Webinar Transcript - Make Waves with Marketing Automation
Speaker: Harry Casimir
Hello, everyone. We’ll be waiting for a minute or two. Just let some additional people come in. Really looking forward to share with you guys some of the automation tools out there to implement on your business. Really looking forward to this. All right, another minute. We will get started. People that’s coming a little If you’re a bit late can join us along your way. So All right. All right. I’m about to get started now. All right, let me go ahead share my screen. All right. Hello, everyone. Hello, hello. Why is this inside? Hello, hello, everyone. Thank you so much for turning in to the The Make Waves with Marketing Automation today. We will unpack lots of gym. Really appreciate you guys taking the time this afternoon, joining me on this webinar. And we will explore a lot of different things. Welcome again to the Make Waves with our marketing automation on the marine industry. I’m very happy to be here today, guys, to really dive deep into some strategies and some technologies and processes that you can implement in your marine boarding business so that you can take advantage and make a leap over the competitor.
So without further ado, let’s dive right into it. So the first thing we’re going to go over is what we will cover today. So we’re going to talk about what is marketing automation. We will go over why it’s important to implement it and how it can become a tool to be more responsive and customer service-centric business, help you become so. We will go over lead generation, lead management system, because at the end of the day, we are in business to generate more leads and get more sales. We will do a live walk on automation. A basic, simple, easy to follow automation for a bot dealer that have leads coming in. How does leads get assigned to different agents and so on, and how does this follow up? And then we will give you a few questions to do your own self-diagnosis on where you are when it comes to automation. So you’re here today and you deserve time to be here, and part is because you want to be here. So my I only request to you is turn off the phone, turn off social media for a moment, ready for your questions, and ready to dive in, and to just focus for the moment so that we can have your undivided attention for today.
So dive right in. Yes. So let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name again is Harry Casmy, founder of Booth Marketing Pros and ateliers. Been in the marine industry for over years now, really work almost all segments from actually IT to marketing itself. I have seen it all. I’m a US veteran, Navy veteran. We are members of the MRA, all the different regional Marine Association. I am the creator podcast, creator and host of the Marine Marketing Podcast. If you are interested in jumping on, come join me as a guest. Don’t let me know, and I’ll be more than happy to have you on board with us. I’m a frequent publisher on Trade Only, boarding industry, and I’m also the co-moderator for Boot Marketing Mastermind on Facebook. I author two books. One of them is The Ultimate Guide for Boot Dealer’s Marketing, and the other one is Marine Marketing Medies. Both of them are available on Amazon. My education background, I do have a bachelor degree in Computer Information System, and I do have an MBA with a concentration on business processes and project management from knowledge University in Vermont. So that’s all about myself.
That’s enough about me. So what do we do here at Boat Marketing Plus? We provide digital marketing services to marine industry businesses. And we have a very, very fine process, a very well-refined, a very well-built blueprint we call Boat Vantage. So we help both businesses take advantage of all the different tools available and software available online to help you your business. That’s just a little bit about us, and you can learn more later on. So we’re just going to dive right in into why we’re here today. So the first question is, what is marketing automation? Well, it’s a very straightforward answer. Marketing automation is a process that uses software to update marketing tasks without human intervention. It can help save time with this human error and help achieve better result. Actually, you can even take the word marketing out of this and use just automation and thinking that you can apply automation on everything that you do in the business. Although our presentation today will be focused a lot on marketing and sales and the process of it and how you make sure those leads get taken care of. But you can apply this from operations to HR to, well, you name it, you can apply automation.
So we will go over step by step into this. As I mentioned, if you have questions, please feel free to add those questions as we go. You can pause those questions anytime in the sessions. I’ll be more than happy to jump in and answer them. If I can’t, I will make sure I come back. At the end, I will leave time to cover that. With that out of the way, we know what marketing automation is, what you can do with it. You can see marketing automation, you can do a a lot of things with it. From automated your calendar to making sure when your calendar is a new event added to your calendar, the CRM gets notified, so it can It can block the time so that other people don’t book you. All of that can be automated. It’s not just about marketing automation. Automation in general can really help streamline and get your business to the next level. What does the universe of marketing automation looks like? Here’s the breakdown numbers. Just for you guys, that number nerds out there, right? If you look at from 2021, the marketing automation marketplace looks like a $4.79 billion number.
By By 2030, this number estimated to be $13.7 billion. That’s just to show you that it’s a big, big, vast marketplace. There’s a ton of tools out there. Just to show you his breakdown, the numbers from a good friend from MAP Tech, MAP. Those guys really do an amazing job every year. They really break down all the different technology tools that are available and where they are, what they do. They don’t put priorities on which one that’s best, but they know that tools is one of the tools that does X, Y, and Z, and they put that in the market. At the moment, there are roughly about 11,000 different software that you can use to leverage, do automation with. So the market is very, very vast. On the same survey, they find that three out of four businesses that are using automation in the marketing, and some of them don’t even realize they are doing just that. 91% of companies report that they increase for demand automation in the next two years, which makes sense because automation is becoming very similar to what AI is today. No one heard of it for the long as well.
We were using it, but no one really pay attention to it. Now it’s explored. Everybody knows about it. I think that’s the same thing that will happen slowly with marketing and automation as more company realizing they want a better ROI and increase their numbers. So what are some of the challenges that we have seen, especially in the marine industry itself? Really, adaptation is really, really a big barrier on this space, lack of training and knowledge about automation in general and about software. Software is something that scares some people. They don’t have the time to learn it. 49% of marketing professionals say lack of expertise is also a tough challenge for them. Again, it’s not something you just will come in and get it done. It’s how you actually have to have a basic understanding of it. We’re going to go I wanted to share that as well in terms of Map out, what is it that you want to accomplish before you dive in into a full automation mode? As you saw a moment ago, there are a lot of marketing automation tools in the market. Choosing the right one is not just as simple as this is what someone said, and I picked that.
