer. And that, it's that engagement with your customer that, that helps with that retention. If you have, you know, if you have a, a roofing contractor and we have roofing contractors don't want to do anything besides roofing. But if, if you have, if you offer other services like gutter cleaning, you know, you can offer a discount.

Jeff

On.

Paul

Gutter cleaning or you can even have a, some kind of referral program where if they refer to customers that turn into clients, they'll get a, they'll get their gutters clean for free or something like that. Or maybe just one because profit margin is pretty high in roofing, about 30%. But you have to have some kind of referral and retention program and you need to have these things in place like yesterday. Okay. You can't wait till you, till you have, you get a, a new client or a new customer and that's okay. What am I going to do? Post sale. It's, you have to take some time to plan these things, put them in place. And we've talked a lot about CRMs and automations and automation systems and CRM. They can help you with this process. But you have to get all that in place. It takes some upfront work. It takes, sometimes it takes a, a lot of upfront work and follow up. You know, a lot of times with painters or mold inspection they, after everything's done they do have a follow up. But a lot of businesses don't do that. They don't follow up with the customer. They think we're going to talk about reviews more later but they, they don't ask for reviews. They don't, they don't follow up with the customer. You can use surveys say how did we do? Where can we improve things like that. And all of this is post purchase engagement which again a lot of businesses don't do because it does take time. It takes work to put it in place but it is important for customer retention.

Ken

Yeah, I mean you say it takes time and effort to put it into place but you know, you talked about the cost of getting a new customer versus retaining an existing customer, getting that customer to buy from you. Again, you know, I mean that's dramatic. It really is very dramatic. And it's pennies on the dollar to make the investment in putting together these systems. And they're systems you have to think about marketing as a systematic approach. And so you know, we're going to dive into each one of these aspects of the repeat refer and review here. So Ian, I wanted to kind of jump over to you. Let's start with, you know, actually Ken.

Jeff

Before we do, I want to hit you know, two, two points that, that Paul made. Well actually one point and then I'll give a quick anecdote. The, the not doing it, you know, not asking for reviews, not doing follow up emails. I, I've had people tell me, well I don't want to do that because I might get bad news if that's the feeling, then maybe there's something else in your business you need to work on. You need to strive for the customer experience being great and then you won' afraid to ask for them. We're going to talk about ways to handle negative things later. Let me give you a quick antidote. Those that know me know my path into the marketing world. I used to be an engineer and now I'm a marketer. But the in between was that my wife and I owned and operated a house painting franchise. And we talk about the three Rs, repeat, refer and review and why they matter. I give you exact numbers we were doing in the lower years, you know, great recession years, we're doing mid six figures. And the, the better years we were doing high six figures. 1/3 of our business came from referrals, one third of our business came from Repeat customers, and 1/3 of our business came from all the things we spend money on to go out and get lead generation.

Ken

Wow.

Jeff

If that's not a better example of why you need to think about repeat refer and review matter, imagine being a high six figure business and all of a sudden a third of that goes away because you're not doing it. Or a third of the potential you wouldn't be. We wouldn't have been there if we weren't doing it.

Ken

Right.

Jeff

That's what better testimony of why this stuff's important.

Ken

Yeah, that's life changing stuff, you know, for, for the people who own the business as well as for the people who work in the business. Because you know that, that extra revenue, you know, can pay for some of the things that a lot of business owners, when they get started, they don't, they don't take it, you know, they don't, they don't take care of themselves. They put everything back into the business and you can only do that for so long, you know. And then if you're constantly stressed making payroll because your numbers aren't where you want them to be or need them to be. And in this day and age, if you're, if you're struggling to even hang on to your workers because you don't have that constant consistent flow of work, you know, and this is, this is so powerful. So I hope everybody walks away from this and implements at least one or two of these programs right away. Ian, let's turn to you and let's talk about, you know, repeat business. How do you do that? You know, and, and what are, you know, kind of what are the essential components for that?

Ian

Yeah, yeah, one One thing I want to start with is just, just we, we all, I, I think everybody on this podcast know this, but just for our listeners, I think everybody intrinsically knows this, but you ignore it. And that's that a huge percentage of buyers of anything have buyer's remorse immediately after they buy it. Like, meaning between the moment they press pay to a week later. Right? Like the. And so in order to pave the way for repeat business, you need to make sure first of all that even in that, that purchasing behavior that you as the business are allaying, setting aside, helping people know that they made a great decision. Right? I mean we, we've been working on this in our business for years and we're getting better at it. I think sometimes we forget too because we're so glad to bring on board a new partner, family member. You know, we, we treat our clients like family and, and we're so glad they chose us. And we're trying to move things forward so fast that we sometimes can easily forget. Like, you guys made a great decision. Here's the reasons why you made a great decision, right? And for anyone that's hired a marketing agency, like it takes time like you. Most of these are not overnight decisions. And for a lot of other service based businesses, people agonize over these decisions. They've had maybe some poor experiences in the past. So in order to pave the way for repeat business, you need to make sure that that purchase experience is really smooth, that they feel really good about it. And obviously that you deliver exceptional quality service products, whatever it is that you've promised to deliver, right? That's the first step before you can actually do any repeat business. Because if you mess that up, you've messed up the relationship. And that's probably another key, is that you can't forget this is a relationship, this is a two way street. Somebody is exchanging their hard earned money for the service or the product that you're going to deliver. So deliver it with excellence. And then you need to encourage repeat purchases. And I think the first way you do this is you actually continuously inform people, your existing customers, people in your contact base. But your existing customers will never know the products and services, the breadth of them that you provide as well as you do. And business owners always fall into the trap of believing that everybody, because you've said it once, everybody knows that you provide this product or service, right? We see this all the time in the dental industry. We see this with everything, all service based industries, but I would go as far to say even restaurants, right? Like anywhere you're providing a product or service, you have to continuously remind people this is what we offer. And one of the easy ways to do this is through things like email marketing. So post purchase, you should be again, reducing buyer's remorse, but then encouraging people after you've delivered a product or service like, hey, you got this. You expressed great thanks in getting this product or service. Did you know that we also provide these additional services? Right. So for instance, if you, if you get some windows done in your house, you might want new eavesdrops, you might want new front doors. You, right, you're, you're focusing on the betterment of your home. And quite frankly, the people that are buying one part of that probably want to buy other parts of that. There's lots of examples of that.

