Small Tasks Deserve Automation:
Brennan’s automation journey began with the follow up emails sent after office seminars in his agency years.
Automation has come a long way since then, and Brennan is a big advocate for using today’s bigger marketing apps and tools that are meant for high volume automation, for even the small tasks like following up, onboarding clients, scheduling a call, keeping in touch with past clients, and lead generation.
13:44 “Alot of our clients had told us thazt they submitted to a few other companies… and we were just honestly the first one to get back to them. Now, this was manual, but there’s a lot of things you could do that could automate that response and get them down that funnel.”
Systemize the Process:
Client onboarding is a good example of a process that you can systemize to not only save time, but make your clients sit back and feel confident in their investment.
Look at the things that you need to take care of, how the process will work, and what the questions are that you find yourself constantly asking your clients. Once you identify those, you can create an email drip campaign that educates new clients on this process, and a google form to pull those questions from them automatically. That way, you can stop asking and start working.
Automation Mistake:
Brennan shares how he screwed up automation on his course about automation, which he says luckily his audience was pretty forgiving.
Make it Personal:
Brennan shies away from the typical mail merge style of personalization, which nearly every business does today: pulling a contact’s first name and company name to create a “personal” email.
Instead, at his new business RightMessage, they focus on matching paragraphs of text tailored to the flow of the message based off of the data they have of each client or potential client.
25:33 “It’s that kind of stuff where you’re taking into account relational cues, behavioral cues, firmographic or demographic cues, and then you’re just changing the way that you converse with people based off of that.”
He shares how they had huge success with this approach at Double Your Freelancing, where he tailors copy specifically to the reader by asking them to specify their field early on in the prospecting phase.
30:33 “We don’t look at segmentation as being black or white, so if they came from google and landed on a certain page about finance, they might be in finance, but its not a guarantee. So we can do more soft personalizations, so maybe just the testimonial is changed.”
On the flip side, he says that if they complete a survey or click a trigger link, then they can say with 100% confidence what segment the user belongs, and tailor things from there.
Favorite Zaps:
- New customer notifications that ping him in Slack.
- At Right Message, their opt in form leads users to a type form that asks for different bits of information. Using Zapier’s javascript console, they then calculate these data points, and then number crunch into an email report. This personalized email report then matches the user with a personalized email course tailored to their needs.
Website: RightMessage
Website: Double Your Freelancing
Twitter: @BrennanDunn