It’s what your business really needs and what you want to accomplish. And really, some of the biggest challenge is you want to stand in the market, you want to stand out in the marketplace and your competitors may and may not be using it. How can you leverage automation to do that? But also, one of the biggest challenges that make sometimes automation can be tricky is because if you let automation run while you don’t pay attention to it, you can really get full quality, especially the leads that’s coming in from sales to sales people, and that can hurt your automation process. We’re going to go over that step by step. What role does marketing automation play in marine businesses in general? So It can really help you as a marine business stand out from the competition. It can help you streamline your leads follow-up. As you all know, it’s interesting to see how many leads that go untapped, unanswered, not follow up with in the marine space. It’s not just the marine business like that. I have seen it in almost every type of business, but in the marine space, it’s Really interesting. And part is lack of automation sometimes in that space.
Also, automation can really help you streamline a well targeted email campaign. If you have drip campaign, which I will share with you in a moment, how you can leverage automation to ensure that your email campaigns are very, very well targeted. Automation can also Also, create segmentation for your customers and also create better customer service, whether it’s for the existing customer that you have or the potential customers that you might be bringing on board, brand new leads, how do you create an impression. As you can see on this floor chart, it’s all about how do you collect the data, how do you segment that information, how do you create workflow to deliver the service. All of that, you can apply this on almost anything in the business itself and make it fit. You can also use automation to automate your social media engagement, whether it’s creating posts, scheduling those posts, make sure to automate part of that process Process, and really all the other repetitive tasks that you have at your company. Again, all of that automation can solve a lot of problem for you, and we will go over some all of that. Again, the benefit is huge.
When you automate the process, so the amount of work, the amount of people you would take to write this content, answer those e-mail, rescheduling, reprocess, or refollow up with everything on a day-to-day basis, you probably would take a day or two where once you set up your automation, all of that can happen on demand when you need it happen, or you can pre-schedule it. All of that could happen, which make you faster to market, faster to deliver. It’s really automation can really improve your leads conversion rate, and we’re going to talk about that. You can see a higher ROI. If you think about, instead of having someone to ensure that you follow up, as you all guys know, the customer have to have at least 7 to 10 touches with your companies before they decide how they’re going to react, whether they will choose you or the competitor. Imagine, because of your automation, you’ll be able to get in front of them with your social media, with your email marketing, with those follow-up emails that will be coming in, through SMS. All of that, you do not have to sit there and do all that work, or your team don’t have to because this is all automated.
Also, automation really give you a better report. At the end of the day, you can easily see where the leaks are versus really just wait until someone tell you there is an issue somewhere. But also within those report, because how automation works, a lot of it is workflow and system integration, you can actually see where issues are and solve them real-time and get them on the way. You find out that the email that’s supposed to trigger and go out every 09:00 AM to a list of 50 people did not get triggered at 09:00 AM. You go in there, you can look at the logs and possibly see, depending on the system you have in place, and see where that issue is and get it right back on track. Imagine if you rely on a human to do that, it would take much longer. Those were some of the benefits you get with automation. How do you go about implementing marketing automation in your business to streamline, to help you, help your team, and help the company grow? It helps. One of the things that you can use for is engage how you your customer, well, selecting how you want your customer to engage with you, your brand, and your business.
You all know from marketing perspective, customers really, really get engaged once they get to know your brand, understand your brand, and know what you do. And with nowadays, the customer is not waiting for an email anymore. Statistic show, 98% of Of all text messages are open and responded within three minutes, they are delivered to someone’s phone. In the US itself, consumers are five times more likely to send and receive text message than the phone call. If you read that again, 98% of text messages are open and we spend within three minutes, which means when someone gives you their phone number, especially from a business selling perspective, Of course, there are laws and rules that you have to follow, but there’s a good chance if you text those people, you’re going to get any faster answer if you were to email them. You can automate a lot of that process all along your way. One of it is following up very, very quickly. How do you ensure you follow up very quickly when it comes to leads that come in, customer request that come in, or that engagement you have on your social media, whatever the platform might be?
Well, if you are part of that automation army or process that you create, you can solve that problem very quickly. Simply by following up to the leads within 15 minutes, within 15 minutes after you get leads, you really increase your chance of converting those potential customers. Here’s why it’s so important. Leads that not follow up within 15 minutes, go cold. Again, depending on the business you are in, but imagine you are a A boat dealer, for example, buying a boat is a longer process, obviously, you guys know. But in lots of time, that intuitiveness the client have in thinking to request a quote from you, learn about that boat, the faster someone gets to that person, the more interested they stay. Within 15 minutes, research shows that a lead that did not get a follow-up on, within that 15 minutes, they got a call. The follow up within five minutes are 21% more likely to to stay on board. And after five minutes, the ad of qualifying dropped by almost 80%, as you can see on the matrix here. So this is why it’s so critical to automate that process so that from the second someone make a request on your website or give you a phone call, that follow-up process should be in place, and this is where automation can become your best friend and become a king for How do you go about leveraging automation?