Ken

Yeah. Just don't assume that they, that, you know, just because they bought windows from you means that they're going to remember that they could buy a door from you.

Ian

Absolutely, absolutely. And, and make sure you continuously inform people about your core difference too. So you, you have something unique. If you don't have something unique, you better find something unique. But you, you probably do something very unique in your industry and that's partly personality driven of you as the leader or you as the business where you've just done stuff a little bit differently because you found that it either serves people better, it streamlines the process, it, it differentiates, it sets you apart, but you need to continuously kind of beat that drum of this is what makes us different. Because one of the other things that, you know, everybody needs to understand is, is none of our businesses live in a vacuum. One of the funny things I've heard over the years, or it always strikes me as sad, not necessarily funny, kind of funny sad, is that people, especially who have had exceptionally high word of mouth over the years, especially older businesses, they, they think that because they've lived in this kind of, you know, glorious past where maybe they were one of the only players or providers of that product or service in their area that they just naturally got a lot of word of mouth. Maybe it was because they did an exceptional job. Right. And, and none of that should change. You should keep doing an exceptional job. But imagine all of the things you're leaving on the table if you're not also going after those repeat customers who are getting bombarded by messages from other providers. And I think that's just a realization all business owners need to come to grips with. And then one of the stats out there is that Repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. So like why would you leave that money on the table? Obviously there's a need that they feel you should be the one providing that need because you've already showing that you're an exceptional service provider or product provider. Timing is really important if you send out targeted offers at the right time in people's life cycles of, you know, so if you're, imagine you're a roofer, your roofers are, are covered for 10 years. I mean some are lifetime warranties and that kind of stuff. But imagine somebody goes lower cost, they do a 10 year warranty or something. It behooves you to reach out to them in year eight or nine to say hey, your warranty is coming up, you might want to start setting aside some money and hey, here's some new roofing products that we have or something, right? Staying top of mind is really important and timing is critical. Use email, use sms. If you have the staff call people, right? Like again, it's a relationship. Don't ignore the personal contact part. Don't oversaturate people with promotions. You know, all of your contacting doesn't need to be about deals or offers. You can certainly include those but those come across as really spammy after a while and it looks like you're, you're really hungry for sales. Be, you know, informational based, educate people, inform them, try to help them, try to be their guide in all of this. We love to reference story, brand because it's such a brilliant framework to guide people through their purchasing decisions. But oftentimes if you reach out at the right time in the right way and people are feeling a pain point you've just become, and especially if they have experience with you, a good experience with you, you become the de facto choice for them.

Ken

Yeah, it kind of makes me think of, and I know that this pertains specifically to Facebook advertising, but I think it's probably fairly accurate across the board in terms of remarketing and staying top of mind, which is really kind of what this repeat campaign is through email. Ali Bloy talked about at any one point in time when you're doing advertising or you're doing email marketing like this to past customers or current customers, maybe only 3% of the market is of your, you know, of your list is ready to buy. But if you remind them, you know, by staying top of mind, there's up to 15% total of that list that may be actually ready to buy. They just really hadn't thought about it yet. They'd kind of been maybe sitting there bubbling in the back of their mind. And if you continue to educate, add value in advance, stay top of mind, you can accelerate that and you can accelerate it even faster if you craft and put together a really well structured offer campaign as well as appropriate. So yeah, it blows me away how few businesses have a list and continue to just send out regular emails. They don't want to be that guy or that company. Right? I mean, everybody's like all just super concerned. I get so many emails, blah, blah, blah. It's like people are going, they're going to delete the emails that they don't want to read if they, if you're obnoxious, they're going to unsubscribe or they're going to mark you as spam, but otherwise they're just going to delete them. If they have that value relationship with you, if they want your information. I bet my, my average is probably, I bet I delete 10 emails for everyone I read from sources that I trust because the subject line doesn't speak to my current situation doesn't mean that I don't want to hear from that business. I might even open up the email just to scan it to say, I wonder what cool new trends or ideas they have, you know, but that may only be, you know, two out of 10. So don't get over it. Get past your personal biases about email marketing and, or text marketing because they work exceptionally well.

Ian

And if I just want to add one point to that, because I think that's such a really good point, Ken, is that we have tendencies as people in general, not just business people, but people in general, to project our own views, feelings, pain points upon other people. But as businesses, that can be a real hindrance. Right? So if, if you yourself, as the business owner are feeling like there are economic pressures on you, maybe you've lost some clients recently, maybe something has happened, costs have gone up, sales have gone down. But if you assume that everybody is feeling that or that that's going to stop them from making buying decisions, you're wrong. Because there are people in every type of economic bracket out there that probably need your service. And yes, some will be feeling the same pinch as you, but don't assume that, you know, you necessarily suddenly should stop communicating or drop your prices immediately or like you have to make business decisions. But don't project your own feelings or your own bias. I think that's such a, a strong point you made there, Ken.

