Episode 13 of Focused On The Road centers on our weekly theme of customer follow-up. In the video, Bo talks about how one of our clients utilizes marketing automation to follow-up with their customer appointments. Marketing automation is a great tool for any business and will help you free up more time to work on important projects. Focused Engagement prides itself on our marketing automation skills! If you would like to learn more about our marketing automation services or our other services, please contact us today. Local business is our passion and we will help you stand out in your community.
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Focused On The Road episode 13 transcript
Hey everybody, this is Bo with Focused Engagement. Today is Thursday, not Wednesday and I am obviously not on the road, I’m in my office. But we’re still doing a Wednesday Focused On The Road. I’m playing with a few tests here. We’ve been doing Facebook live videos and I’ve been struggling wit the video so I’m actually doing some tests right now. I’m doing a little bit different format plus it’s fun to play with different formats. I got a green screen behind me and I’m showing myself just down here in the corner and I got my screen up. And the reason why I’m doing it this way is because today we’re talking about automating follow-up.
Now this is a really good one for me right now because I really screwed up on a followup. I had a business scheduled for tomorrow for a Focused Fridays interview. And I was supposed to follow up with him on Tuesday, which would have been the 14th or something like that. I put it on my calendar for today. So I followed up with him today and he said, “Hey, I didn’t hear from you. So I already scheduled something out. Sorry”. So I lost out on that great interview and now I’m going to scramble to find somebody else
Today we’re going to go over what I could have done different. Now, if I was to throw out a defense, I put this out on a group here in Utah and the response was overwhelming. It was awesome how many people jumped on. And so I was having a hard time keeping up with the responses right at first, so I kind of screwed up and put him on the follow-up on the wrong bait. What I had done now is I have created a calendar specifically so people could schedule this.
So, I’m going to show you that I use SharpSpring for our automation. And I’m going to show you how easy it is to set up an automated follow-up for something in this case. Now, this is a really good case study because I’ve actually set up client who does, they’re a moving company.
Whenever they’d schedule somebody, they would have to put it on the calendar to email that person, information on certain days up to the move. It was very time consuming, so we have automated that in a very, very similar way to what I’m doing here. This is a really good scenario on how to use follow-up automation.
Okay, what I’ve done is I have a calendar event so somebody can book a Focused Fridays interview with me and when they do it automatically adds to my calendar and then it’s going to trigger this workflow here. So the trigger is when they book a meeting with me. I’m going to make this a little bit bigger here. At first I just haven’t notified me, but then I get into the really cool stuff. This is the actual automation here and I am going to bring up this screen and show it to you. I’ve only built this today and I haven’t built the email. So I got some fake information and just to show you how it works.
We have the date of interest, which for our case is going to be obviously the Focused Fridays. I can create an action here and I can just have it send an email and I’m going to create an email specifically for this telling them what kind of questions I’m going to ask so they could think about it. I don’t want anything that I am talking to them to be a surprise. This is supposed to be a beneficial to them. And, quite frankly, fun for me to interview another business and see how they market. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I want to make sure that they’re comfortable and that is good for them and for me. Saying that out loud didn’t sound quite good as it should have.
So I got three days, I’m going to trigger off an email one day before and I am going to send a notification to me so I can actually call them and make sure that they got the email that they went through it and they know what’s going on and that everything is still good to go now.
I don’t have to assume that they read the email because one of the cool things that SharpSpring is going to allow me to do is I can see when an email is opened up in red. I can have that trigger off a note occasion to me as well so I know that they got it. If I don’t get that trigger, I can even set a condition trigger that if they have not opened up the email then to notify me. None of this is ever going to be a surprise, that’s the cool thing about it. That is all I have going on on this one, but we also have on a date time, we also have after the date of interest. I decided I’m going to ask one day after I’m just going to fire off a thank you email.
These emails can be customized to the information that we have. It’s not going to be some sort of form letter. I can make it look very nice but it’s still automated. So it’s not taking a lot of time out of my hand, but it’s really putting your business in the best light.
That’s a date time action group that we can use. Now, what are some other ways that we can use this? If you sell products and those products are delivered on the delivery date, you can put that delivery date in SharpSpring and you can fire off a date and time action group on that. You can do it beforehand to say, “Hey, don’t forget where you’re coming on X day at X time to deliver your product”. You could do it afterwards, you can see we actually have to look at time after, do that again, time after, we have actually months so we can do 12 months if we want to do so.
My recommendation would be probably one week after to send some sort of thank you or even just a couple days after to send some sort of thank you. That would be a perfect time to also ask for a review. one month after, depending on the product could be a great time to say, “How are you enjoying your product? Do you have any questions?”. And if you have a way to have them to review the product itself, not just the company.
You want the reviews, you want them to review your company and your sales person, how well they did you do that on Google or Facebook or wherever it is. You want reviews, but you can also have them review your product on your website so that as people other people are looking at this product, they can see the reviews and how much others enjoyed it. So that social proof shows that it is a good product. You’ve got the social proof that you’re a good company. You got the social proof that you got a good product and done right. By the way, Google will actually show those reviews in your search engine result page so they are very, very, very powerful.
That’s an example of a way to follow-up after you can also do surveys. Ask people to fill out a survey to review and maybe give them a gift card or something for participating so that they take the time to do it. This will help you start gathering more information to tell you why they picked you, how long it took between the time that they decided they wanted this product and the time they actually purchased it, what you could have done better, how they enjoyed your store, how they enjoyed the salesperson, cleanliness, and other things like that. You’re only limited by your own imagination as to what information you can gather. And the more you gather, the better you can make your company. It doesn’t matter if you’re a product-based or service-based either way.
This is a great way to improve your company. Those are a couple examples of how you can use automation to keep up with your customers or your leads. If you have other stuff, I would love to hear them. If you have questions about automation or automating follow-up or automating anything really in marketing, I invite you to give us a call.
You can call us email us, text us, message us on Facebook messenger, or just on our website. I’ve said before that it’s very important to have as many engagement opportunities as possible and so we monitor all of them. Get a hold of us, let us know your question. We’ll do our best to answer it. I’m never afraid to say, “I don’t know. That’s a great question. I’ll figure it out and get back to you”. So until next week, have a great day.