Well, the ideal outcome for automation is to deliver immediate response to a lead, immediate response to a potential customer, immediate response to a potential partner, depending on what you achieve, what you want to achieve at that point, whether it’s to email, SMS, and potentially other means of communication. All of that to ensure you get to the right person at the right time when they reach you. The ideal outcome here is every lead that you’re as a marketer, every leads that come in, your sales team might be lacking, but because of your automation is well defined and well built, you make sure every leads is follow up and followed to within 20 seconds of And possibly a phone call from the company within 15 minutes and business hours. Obviously, sometimes it might take longer than that. But imagine you send an email to someone, request for specific things, and then two days later, that’s when you heard from them. What if you were able to send an email automatically? And that email doesn’t have to be super complicated. Someone make a request, for example, Hey, I’m interested in X, Y, and Z. Can you get back to You can actually automate the first message.
Say, Hey, Johnny, thank you so much for reaching out. We get your email. Someone from our team will reach out to you. And you can even tell them, Hey, just so you know, this message is automated to confirm that we got your message. And people like that. People appreciate that. And now they know you already received their email and you already promised them someone will reach out to them. This is why it’s so important to make sure you have that system in place to ensure your leads or follow-up, they don’t go cold, they don’t get dry. Then once on every leads that get follow-up, you can actually create an actual sequence or drip campaign to those leads to ensure that the follow to get done by your own team internally as well. Knowing that most businesses, they usually have at least two or three sales people, you want to make sure those people are on top of those incoming leads. And again, depending on how you implement lead in your business, you can have Ron Robbins or you have someone that sign those leads individually one by one. All that process can be automated. But if it is not, but make sure you have the supporting system in place to ensure those leads get follow up with.
But how do you go about making sure all those processes, all those systems are in place to ensure you have all the automation in place so that you can see the result that you are getting. And this is where a lead management system come to place. Different companies have different What name for this. Some company call them the CRM, customer relationship management. Some company call them the sales management system. So it all depends. But whatever you call it, personally, I like to call it lead management system Because it’s easier that way. We know this system does one thing, one thing only. It manages and it’s implemented. It’s helped leads come in. It’s easier from a marketing perspective. I can go in. I know this This month, we receive 20 leads and only two of them convert, or only five of them convert, or two of them, whatever that number is. Step two, how do you go about implement a marketing automation system for your company? Well, the first thing you want to do is identify the key touch points that you want to do. My suggestion is always start small and then you build from there.
And we’re going to show you in a live example what that looks like. And you can slowly build up from where you start. But it is critical to sit down, think of the key touch point. Of when the customer coming in, where they coming from, how do we even… Let’s step back even further than when the customer coming in. But how do we start build awareness about our branding? How do we get them to engage with us? And once they get engaged, they become interested in learning more, which means that’s the education piece. And how do we get them to become aware of us and interested in our service? Services. Now, obviously, all those key points that you will be creating during the journey, then you have to choose the right automation software tools for your business needs. There are too many to list out there. As you guys know, there are the big giants out there from Salesforce to Pod-Art to HubSpot. Well, you name it. There are too many just to name. And those are not just the only tools out there. There are tools that just not even part of the sales process or marketing process that still be able to create a fairly good automation system for you.
Again, it all depend on your needs. And even the old Google Excel can create those automation, especially with the way Google implement that in Zappier. So making sure you develop the flow of the messaging so that those messages and content that goes out, whether it’s going to social media, to your website, to different other newsletters, from the text messaging. All of that, those messages are very personalized and resonate with your target audience, but also tie back in to your automation system in the back. Now, this is where it comes very interesting in terms of creating workflow and sequencing, and this is what I will be showing you in a moment, on how some basic workflow can save you the amount of time and your energy and your team headache so that you don’t have to babysit the system. And obviously, what you measure get improved. So you cannot rely on set and forget mentality perspective when it comes to automation. You must ensure that you create a system that is sustainable and that also being monitor, optimized, and making sure it flows very well for what the result that you want to get. So here’s what a flow would look like.
Again, this is very complex flow, so you don’t have to follow a flow like this. I’m a visual learner type of person, so I like to… I would be sitting by myself and sometimes I would be drawing. It’s part of it. I’m creating the flow of I’m thinking what I want those to accomplish. Again, a lot of the system nowadays, you don’t really have to sit down and do this. It helps a lot, I think, if you can sit down with yourself or your team, start thinking of, Okay, here are five things or seven things we want. Here’s what happened when this happened. Here’s what happened when that happened. When the customer come in, or when the customer comes to our booth at the boat show, what do we want to happen? Do we want to send them a text message right away? Joe, the broker, add that person to our CRM. Our CRM send an email to the potential customer and say, Hey, thank you for stopping by. Glad to see you. I’ll be in touch with you when I get back to the office on Monday. An email automatically gets to Joe, Hey, Joe.
That customer just got added and that message was sent to that customer. Two days later, making sure Joe got another email that said, Hey, Joe, don’t that customer is on the CRM to follow up with. And maybe Joe even forget what there is an automation that’s already created to follow up with that person again on behalf of Joe. Again, it’s all dependent on your business model, how you process this, but you can see all the possibilities you have on hands when you have a system like this that eventually gets you more bookings, more sales, more repeat buyers, and get people to to become loyal customers. Again, this is a flow for one of a system internally, but you can apply this for almost anything you want. What are some of the tools that you can use? What are some of the things that you can use to streamline your marketing automation process? So any forms that you use on your website, whether it’s come It’s coming from organic traffic, it’s coming from pay advertising, you can actually use those to streamline that whole process so that when someone submit a form on your website, they got an email automatically Let them know we receive it, make sure whether you use a round-robin, making sure the salespeople follow up with that leads, and live chat the same thing.