Ken

Yeah, thanks.

Jeff

And that goes into tactics too. I've had people tell me, oh, I don't want to be on social media. I hate social media. Well, you might, but all your buyers don't necessarily hate it if they're there, you need to meet them where they are. Yeah. So don't put your own bias of things you like and things you don't like and assume everyone else likes and doesn't like the same things either, in terms of how you do things.

Ken

Yeah. Yep, Absolutely. All right, Jeff, let's talk about referral campaigns. It sounds like you have great personal experience with this. So, you know, I'd love to hear your thoughts about how to do this, the importance of it, and, you know, lessons learned or things to stay away from.

Jeff

Yeah, sure. So you set me up, so give me a softball there. Referral campaigns are really important and there's actually two kind of ways you can go. I'm only going to talk about one of them now. I'm going to talk about the post sale referrals, turning your customers into advocates. But I'll just mention, don't forget that building referral networks of adjacent businesses, partners, other people that are focusing on the same clients you are can also lead to great referral sales. So example is networking. But one of the things that I'll borrow from, from that and I'll do a shameless plug, you know, some of the other duck type consultants and I did a book on strategic partner referral networks a few years ago. One of the things we brought up there is you have to be intentional about it and you have to educate people how to do it. I think John Jansen and Ducktape Marketing talks about that.

Ian

Matter of fact, he's got a whole.

Jeff

Book called the Referral Engine. Referrals are huge because you're turning unpaid people essentially into salespeople for your business. You're turning them into advocates, and you're getting a lot of borrowed trust, if you will, from it. You know, we can do a lot of things. We can do outreach, we can do SEO. We do a lot of things to get people's interest. And they will work, but they won't beat the power of a warm referral. Somebody, you know, you're talking around the water cooler at work, hey, I saw you just got your house painted. Who'd you use? Because I need mine too. And then they say, oh yeah, we use so and so. And they were great. And they did this that you ought to give them a call. You know, that that beats, you know, a Google search any day. So customers referred by a friend are four times more likely is the statistic to buy and have a higher retention rate as well. Something like 30% higher retention rate based on that referral. I think there's a little bit of psychology, you know, if their friend recommended it and then they bought it, they don't want to quit it because they feel like they're letting their friend down too. So warm referrals. Referrals from trusted individuals are huge. So an example, you know, an electrician could offer a refer a friend discount. Any trade really, any spa, any service, refer a friend discount where the referrer and the new client both share in it. So now you're incentivizing the referral behavior. That's that develop a program, be intentional about it. But if somebody refers somebody else, both people win. Both people get a discount, both people get, you know, a shared experience maybe depending on, you know, that could work really well in spas. And since they trust each other's recommendations, you know, easy win. But again, I go back to design an effective referral program and be intentional about it. Think about how you want to act, how you want to people to refer you and then enable them to do it. You may need to train them a little bit. I'm not talking about, hey, you know, we've got an hour long class on Zoom. You ought to join it. We'll teach you how to rehearse. No, no, no, I'm talking about just give them a little bit of information. Hey, here's a brochure we use if you want to hand that out to some of your friends. Talks about what we do. Here's what you get from it. Just kind of plant the seeds, teach them how to refer you. In the business world, you know, there's that, that reverse introduction tool. Hey, I'd like to be able to refer you. Here's how you can refer me and please do the same and tell me how I can best refer you. You know, it's again, be intentional. Set the programs and mechanisms up. But when you are intentional and you design crafted programs, you'll see them be much more effective. Dropbox, for instance, they did a referral program and grew their user base 3900%. So 39X, how many businesses, how many of you out there listening would love to grow your business by 39x? That'd be phenomenal. I mean that'd be hitting it out of the park. That'd be hitting it out of several parks, right? So having, you know, these intentional programs and refer a friend, get a bonus incentivizing the behavior can be huge. The yoga studio offer a free class. So somebody, when they bring a friend, you know, those are all the kinds of things we're talking about. And it doesn't have to be monetary. There's other ways to incentivize referrals. You know, in the house painting business, one thing we tried was right after people get their houses painted, they want to show them off. So we said, you set up the, the, you know, new house warming party, if you will, you know, with 10 of your friends and we'll provide the wine and cheese. Right now you've got a program for people to bring in and advocate for you and sell for you. There's a lot of different ways of setting up these referral programs and incentivizing them, but you got to formalize it and you got to promote it and make it easy. You know, if it's a link for somebody to get their contact information in social sharing, there's a lot of different ways for people to, to be able to share things and, and let you know that they did so. And then things not to do. Don't make it too complicated. Don't make it contingent on jumping through a bunch of hoops. Don't say, refer five people and you'll get something. And it's like, ah, that's a lot of work. You know, no, incentivize everyone. Maybe it's not the hundred dollars for referring five people, maybe it's $20 for each one. What? You know, again, it doesn't have to be monetary, but you get the point about making it simple and easy and something that's worthwhile for people to do. You say, hey, you know, give me a referral and I'll give you a dollar. People are probably like, yeah, so what? They give me a referral and give me a million dollars. People are going to do it all the time. So those are obviously extremes, but you get the idea. Make it worthwhile. Right? Right. Don't make it complicated, make it easy, make it worthwhile. And then, you know, just work it, work it. Work the system, work the process, make sure everybody knows about it and make sure that you leverage all the channels. We talked about repeat customers and follow ups. Follow ups are a great place to tell people, hey, we've got a referral program, you know, if you're doing in the house paying business. We did a right after the job finished, follow up, want to make sure everything's good and if there's anything we need to come back and take care of US now we did a one month follow up. Oh by the way, we have a referral program and then we did a one year follow up and that was solely about referrals and repeat, you know, incentivizing repeat business. So work it, work that program. Leverage all the channels that are available and turn your customers into advocates.

Ken

Yeah. A couple of things that I wanted to ask you about. One is like setting up a two way incentive, you know, or double sided incentive where the referrer gets something and the referee if they make a purchase gets something. Did you see success with that or.

Jeff

Did you try that in the house painting business specifically it was, it was harder to do because you know, it's like refer a painting job will come back and we'll paint a door. And that's not really conducive to you know, the parody of what the referrer would get and the that particular business. A monetary or gift type of reward item. Reward was, was more appropriate than a double sided. But absolutely, if it's a, you know, yoga studio, even a chiropractor. Right. Come in and get a free adjustment if you bring a friend. Anything where spa, you know, anything like that, that, that's, there's parity in what you can offer that people would want right away. Same thing that house painting. People just got their house painted. They don't need it painted again right away. But anything where what you can offer is on parity with what you're going to gain, particularly if it's an ongoing, you're going to get somebody in lifetime value, the customer comes into play. You know, you can give away, you know, a $40, whatever treatment if you're going to get somebody for $40 a month for the next three years. Right. So yeah.

Ken

The other thing is I like to recommend to businesses because a lot of people are like that, that sounds kind of scammy. I'm paying somebody to, you know, to do this or that and they don't, they're not comfortable with that. In some industries they can't accept that. You know, monetary gift anyway.

Jeff

Yeah.

Ken

Oh, you know, so having a charity, you know and you can, there are a lot of cool things that you can do. You can pick a charity of the month, you know, that you're, that you're supporting and anybody who, you know, makes that purchase decision as a referral, you know, there's a, there's a donation made, you know, you can structure it that way. You can pick out, you know, one per quarter you can give, you know, I don't know how, how wise this is necessarily. But you could give the customer the opportunity to choose their charity of choice that might get a little cumbersome to manage. So I probably would shy away from that. But I, I love that because people, you know, I think more than 50% of the time people are probably going to say, yeah, let's just donate to charity instead of getting dollar gift card, you know, and so just, it makes your business look good, it makes people feel good, it incentivizes people to get, you know, to become your advocates. I, I mean, yeah, so many positive things that I think can result from that. And you can have, you can give them a Choice. Get a $50 gift card or we'll make a $50 donation to, to this charity this month. Yep.

Jeff

Yeah, A lot of, like Realtors particularly, we did got a lot of referral business in the, in the house painting business. We got a lot of referral business from Realtors. And they're not, they're in that category of they can't take substantial monetary kickbacks. But you can drop a bottle of wine or a basket of cookies or something off at their, at their office.

Ken

Yeah.

Jeff

The other thing that's worth mentioning on referral programs is gamification. You can turn into a contest too, right? Say, hey, we've got this referral program and once a quarter, once a month, whatever interval, whoever gives us the most referrals is going to get something. Now, I wouldn't make that the only thing they can get because that falls into the. It's getting complicated. They're having to work and maybe not getting return. I would make every referral have some kind of value to it. But then you could gamify whoever gives the most gets, you know, a higher level or a special, special thing. And then again, make your advocates compete with each other for. And everybody wins.

Ken

Yeah. I mean, you can almost merge a referral program into a loyalty program through gamification. We use a text marketing platform that makes that super easy to track and manage and super easy for people to become referrers to earn points towards rewards and incentives, but also incentivizing the people they refer to to take action and become customers as well. So, yeah, yeah. Paul, let's come back to you. Let's talk about reviews and review campaigns. You know, just kind of give us the lay of the land about, you know, why it, again, why they're so important and how you put together a program to really execute and get a steady stream or what we call, you know, a nice review velocity coming in for reviews about your business.

Paul

Yeah, it blows me away how many businesses don't understand how important reviews are. And they are a major, they're a major ranking factor on Google Maps. Now if your competitors don't have any reviews, you might be able to get away with not having a lot of reviews, but that's usually not the case and you have to have review. And you mentioned review velocity if you have 55, 5 star reviews but the last review was from 2 years ago. Google doesn't put a lot of weight on that. They want to see recent reviews and they want to see consistent reviews. And people trust reviews. And it's so in a way it's kind of like a sales force, if you will, for, for your business because people trust them. And it's kind of like it's customer service. Reviews in some ways have become a, a complaint board. And most people that leave reviews, they expect a response to that review, which businesses don't do. And you can leverage AI to help automate that process. But you have to have a system in place to get reviews. You can use tap cards and we have clients that, we've provided them with these tap cards and they just don't use them. But it's, it basically it uses nfc, near field communications technology and there's a qr. You just tap it on your phone.

Ken

And it opens up or, or tapping your hotel key to the lock, right?