Once those people reach out to you, again, depending on type of chat system you are using, the potential customer can get added to your automation as well. Whether it’s a trip campaign, a sequence, you will be sending those emails on a consistent basis. Maybe you implement a miss call back system. I don’t know if you ever get this text message, you call a business and you get a text message from them, say, Hey, we miss your call. Can we call you back? Or can we have a call at that date? Those are very, very systematic, fully automated system that you don’t need someone to babysit the system. You can also create what we call database reactivation built in in your system. The database reactivation really works very well to make sure that your past customers are well aware your business still exists, but also try to bring people back in. You can create different methods on the database reactivation, whether it’s to bring them back, to invite them to bring your friends, or to really just let them know that you are still in business. Because for us that have done business for a long time, someone buy a boat or rent a boat today or come get service from your business today, they may not come back for another six, seven months or a couple of years from now.
They may not come back. But imagine they got an email from you, remind them of your services or offer them a discount to come back. Sometimes it’s not because they don’t like you, it’s just that life change and people move on and sometimes they don’t remember. It’s good to keep those database reactivation. You can clearly automate that process depending on the system that you are using. See, I’m very good at last activities and last modification. That way we can automatically get those emails out. And obviously, we view your automation as well. So as I mentioned to you at the very beginning of this, I will be going through this amount of data here and information. So feel free to stop me, ask me any questions, comments, anything. So in the old days, back in my days, as some people will say, there There are a lot of different tools. You can see, guys, in the early screenshot I showed you, there were a lot of different tools, but none of them were communicating with each other. Some of those tools now still exist, and some of you will laugh. They’re not old, per se, but those tools used to be really the king of king.
Enfusion Software, those of you guys that are aware of the software, they’ve been around for a very long time. They’re still very good. Now I know their business model changed a little bit and they really opened up. But those tools, imagine having all those different tools trying to get one thing done. But now, most of those tools, actually, you can use different methodology, different system to connect those tools with each other. So it’s not a big deal. When you use them just by themselves, they look really cranky because now you have to push data from one place to the next. But when you are able to automate that process, it’s really, really can streamline your work. In that case, for example, if you lose RankCentral for your phone system and you use, for example, Enfusion for your cells as a funnel, and then you use Corel for your tracking system. Those are a lot of different system to keep up with. So how do you ensure that everything talk to each other? And at the end of the day, the closest CRM you have from all of this is really Enfusionsoft, and depending who’s counting, personally, I have my own opinion about that.
But now when you have all that many different software and you still need to have good data about your customers’ information, none of those even provided. So now you have to go to a fourth or fifth different software to get that information. But you still need all that information to talk to each other. So this is why we say All Stack. Now, how do you go about getting a system that really help bring this together? So the first thing I highly, highly recommend, especially if you just started with automation, if you have not really dive into the craziness of software selection, is really start thinking of your automation and what is the best result that you want from it? And what are some of the things that you How you can get out of automation? Speed to leads via email, phone call, phone messaging. How do you want to communicate with clients and your clientele base? How do you add live chat to your website? How do you make sure people are able to communicate with you via a different social media platform? And if they do, where is that message fully integrated in one centralized location?
If you’re going to do database activation and making sure you follow up with past customer, how do you want to manage that? How do you want your sales pipeline and pipeline management system be tracked, but also looking at what are some of the key KPI you want to look at to ensure that you are hitting those numbers. But also, more importantly, from a marketing perspective, you guys all know when a marketing person comes, when a salesperson or operation people come to you and say, Hey, I need to do marketing for X, Y, and Z, you start having a lot of questions. Really, one of the questions you will have, most likely, is we got How do we create those landing pages to ensure what we want to present is really, really resonant with that clientele or that piece of segment of market we want to get that message out. How do we create the sequencing? So all those information are really important to start thinking before you dive into automation. Because marketing automation, there’s a lot of ways you can take advantage of it. And one way you have to ensure you have that in place is understanding your customer journey.
So every Any businesses, no matter how similar your business is, there’s always a different way to approach your customer base and your customer, your target audience, your avatar, every one of those businesses, their customers think a little bit differently, especially your target audience. So just because you are a boat dealer that’s selling that type of boat and another dealer sell That type of boat does not mean that they have the same client base with you. They may not even be your competitor to some degree because usually people that drive one specific car usually stay within that car line. The same thing for boats. Most people that really lack one type of boat, they stay within that line. That can apply for almost any business, whether it’s clubs, boat rental, especially manufacturers. So all of that understanding the customer journey. I always look at the customer journey into those four different steps. So you have the brand awareness. Get people to know you, who you are, what you are, what you do. And then slowly start pushing more information to get them to get educated about your business, your products, your services, and what you stand for, what make you unique, what make you the one that they should choose.
And now that education piece is finished. That’s how you start getting them in the funnel to consider you when that decision process is made. And by the time those people make that decision, they become loyal customers. And through that process, automation can really be a game changer for your for your business. What that means for your business in terms of how can you get a customer to truly be aware of your business, be educated about your business and then become a low customer for your business that really follow through and want to always be a customer and refer a customer to you. The right marketing automation tools really is key to success on this. We’re going to go over the example, life example I’m giving you in a moment on how you can implement a basic workflow to ensure that your team your marketing dollar go as far as humanly possible. We all know in marketing, it’s not one thing that really to get the numbers right for you. Depending on the business model that you have, depending on where you are geographically, but also the size of your business, there’s a lot of different things that need to be done.