Paul

And it just, and it opens up the Google review page and they can leave a review. So I, I understand that some people that, well that's, I feel like I'm pressuring them. Well, you don't have to stand there while they write the review. You can just say here, look, I can tap this on your phone and this is where you leave a review and, and have a program, you know, have a program in place for that. But you don't have to stand there and monitor them while they write matter. You shouldn't do that because that probably isn't a good idea. But you can, you can also put programs in place where you use email and SMS to send like friendly reminders to, with a, with a link or even a QR code within that email because the easier you can make it for someone to leave a review, the more likely they are to leave a review. And if you get a negative review, just respond to it. And because if people, if you get a negative review and people see that you responded to that and you're trying to make it right, you're trying to correct the problem, that's that's powerful. And you can bring the reviews onto your website. And it's not just Google you can get reviews on, on Facebook you can. If you're a, like an interior designer talking about painters and you use Pinterest, people can leave comments. They're not really reviews. They don't call them reviews. I think they call them comments I believe is what they call them. But it's not just Google. So leverage reviews on, on these different platforms. A few things you should not do is incentivizing reviews is a bad idea. And Yelp is really strict about this. But every review platform has, they basically have policies about incentivizing reviews. I'll say, hey, if you give me a five star review, I'll do this or that. And the other thing you should never do is don't pay for fake reviews. Google, you might get away with it for a while. At some point Google is going to, is gonna find it and they can actually suspend your business profile. They can delist your business profile for doing things like that if, if they find out. But the, I think the biggest thing is businesses need to understand that how important reviews are and how, and not just to the business, but to other people that, that are looking for, for a service and especially with service area businesses because they're unfortunately with a lot of service area business. There's, there's a lot of bad actors in that in that place. And reviews can help differentiate you and it, it really doesn't. I mean you may pay for a platform, but you're not, you're probably not paying for a platform just for that. You probably have a CRM that can help you automate this stuff or, or the tap cards. But it really costs you nothing to, to get these reviews. And you need to, you need to have a process in place and you need to do it consistently and you need to respond to reviews. And that's where automation can help you with all of those things.

Ken

So a couple things that you mentioned, Paul. One is do you, you talked about, you know, don't incentivize people to write reviews because you'll do this or that. I just want to clarify. You don't want to give people money or any financial benefit by leaving a review. That is just a bad idea. You're playing with fire. A lot of people do it. It's dangerous as hell. I would never abdicate that. The other thing that you mentioned is with Yelp, Yelp doesn't want you to ask your customers to go write reviews and they, they don't they? They encourage you to have people write reviews, but they don't want you to cherry pick that and send an email with a link to your Yelp page asking only the people that you know are like super satisfied to go write a review. You don't want to provide that electronic link. You're just, you're, you're pissing away your opportunity because Yelp's going to sniff that out very quickly. Yelp is a platform. It, the whole culture of Yelp is they want stuff to happen organically and user driven. Other review platforms tolerate review requests completely differently. It's okay to ask people to go write a review. There's a concept of review gating which you don't want to do either, which we've talked about in past episodes where, you know, you force people to tell you whether or not they're going to give you a good review or a bad review by asking for feedback before you even let them go write a review. That's again, that's a violation of terms of many review sites. So you need to understand this stuff and it's important. And that's one of the reasons why it's important to put a system in place to be able to execute it. Train your staff, make it as easy as possible for them to ask a customer, client, patient for reviews and make it as easy for your customer, client or patient to write the reviews.

Jeff

Yeah, I, I want to jump in the, you know, specific platforms. Paul mentioned multiple platforms. And we've been talking specifically about Google and Yelp. Google, absolutely. If you want to show up in the map pack, you got to be there with the reviews. And Paul made the point, it's got to be steady growth. You know, you can't just have a big spike up and then nothing for a long time and then a big spike up because that looks a lot like, wow, we just bought them all bunch of reviews. That steady growth is huge. I've got a client that we, we've taken from 300 to, sorry, 30 to 150 just. And you look at the growth curve and it's just a steady lineup and they're being rewarded. They get most of their new lead traffic from Google right now. They're not doing any advertising. It's all Google profile, local SEO and review driven. And then Yelp is the platform we love to hate. Yelp is a little finicky. Like you said, you can't, you can ask for people to leave your review in Yelp, but you can't direct them to it. Because Yelp will sniff that out. But you got to do it. You got to get reviews on Yelp. Because look at any search for any of your business. But B2C, if you look for any search, you're going to see Yelp in the top results.

Ian

Depends geographically though, right? Like some geographies are very Yelp focused. Other geographies, there's nothing.

Ken

Yeah. I mean.

Ian

By region, province. By province.

Ken

Yeah. The, the coasts. Absolutely. You know, bigger, bigger metropolises usually have a better presence on Yelp. If you're out In a town of 20, 000 people in Middle of.

Jeff

So I'll, I'll modify that because I am in a metro area. I'll modify that then, say, do a Google search and if Yelp appears high in the search, you gotta be there whether you like Yelp or not, whether you love them or hate them. Again, it goes back to those biases. Right. If you have a bias against Yelp. I hate Yelp. I don't like their practices. I don't like. They work. It doesn't matter. Because people that are looking for you, if they see Yelp come up in the listings, they may go click on Yelp in the listings. And you gotta have your profile there and you gotta have reviews there. It's not going to help you. Yeah.

Ian

I would just add one caution to that though, Jeff. Like if people like Monitor, if people are leaving you reviews on Yelp and you're not a paid Yelp subscriber, as a business monitor what's happening. Because there's lots of stories out there, like real stories of businesses where they're, they're getting reviews they're not showing. So that's, that's my only caution is pay attention. Right. Monitor what's.

Jeff

And expect you'll have a login to yell for your business. What's that, Ken?

Ian

Not to the same degree. Ken.

Ken

I agree. I know, but. I agree. But, but Google reviews don't always show up.

Ian

It's not to open up a can of worms because I know you guys are, are young providers.

Jeff

But, but let me go back to people.

Ian

There's people.

Ken

I, I get it. I, I understand.

Ian

I know, but our listeners might not. Ken. So that's like we're trying to offer a.

Jeff

Let me fair.

Ken

Yeah, no, I, I completely understand though, Ian. It's a great point. Pay attention to what's going on. I mean that, that's the critical thing. And don't just, don't just have it on autopilot and assume everything's going to be Good in anything.

Jeff

You'll, you'll have to have a login to be able to, to build out your Yelp profile fully and expect that, you know, when you log in, you're going to get a call from the Yelp advertising people, people wanting you to advertise. I have a bias about that, but it may not be the same for everyone, so I won't share it. But yeah, I'm just saying in terms of other platforms, Yelp can be very important. So don't ignore it because of the bias. And then depending on your business, there's other ones that matter too. In the contractor world, there's one called Guild Quality. There are medical review sites. So of course Google's a big one, Yelp's a big one for B2C. But the other ones matter too. There's typically, you know, maybe a half a dozen that really matter for any given business and spread it around. You know, ask for some people to review you on Facebook, ask for some people to review on Google, ask for some to review you on Yelp or Houzz for contractors is another one. H O U Z Z Don't ask people to review you multiple places or don't give them a choice. You're, you're less likely to get any review. So pick one and just change it up every once in a while.

Ian

I would, I would, I want to express too that statistically, like in case you're on the fence as a listener about whether to do reviews like the stats haven't, they fluctuate every year, but they haven't dramatically changed over the years. You know, if you don't ask for reviews, you may get 5 to 10% of all your customers leaving a review, which is still helpful, but it's not going to help you beat out the competition from a review velocity standpoint, a ranking standpoint. But, but the other side of that stat is that 80 to 95% of people read reviews before a purchase. So if you're not doing this, you're just leaving opportunity on the table for your competitors to swoop in and take clients, customers, patients from you. Like it's a no brainer for sure.

Ken

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's going to vary based on industry, but I think a good rule of thumb is if you have less than 30 reviews for your business, there's a chance. I mean, you know, if you're, if you're a marketing firm like we have, and we don't have dozens of customers on a regular basis, we have long term customers that Maybe have been around for several years, but we're not adding massive numbers of new customers. We're not going to have that same review velocity that a restaurant would. But I think a good general rule of thumb for any business is at a minimum, if you have less than 30 reviews, you need to get on this tomorrow or today. Most important thing that you probably need to be doing. And if your review score on Google is less than 4.0, guess what? They're going right past you and they're going to your competitor. Because people, you know, people don't want to do business with businesses that have less than a four star rating generally. Now, you know, you might be able to get away with it, you know, here or there, that's going to be, it's going to become really important for people to actually read your review responses if you do have less than a 4.0, because that can kind of help to reverse that cycle, you know, because people are like, okay, well, I see that they acknowledge that they screwed up. They made it right, you know, and actually they gave the, they gave their customers something really, really nice, or at least they responded and they're trying to work with them. Everybody has a bad day. I'm gonna cut them some slack and I'm gonna go there and check it out. So I think those are just really important. If you're, if you're not meeting those two criteria, your customers are probably going to skip you by and your competitors are going to love you.

Ian

Nobody wants that.

Ken

Ian, let's talk about segmenting your audience for the best results on these types of campaigns.