Whether it’s creating content, getting this content. But one of the things that we know for sure automation can do is strategically help you planning and scheduling your content content to ensure that you save time, but also save some energy as well. And by aligning those content to be posted and created on a very, very consistent and a good frequency basis, it really helps show not just the customer base that you have or you are targeting, but also show those algorithm that you are a true business that focuses on true customer service, bring value to your potential customers. And believe it or not, that’s a very good, strong signal, lots of search engines looking for as well from an automation perspective. So how do you use automation to ensure your leads are nurtured and to certain workflow that you have? I believe in the next two, three years, automation will become the heart of marketing. If you don’t have things fully automated in your marketing, it will be very hard because there’s a good chance right now, your competitors or the bigger guys that have the resources are already implementing that. For you, it’s just a matter of time that you figure you have to start Really looking at automation, how do you automate some of that processes so that you can get your team on board, get yourself, familiarize yourself with what automation can do for you and the advantages that it can bring to your business.
And really help drive more traffic to your website, more traffic to your front door, get more leads, more sales, eventually more profits. And that’s what we are looking for. So as you guys know, most businesses nowadays, somehow, somewhere, are using some type of CRM. My background Before I really got a very, very deep involved in the marine industry, I worked with many, many, many different industries, from construction to agriculture, insurance. When I came to the The Marine industry, I was shocked because most industries that I have worked on before, every place, they love the CRM. It’s like one of those things that they live and breathe. If they don’t have it, the business doesn’t really work. When I come to the Marine industry, I was very shocked to see lots of businesses don’t have CRM in place. But what’s even more interesting is, as of today, I speak with at least two or three boat dealers that are not even clients of ours on a weekly basis, different dealers from all over the world. One of the things that I find about all of them is that almost all of them have a CRM and none of them use it.
If I were to guess, I would say 50% of them or 60% of them don’t even touch it, actually, depending on a monthly basis for it. Some them have Salesforce, HubSpot, Lispeed, you name it. They have a CRM somewhere. They are not just using it. And I wonder why. And I haven’t have the answer. If you guys know, that would be great. If you can share with us why people are not using the CRM. But one thing that I know for sure, CRM is very, very, very powerful tools. As I mentioned earlier, when you talk about CRM and lead management, sometimes it’s one the same, depending on the system that you are using. So here we’re going to really quickly go over what the back of a basic workflow looks like to automate that process for you as a marketer so that when those leads come in, there’s a true follow-through so that you can look at those reports and know that you have done your job. Not only you build the interest, you your build the awareness, you create the education piece, get people to know what your product and services are, and then get them inside the funnel.
At the end of the day, obviously, from a marketing perspective, you’ve done your job. But if those leads come in and they’re not converting, one, they may not be so good, or two, they’re not follow up with, that’s still a problem from a marketing perspective because your company is not making the sales that they need. So the sales people still need some help. You from a marketing perspective, it’s not necessarily your job, but to some degree it is to ensure that they have the information that they need so that they can make decision or at least you can help automate that process for them. So making sure you have that continuous improvement and system in place to ensure that you can look at this data and making sure you have the information that you need. So as I promise you, I would do a quick live demo on what a basic bare-born workflow looks like. And this is a very straightforward workflow. This is just an example. It’s not specific for one person. As you can see, we’re not going to go over all the nearly greater detail of this. We won’t have time. But I want to show you how does this basic system work.
So when you have an automated workflow system in place, It works this way. So for example, what this does is basically tells me when someone contact us on our website, I want that person to come in and assign it to… When that person comes in, I assign it to Harry Smith, which means basically this is a very, very simple automation. Again, keep in mind, I could split this and I could actually build a Raren Robin up here so that I can see I have salesperson one, salesperson two or 3 and 4, and then I want salesperson to get the first one, the second one to the second to the second, and so forth. You get the point, right? We can actually build a whole automation here. From a marketing perspective or from a general manager and owner perspective, you can see that data later on from a reporting perspective. Then here, what I want to do is I want to assign this new lead that coming in to this guy, and also I want to create an opportunity within the opportunity system, and I want to add this to the sales pipeline. I select what sales pipeline I want that person to get added to.
Again, depending on your The business follow the structure that you have, some people have one sales pipeline, some people have multiple sales pipeline, one sales pipeline for just random people that’s coming in, sales pipeline for upsells, existing customers, and the sales pipeline to do something else. You can select what sales pipeline you want to get that person, that opportunity to be added on. Then what you want to do is after four minutes, wait for four minutes before the first email. Inside the first email, I want that first email to go out just to say, Hello, introduce yourself. This email can fully be automated so that, for example, if Jen send an email from your website and that email automatically… Remember, we are assigned it to Smdi and it gets inside the opportunity, we wait for four minutes, that email goes out back to Jen now, the first email, could say, Now it shows it’s coming from Smeedy, the broker, the salesperson, and you would say, Hey, Jen, this is Smeedy from ABC, a company, a dealer, or boat club, or manufacturer, whatever the name might be. Just checking in, I want to introduce myself. I got your email.
I will be calling you in a bit, a little bit tired of at the office, whatever message you want. But this message is fully automated. You can actually create this and replicate the same information for all of your agents, actually. So unless Unless you have very specific things that you want to say about a specific agent, even that you can actually create a different variable. But that’s too much detail from a technicality perspective. But what I’m saying is you can actually You can see that you can actually use that one flow for all of your different salespeople. And that message, when it goes out, it looks like it’s coming from that specific salesperson to that specific customer. And as you can see, Again, this is for testing purposes, but within that one email goes out, you also send a text message. A text message that goes out because that person provide their phone number as well. And that text message could be the same thing you send to the email, or That email could have a lot of details. That’s like, Hey, thanks for reaching out. We have a vast inventory. Here are some of the details.