Ian

Yeah. So just to explain what segmentation is in case it's not, you know, people aren't clear on it, segmenting your database basically is. Or, and there's other ways to do it, right. You can even segment on Facebook and stuff like that. But segmenting is basically being able to have a criteria by which you take your overall numbers of contacts on whatever platform and you slice it up into the criteria that makes most sense, their side of the equation, not your side of the equation. Usually meaning if somebody is interested in dental implants, then you probably want to segment them about that particular topic. It doesn't mean you ignore other topics of your business when communicating with these people, but it means that you're going to communicate in a very specific way with a very specific message in areas that they're most interested in. The alternative to that is what we talked about with repeat business, right? You. Not only can segmenting be powerful on the front end before somebody becomes a customer. But it can also based on their interests, webpages they go to, things they download, just actions they take, interest they express. But on the after side as well, post purchase side. If somebody purchases a door you want to sell them or promote windows and eavesdrops. If they buy a window, you can talk about doors and eavesdrops, right? Like it's you, you want to customize the message because you don't want to come across that you're, that you don't understand who you're communicating with. So if you, if somebody buys a door from you, you don't want to keep promoting doors with them because that just comes across as really dumb, right? It's, you know, so segmentation is super powerful though. It does take work and it takes maintenance. Right? You want, and you need to monitor it. But the statistics are really powerful. On average, open rates go up 14.3%. Conversion rates go up 10%. I mean if you want to find money in your business, that's a great way to find money in your business. Improve what you're doing now by doing some segmenting and the results are going to pay for the work you do for sure, if not more. But you can create targeted campaigns. You can segment customers on purchase frequency, order value, product category, re engagement. Right. If somebody has been or is, was a, you know, one way we often use segmentation in the dental marketing world is reactivation campaigns. If somebody has not if they're what we would call like a stagnant or non active patient. If they haven't left or even if we don't know if they've left a practice, we want to be communicating with them at least every six year, six months to a year and longer. Because maybe they're just, you know, maybe their insurance ran out, maybe they shifted jobs and you know, their insurance hasn't kicked in. Maybe they're there. There's so many reasons why somebody might not come back in for dental care. But if you keep communicating that you miss them, that you're there to help them, you know, that you maybe even have payment plans, right? That's the very popular thing, regardless of the industry you're in, especially when the economy is a little bit tougher, right. Telling people that you have payment plans is super powerful. But you need to be able to understand who to segment that for. If you're a brick and mortar business like pet supply company, you might want to segment it by. These are the peoples with people with dogs, cats, reptiles, whatever, right? Because you don't want to be promoting, you know, how to take care of your, your turtle if you know in your database that they're dog owners. So, you know, there's all that kind of stuff in order to do segmentation, sure. You can do it in a spreadsheet, you can do it on a piece of paper. That's not very powerful. You really want to leverage the power of a CRM system. Contact relationship management software, a marketing platform that can basically, you know, you can tag people according to purchase behaviors, other types of behaviors they've done, but make it really easy so that you can then run a list or just throw them into a nurturing workflow or an email program or an SMS program that basically says, you know, this person did this. We're going to communicate this way and we're going to continuously reach out to them on a regular basis, staying top of mind, but speaking to their particular interests. Because if you can connect with somebody where they're most interested, the chances are that you will continue to be a valued expert in their lives and when they have a need, they will reach out to you. So the antithesis of this is generic. Like don't do these things. Don't just, I mean, I'll say this, I was gonna say don't do generic emails. Don't do one size fits all. I would say if you're not doing any kind of outreach, at least do that like start. Because once you start, it's easy. You know the old adage that it's easier to move, to steer a moving ship. Right. It's the same thing with your marketing, like get moving forward and then you can adjust, you can modify, you can improve, improve. But ideally you're going to not do generic one size fits all messages just because they're less effective, they're less personal. You know, you want to really zone in, you want to be their invited guide and not a pass to them. Right. And that's how you'll get people to, to choose you over and over.

Ken

Yeah. A couple of other segmentation ideas, you know, that are pretty common but again, not usually implemented are, are like birthdays or anniversary dates of, you know, when they, when they made their last purchase or when they first became a customer or something like that. And you can track all of that kind of stuff in, in any quality CRM. So yeah, and, and that, you know, I mean, if you're skittish about asking people to come back in and buy, you know, using a birthday campaign is, is the perfect way to get over that, you know, I mean, people want to get recognized and, and, and celebrate and enjoy their birthday, so use that as an opportunity.

Ian

Yeah. Starbucks sends you up your free, you know, cup of coffee. Right. And, and I can tell you it's not just adults that like that kind of stuff. Teenagers absolutely love their free birthday Starbucks, so. Yeah, but that's segmentation.

Ken

Yeah.

Jeff

One quick tip I want to throw in for segmentation before we move on is it's not just what you currently know about people based on what you sell them or when they bought last or when they visited you last. You can ask questions. So if you send an email or you send a text, you can do surveys, you can do polls, you can do. Tap on this link and guess what? If it's a CRM, when they tap on that link, it gets tallied and they get tagged in the database. So you can build your own segmentation, you know, parameters over time, get more information about people.

Ken

All the.

Jeff

I tell people all these quizzes on Facebook, all of these polls, you know, if you're on Yahoo. Reading the news, and they, they want to know how you voted last election, to use a poignant example. Yeah. They're not about just tallying up the results. They're about building a profile of you so they can then advertise you. So do the same thing in your business. Right. If, if you're a, a house painter and you, you know, what do you think? What do you like of this deck color? What do you know? Well, people are answering that maybe they have decks, and then you can talk about deck staining. So there's, you know, lots of things you can do to build your own segments besides just the stuff that people give you.

Ken

Yeah, well, and, you know, that's a great point, Jeff. I think you can actually use surveys as a way to do, you know, new, you know, get past customers to buy again. You know, they complete a survey, give them something to thank them, and this is perfectly acceptable to thank them for their time in giving you valuable information. It could be feedback that you want on a product or a new product that maybe you're even thinking about launching. You know, and then if, if. Especially if it's a new product or new service, you know, if you decide to go ahead and move forward with that, you could say, since you provided this feedback to us, we're gonna, we're gonna give you, you know, this bonus or this discount or whatever.

Jeff

Yeah. And then make your. Which bonus they get depending on how they answered. Right. There's a perfect example.

Ken

Yeah, exactly. All right. Jeff, let's. I know we've talked a little bit about some of the common mistakes that people, people make, but I just want. I. Again, I think it's, I think it's important to kind of go over, you know, things to avoid because a lot of people get a lot of bad marketing advice or they just do things because they just, they, they don't know, you know, and sometimes you, you, you don't know what you don't know. Right. So I think it's important to share some things to avoid. If you could just kind of go through some of the things that jump out at you.