Here is how you become a member within the club, how you rent our bots, or how you charter our bots, whatever you want to put in there. But also within that text message, you can put additional information and say, Hey, Jen, I just sent you an email. It’s very long. We’ll detail out some information, but just summarize. As you know, we offer chartering services. We are a dealer. We are at the marina. We have a rental. I mean, you can list all your stuff there if that’s what you want to do. Or you can say, Just so you know, we will be giving you a call. Or, I haven’t heard from you. I will call you. The other cool thing about our specific system, obviously, every system is different, but this system in particular offer you the ability to actually record a voicemail. It’s very generic, so it’s not for everyone. And that text message, we can actually look through it to get the specific agent or worker. If you have multiple salespeople, each one of them will have their own message. But this is a very general message that would be coming in. It won’t say the person’s name.
It would be, Hey, this is ABC business, calling in, checking in, shoot you an email earlier. I wanted to see if you’re still interested in buying or dealing with us or something like that. Again, keep in mind this is very, very generic. You can actually customize this to your way to really, really optimize and making sure the follow-up. Now, imagine someone comes to your business, to your business website, submit a form. Five minutes later, they get a message that said, They get your message. We’d love to do business with you, and we will be calling you. And they call you, or they did not call you, but they said, They will call you, that much, much better from a business perspective, you’re already looking good in that customer’s eye. Now, whether you follow through or not, that’s a different story because that’s the other steps. But imagine the customer is In the eyes of the customer, now you look good. The other things you can see inside that automation, again, depending on your business model, that system is infinite. You can actually create multiple, multiple flow, multiple with and really simple. Actually, our system is very straightforward and simple.
We can decide what action we want happen. Even for some of our customers that are selling basic things on their website, we even have this integrated with Shopify so that they can have the basic information that they need. But that’s just to show you. And again, this is just one system. That same thing I’m showing you right now can happen on almost any system that’s available in the market. So wanted to show you a live example what it looks like to create workflows from a marketing perspective. This is the most basic workflow you probably would see because again, from a marketing perspective, maybe you create a workflow that generates a title of content for social media content, blog posts, maybe web pages, and automate that process to send it to, I don’t know, ChatGPT, maybe to write the content for you. Then when ChatGPT finish, maybe send it directly to a specific place for you or post it wherever that might be. Those are a ton of different methods, ways that you can use automation as from a marketing perspective. But I just wanted to show you a basic example of how you can set up an automation within a lead management system to ensure that those leads that come in, they get follow up, they get follow through.
And you can really insist. And we can automate this whole process as well, where we push the salesperson to ensure they follow up with that person. And maybe in two, three days, if that salesperson doesn’t have any activity, they don’t check that email or they haven’t called that person, we automatically reassign that lead to a different salesperson. All of that can be done fully automated for you so that you don’t have to worry about, Oops, someone did not call. That’s the advantage of true marketing automation. I just wanted to share that with you. All right. So Again, I just went over that live example with you, show you what this looks like. And as I promise, I want to share with you and ask you, are you leveraging automation right now in your business. I would love to hear what people think and what questions that you guys have. But here are some of the questions for those of you guys that stay with us. We’ll get a copy of this. So that way you can do a quick self-diagnosis. And are you doing any of these or all of them? Are you following up with leads within five minutes or less on both text, SMS, and email?
And again, all that information can be automated, so you don’t really necessarily have to be sitting by your computer waiting for that contact to come in. When they come in, all that information just automatically get done for you, and then you pick up the phone in 10, 15 minutes. When you But are you doing that right now? Do you have conversion campaign in place that follow up to all the leads that did not get converted? So sometimes people change their mind. Sometimes the things that they thought they need to fix, it fix itself. All of that, are you following up with those people? Do you have a system in place with your existing customer base? Are you Are you emailing those customer base that you have to reactivate them, offer them something? Are you sending monthly newsletters? Are you leveraging email to get online reviews? One of the biggest thing that we’re coming in and truly making a lot of changes, especially from a Google Maps and and things now, is your review counts. Customers, according to Google, early Every set of customers would choose people that have good reviews than people that don’t have any reviews at all.
This is why you want to get more reviews on your system. Do you have a system in place to automate that process for you so that when someone walk out of your shop, walk out of your business, if they’re satisfied, do you automatically send an email to them and say, Hey, would love to get your feedback? And of course, so today, as you guys know, we cover a lot of information. So we talk about marketing automation, how to leverage marketing automation for your business, for your marine business, to help streamline some of the work that you’re already doing, but also make things easier for you, for your team, and for your business. Really, how do you use marketing automation to generate more qualified leads and convert them? And really, as I mentioned earlier, ultimately, we all in this to get better marketing result, get more leads, get more sales, and more profits. So That’s what we all in business for. And eventually, taking care of our teams, taking care of the clients we have are extremely important as well. But from a marketing perspective, we want to get people to be aware of us, get them educated, get them to know our business, get them to love us, and then get them to just don’t have any choice to make the decision so that they can pick us as business, as the company to deal with.