Jeff

Yeah, I had a quick list here. I think we, like you said, we have hit on them. Ian gave me the perfect, perfect lead in about avoiding generic messages. If you can. Don't overlook personalization. Personalization is huge. Remember, sales is about relationships. Right? Ongoing business health and growth is about relationships. And what better way to build and strengthen relationships than through personalization? The statistic is that 80% of customers are more likely to buy when brands offer personalized experiences. So it's going to help you with that. So personalize whenever you can. And it may be as simple as putting their first name in the, in the email to template. Now make sure it doesn't say hello, bracket, first name, bracket, get a default or it's going to make sense if you don't know their first name. Yeah, but any personalization that you can do and then personalization based on interests, which emails they get, how often they get them can help a lot too. We talked about reviews and the importance of reviews and responding to reviews, but also negative reviews. They can't happen. Especially, you know, we said review gating, don't do it. It's, it's a bad practice, can actually get you in trouble and get you banned. So you might get a negative review occasionally or especially if you're not asking for reviews, then you might be getting more negatives because face it, people are more likely to want to flame about a bad experience they had than compliment a good one. So if you get those negative reviews, don't be afraid of them. Use them as an opportunity to turn things around. But if you leave them unaddressed and that that rating starts trending down and especially if you have a good rating and you have a lot of recent negative ones, people are going to go, what's going on with that business? You need to address them because you can start leading to a loss of customers. And it's like 22% of negative reviews unaddressed or negative reviews on address lead to 22% loss of customers, I think is the statistic. So respond professionally. Don't be argumentative. We talked about this before in last past episodes. You know, respond positively. Are very sorry you had this experience. Please contact me offline. We'd like to see what we can do to turn it around. Post about what you did to turn it around. The ideal case would be to get that customer then to post a follow up review. Yeah, they worked with me and they were great. We got everything all taken care of. I don't think you even can take the review down yourself. But, but don't do that. Respond professionally. Respond positively. Use as a learning experience in a way to, you know, turn that frown upside down. Make, make a bad experience into a good one and show people that you're interested in doing that because that will reflect positively on you. And then yeah, again, referrals. Have an intentional program. Ask for them. Don't just assume they're going to happen. And yeah, be authentic. Be intentional and just work the, work the system. Take advantage of the technology when you can. Don't say I'll get to it when I get to it and have it overwhelm you because it's too hard to do these especially reviews. It's such a simple process. A little bit of automation that's inexpensive can go a long way to really helping with your business.

Ken

Yeah, we're coming up close on time, but there are just a couple of things that I wanted to kind of fly through. So if you guys could respond very quickly to each of these, you know, in like 30 seconds or so. Paul, any idea of you know, like key metrics to take a look at?

Paul

Yeah, know and track your customer lifetime value. A lot of times that's referred to as clv. You know, just if you have a referral program, monitor what's going on with it. And, and we talked about monitoring your reviews. Jeff just mentioned it. Monitor your reviews, ask for reviews, respond to respond all reviews and especially negative reviews. If you're doing repeat campaigns and this is something we didn't talk about, I'm not going to go into it because we are short on time. Is customer reactivation. We didn't mention that. But that. That's something else.

Ken

You didn't talk about it.

Ian

It's okay. You, you blacked out at that point.

Jeff

Paul.

Paul

I probably did.

Ian

We saw your TLP fall over.

Ken

So.

Paul

But yeah, just whatever you're doing, monitor it. Just don't. I think somebody else is going to touch on this, but yeah, don't, don't set it and forget it.

Ken

Yeah. Ian, quickly talk about continuous optimization of these campaigns.

Ian

Yeah, you, you can't improve what you don't measure. So Paul talking about measurement was perfect. But measure, measure everything, right? If you're doing email campaigns, look at your stats, Figure out which messages are resonating with people, figure out which offers are resonating with people. Just pay attention to the data. And if it's not like, if you see a decline, if you see something working better than others, focus your efforts on modifying the ones that are weaker to boost them up and just keep continuously improving. Do some a B testing. A B testing is key. So that means try two options, see which one works better.

Ken

Jeff, how about you?

Jeff

Yeah, I was going to mention AB testing kind of falls into monitor the analytics like Paul talked about. Of course you have to have that to a B test. So instead, let me just quickly say use customer engagement to your advantage. Engage with your customers, ask them questions, send them targeted emails and learn from that. You may even develop a new product or service based on feedback that you get, but the engagement in itself is very powerful.

Ken

And I'll just add to that a couple of things. So like, if you're a high volume type of business where your customers come in on a fairly regular basis, you might want to mix up your program a little bit just to kind of keep it fresh and interesting. So, you know, keep that in mind. And then also I love this idea of AB testing your actual offer for what you're doing in terms of the referral incentive. So for example, if you offer a free class for you and your friend, try that if you're a gym or a fitness studio or yoga studio or whatever. But then see how that performs. But then also see if you get better performance from a different offer structure like free water bottle for every new referral you bring in, or yoga mat or whatever it might be. You know, just test stuff, continue to optimize it. The little bit of work that you put into this is going to pay off massively. So that's the thing that, you know, I hope everybody learned something from this today. And, and I think this is maybe one of the most actionable podcasts that we've ever had because these are real things that people can implement immediately. If you're not quite sure what to do, reach out to, you know, to a legitimate marketing strategist to really get this integrated into the overall marketing efforts that you're doing. And, you know, and, and good luck. This is the perfect time of year to do this. Get serious about it, do it before Black Friday and have a great close out to 2024 and a kickoff to 2025. With that, Ian, I'm going to turn it over to you.

Ian

Yeah. Yeah. So if you like what you hear, invite all your friends, families, pets, dogs, everything. And be sure to like this podcast. Be sure to share it. And until next week, keep calm, folks, and mark it on.