Now, as we’re about to close here, I would be remiss not to mention that I know some of you guys, what I just went over, some of the tips and some of the questions I have. Why are we going to just go home, execute on give them to your team, execute. For those of you that need some help with your automation, with your marketing, with how you really streamline some of the processes in your business from a sales or marketing perspective, We’re more than happy to take a look at what you have. There is no obligation, and it’s a free session for you guys. Go to boatmarketingprice. Com/scale. Schedule a call, we’d be more than happy to have on a call and answer this question for you. We go back to that. Here again, it’s boatmarketingprose. Com/scheduler-a-call. We have some additional resources on our website. We have a lot of resources on our website that if you go to bootmarketingprose. Com/resources, we have white papers, you can listen to our podcast. We have some magazine as well. Download those. You can actually even get some PDFs on our books as well. So check some of the resources that we have available for you guys.
So let me see. We got one question here. Which KPI should I focus on to measure the effectiveness of marketing automation increasing booking and sales? Booking and For sales, let’s assume you are a charter business in the marine space, or maybe you are a boat rental business. I’ll just take that as an example. What are some of the KPI we looked at from a marketing perspective? One, a few key one. If you’re in the type of business, we do a lot of Google Ads and MetaAd as well. So MetaAd meaning Facebook and and Instagram. And depending where you are in the country and your clientele as well. So it’s not one size fits all. So it’s all dependent on where you are, the clientele you’re targeting. But one of the KPIs we looked at is customer acquisition costs. So how much it costs us to acquire one customers and how much that we make from that customer, from each customer. So this is very, very important. So obviously, you can at how much click rate. That’s important. But at the end of the day, for all I know, you can have 3,000, 10,000 clicks. But if you only have one person that just convert, it doesn’t really matter.
But if I have only five clicks and I have three people that convert, that now we’re talking. So how many clicks someone gets? It’s important to know, but it’s not that important. Maybe there’s a flaw in the system, there’s a fluke that we need to fix. So it’s good to know those numbers, but the key numbers you want to look at from a sales and booking perspective is how much it’s costing us to bring each customer in the door, and how many of them are we converting? When we convert those, how much are we making from each one of them, whether it was from two upsells or from the standard that we already charged them. Because that number will tell you, are you making money from that? For example, if you have 10 people, let’s say you have 100 people click on your link, and of that 100, let’s say you have a 5% conversion rate. Of that 5% conversion rate, let’s say you only have three of them that’s actually signed up and buy. But let’s say each of those click cost you a dollar. You spend $100 for ads. That’s just an example.
Then you have five of them that convert. Now it tells you you’re spending about $20 for a conversion. But when you have three of them that actually become customer and buy services, your rate per customer acquisition, the actual hard net number is a little bit high. It’s about $20, almost $25 a pop or more. You have to look at these numbers to see, does It makes sense. For example, if your booking is $500 per booking and you’re getting, I don’t know, your acquisition cost is maybe $40, $50, that’s not bad. That’s pretty good, actually. But again, how much are you spending on the back-end from management to additional people that’s running the business for you? You have to do those numbers to understand, are you making the numbers work for you? I have seen businesses that just… They’re doing very, very well from an ad perspective. But because they don’t understand that number, they’re like, Man, ads is so expensive. I’m spending a lot of money on ads. How much money did you spend last week or last month? Come to think of it, a couple of thousand dollars, maybe $2,000, $3,000 a month. But if you are generating 30, 40, $50,000 on your $2,000 ads, you have to start thinking, that’s pretty good return on investment.
Obviously, there are lots of variation here, lots of numbers to think about, but I’ll just give you an example. Another question I got is, with limited tech knowledge, what’s some straightforward strategy for implementing marketing automation to follow up quickly on leads and inquiries? It There’s a ton of different ways to do this. Now, if you really want to go automated, there are too many tools out there for me to just tell you, pick one, because without knowing your business specifically, it would be unfair for me to say, Just pick this and run with it. But there are lots of different tools that can help with automation. So even for example, I’m not saying this is what you should use, but in an example, when Mailchimp just started and even Constant Contact Now that partner up with Springboard, I think. I cannot remember the name of the company that they purchased. But even Constant Contact Now have really, really good automation in the back. I’m just giving you an example. All of the system, they have automation. Obviously, there’s a little bit higher pricing for once you get into heavier automation with those softwares. But almost every one of them have different automation.
So for me, non-tech person, it’s not necessarily what big tools I can get, but what can do the job for me or I can use faster, easier. Again, I think constant contact. I haven’t used constant I’ve known in a long time, but I do know the pretty solid system that almost anybody can use. Now, obviously, there’s a limitation for every system out there. That’s why it’s important to understand your business. Instead of trying to squeeze your business and make it work inside of a software, find a piece of software that’s actually already have the capability to handle that type of business that you are in. For example, our system, my web lead, the one I showed you a moment ago, we have a full automated process for just marine businesses. We have an automated system inside our own system for boat rental, for boat dealers, boat manufacturers, boat clubs, and boat charters, and a couple of other one. When you come to us, we’re not building something from scratch for you. We already have system that’s already tested by other marine business just like yours. When you come in, then we just implement that. We hook you up, you get set and ready to go so you don’t have to scratch your head.
Our system within itself, depending on, again, what type of business you are and what you want to do, customer acquisition, we even Our system even can help with that. Those are little things that understanding your business, and I’m not saying that’s the only tools out there because there’s lots of other tools that you can use. Maybe the tools that you’re already using right now might be the tools that you need. But again, you have to look at your business. What are some of the things that you can apply. Another question we have is, What are some of the tools, what are some of the steps that we can take to implement automation seamlessly inside our existing workflow or CRM we’re using? It’s very similar to the question that I answered a moment ago. Again, you have to understand your business because what I would do if I started from scratch today and I already had system in place and I don’t have automation, I would look at… I would sit down and map out what are each steps that happen on our system. So we need to write content. We need to produce this content, create outline for this content, produce them, post them, optimize them, monitor them.
Then we need the following as well. We need to capture more leads. When those leads come in there, we need to do X, Y, and Z. If you can, almost in plain English, write down each steps that your business will need to take. Maybe the system you are using already have all this in place. It just matter or you haven’t had type into those yet. Map out your system first and then figure it out if your system… Map out what you want to accomplish and see if your system can fit in there. If not, then you might want to start looking at the system. The other way, obviously, is if have limited technology and you need some additional help, our outside help is maybe the way to go. My team here, we’ve been in the marketing industry for over 15 plus years and we have implementing a lot of system, including system that we build from scratch as software for ourselves. We’re very well aware of the different software out there. We’ll be more than happy to give some suggestions, not even not affiliating at all. Just we know the system that can work for you.
So one last question. What are some of the common pitfalls and challenges a boat dealer face when adopting marketing automation, and how can you avoid them? That’s a very good one. This is where it comes back again. Remember, our business is unique, but a lot of the things that sometimes we do on our business is not… It’s unique to us, but someone already How do you solve that problem you are having right now. Someone already figured out the solution to this. This is why I said it was very shocking to me when I come to the marine industry. Most of the industries, They have big conferences. Those conferences, oftentimes, it’s strictly about sharing what worked extremely well. From what CRM that works extremely well to how do you automate, how do you do X, Y, and Z, how do you do all that? Most of those industries that’s really where it really set the Marine one apart, because in the Marine space, some of that knowledge don’t get shared. A lot of time, the problem you’re dealing with, three, four, five, all that people solve it, but they’re not sharing it, so no one knows that problem being solved.
Sometimes it’s not because those people are selfish at all, actually. It’s just that No one is asking, and there isn’t a channel of communication to share that knowledge anyway. So who cares? No one asks me. I’m not sharing. I feel like it’s part of it is a little bit tricky. Now, from coming back, what are some of the challenges in people and what’s some of the things that you should be aware and looked out for is I would say adaptation is key here. Extremely, extremely important. I have seen where companies spend thousands and thousands of dollars and getting a CRM, getting a lead management in place, and the team don’t use it. You have to understand your team. You have to to build what I call the buy-in. You have to start building buy-in system. What I would suggest, and I’m not telling you to go get an account from them, but Salesforce have those booklets, and they have an adoption booklet. I cannot remember the name of it. It’s actually pretty good how to get the user to adopt the rest of the team, how to get them to adopt a new system. And obviously Salesforce itself is one of the leader, well, not one, is the leader when it comes to CRM online.
It’s insane. So it makes sense for them because a lot of people love them. A lot of people hit them. And part of it, Salesforce, personally, I think it’s just a genius system because it does everything and anything, but it’s ugly, it’s very complex, it’s very hard to Adoption is very hard to get people that are not tech savvy to just get in there and dance with it. So they have made that book, and I thought that that book was very good and actually very easy to read, too. So it’s actually Very good for even the business owner to look at a booklet like this to see how you can apply adoption. So that’s one of the pitfall you have to look at because adoption is one of the key to failure. If you don’t get adoption right, meaning that you don’t get your buy-in from the salespeople, you don’t get buy-in from the leadership, you don’t get buy-in from everyone that will be using that system, then it becomes very hard. The next piece, obviously, is once you have that, you have to be realistic with yourself. Do I have the knowledge? Do I have the resources to implement, execute what that CRM automation system will a part of me?
Or do I need a Toad Poly to come in, look at this and implement it for me and making sure I’m on the right track? Because again, almost every software right now in the market, there’s a group of people that really understand it and waiting for you to hire them to get it done for you. So don’t lose your hair over automation. Figure out what automation you want and get someone to implement it for you. And many of those people might be able to do it for you as part of a one-time fee, whatever that might be. For us here, again, we have a lot of system in place. We’ve been in the industry, we’ve been in this space for a very long time. So many of our system is already pre-built or add-on. When a customer comes to us, usually we have to do add-ons and customize a piece here and there for them. But that’s to the extent of it. But many of our staff already who we build a little bit. So again, who you work with make a big difference. And also know your team. That’s the key for true good adoption when it comes to market learning automation.
All right, well, that’s really… I think we come up. Thank you so much for sticking around, staying with me here. If you guys have additional questions, I’d be more than happy to take them. If you want to come on stage, feel free to just ping me here. It’s either ping me on the chat if that’s open to you or ask me a question to come on board. I’ll be more than happy. We still have a few more minutes left. I’ll be you on stage to ask that question if you guys want. I’ll be more than happy to do that. But again, thank you so much. I think we covered lots of good information here today. If you guys don’t I don’t have any questions, we’ll be staying here for the next three minutes and then finish the webinar. Those are very good questions. Thank you guys for asking. All right, all right, everyone. Well, again, thank you so much for stopping by staying with me the whole time, asking questions. Really, really lovely to see you guys. Hope to see you in the next webinar again. And for those of you guys that staying until the end, as I mentioned, feel free to request a free strategy session with me and one of my team member here, and you will be getting a copy, a link to this recording.
So feel free to reach out to us, answer, ask any questions. We’ll be more than happy to help. Again, thanks and have a good day.
